When English settlers first arrived to America in the late 16th century, old growth longleaf pine trees that towered as tall as 30 meters covered up to 90 million acres of the southern United States. When cut, these ramrod-straight trees made an ideal ship’s mast, and according to the University of Florida, many of the best specimens were cut down for use by the British navy. Others were slashed for “naval stores”--tar, pitch, rosin and turpentine—that were exported to England as early as 1608. Today, those majestic, old-growth longleaf pine forests are almost gone.
Given that these trees take 150 years to mature and grow for over 300, they were not replaced. Today, in my state of North Carolina, the British are still effectively cutting our forests. Our trees are being chopped into pellets, trucked up to 200 miles to a port on our southern coast, dispatched across the Atlantic in container ships, and burned in U.K. power plants.
Even here, few people know this, because this environmental travesty occurs in poor, rural areas of color, where people are already beset by low health outcomes and high unemployment. And for what? So you can tell yourselves that our trees are your “renewable biomass” and therefore better than burning coal. Apparently, burning our trees and leaving us a denuded landscape meets a European Union standard for carbon reduction.
