It is a rare thing when a small, poor Black community stands up successfully to a corporate giant like Drax, one of the world’s largest makers of wood pellets for industrial-scale burning for energy. But that’s what happened in Mississippi in April 2025, as this story of mine illustrates.

I learned about this meeting in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, while I was in Washington in late March to speaks at a forum on wood pellets for energy sponsored by the Rachel Carson Council. Krystal Martin discussed the organizing efforts her group, in conjunction with several environmental groups, were pursuing to keep Drax from increasing the amount of toxic emissions it was already putting into the air over Gloster, Miss., where Drax has its largest facility. The community argument prevailed over the business argument put forth by Drax. That just doesn’t happen very often, especially in environmental justice communities like Gloster.

This is one of those examples where a public health and quality of life argument from a local community may just have more impact in pushing back against the growth of the wood pellet industry than the years of scientific arguments that have largely failed to persuade policymakers in the European Union and United Kingdom to shift away from their reliance of forest biomass for energy as the primary way to phase out coal.