Covering an issue such as forest biomass for energy for as long as I have enables me to connect the dots with previous coverage. Earlier this year, I wrote two stories that connect to this one here.

The first in January discussed a new study that specifically identified the kind of air pollution produced by wood pellet plants and also how dangerous that pollution is to public health. The other a few months later described how forest campaigners had hosted Biden Administration officials at wood pellet plants in North and South Carolina to hear from community members whose lives are adversely effected by living near the plants.

This story connects those dots. A coalition of environmental and social justice groups combined to survey more than 300 households within a two-mile radius of five pellet mills in the U.S. Southeast to ask a series of questions. The result is what I describe as “a collective personal story of diminished quality of life and degraded health suffered by residents living near the mills.”

“I used to walk around a lot but stopped once the mill [opened],” a resident living near the Drax Amite plant in Mississippi told coalition interviewers. “I was recently given an asthma pump for breathing problems.” A resident near the Enviva Sampson plant said: “My eyes burn. I have mucus in my throat every morning when I wake up.”

In every story I write on this issue, I reach out to biomass industry spokespeople for a response. Typically, I don’t hear back. This time, I’m pleased to note, I received a response from both an industry trade group and a Drax spokesperson — both of whom discounted the survey and claimed they take the health of people in the communities in which they operate very seriously.

In this story, I also got my first opportunity to interview the Rev. Leo Woodberry of South Carolina, a longtime civil rights advocate now pushing back against what he sees as the public health hazards posed by pellet mills in the mostly poor, rural and minority places — environmental justice communities — in which they operate.

This story came to me from tropical ecologist and Amazonian expert Miles Silman, my longtime friend and colleague at Wake Forest University, where we both teach. He made sure I got a copy of the study from which this story is based weeks before it was published.

In this pioneering research, made possible by intensive aerial lidar-driven data collection between 2016 and 2018, is a surprising finding: while deforestation gets all the attention from damaging the ecosystems services provided by the Amazon, forest degradation actually has a five-times greater impact on reducing the Amazon’s ability to store carbon and thus slow the rate of global warming.

“When countries report their forest and carbon changes, they mostly rely on deforestation because it’s much easier to see and quantify,” Ovidiu Csillik, lead author of the PNAS study who is formerly of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, told me in a phone interview. “But we’ve found that forest degradation is actually more important in terms of carbon loss.”

Imagine this: policymakers grab headlines and political capital by promising to curtail deforestation, as the new president of Brazil has done. That’s a good thing. But it turns out it’s more important to stave off or manage damage to tropical forests from flooding, landslides, wind disturbances, selective logging and road building. The reason: degraded land can often be rescued if action is taken soon enough; deforested land typically heralds an complete land-use change to ranching or farming.

While I had never met the lead author, Miles knows him because he joined the faculty at Wake Forest as a remote sensing expert in July 2024, a month before his study was published. I was clear with my editors at Mongabay about what could appear to be a conflict of interest; they agreed I should do the story and disclose the connection. That’s what we did. Also, this is my first story published on Mongabay’s newly updated and improved web site. All previous stories now show up in the new formatting.

For the second time in four days, I was invited on to the top-rated news program in the Triad to discuss history — the fist-ever address to a Joint Session of Congress by a pope. This one was extraordinary. My commentary with Neil McNeill is here.

In his 40-minute address, Pope Francis demonstrated first and foremost his admiration not only for the United States (“land of the free, home of the brave,”) but also of America’s great promise as a land of hope and dreams. He delivered his speech in English with grace and humility by making every aggressive point he intended on immigration, climate change, the death penalty, financial reform, marriage, terrorism and respect for the poor. It was brilliant.