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pollution
Forests, Not Data Centers: A Better Plan for Rural Prosperity
Local and state governments should invest in protecting natural landscapes as the foundation of rural prosperity—not funnel more public dollars into yet another dirty and destructive industry.
Mar 25, 2026
Nature is our lifeline. Technology cannot replace it.
That truth is the heart of a growing conflict in rural America. As data centers and AI infrastructure are sold to communities as “innovation,” “jobs,” and “the future,” we’re being asked to trade away the natural systems that have always sustained us: forests, clean water, a stable climate, and the human need for connection with each other and the natural world.
It’s not a fair trade. It’s not a winning economic strategy. And no matter what Big Tech claims, it’s not good for us.
Like many Americans, my most treasured memories come from time spent outdoors. I grew up exploring the forests of coastal South Carolina—climbing trees, watching birds fly across the sunset, picking wildflowers. Those experiences led me to co‑found Dogwood Alliance, an organization dedicated to protecting Southeastern forests, in 1996.
We still have a choice: Allow hollow promises to lead us into a dead planet, or look to nature for survival and joy.
Our Southern forests are among the most biodiverse in the nation—and are the least protected. Industrial logging has presented the greatest threat to forests I’ve seen in my lifetime. The South is logged at a rate estimated to be four times higher than South American rainforests. I’ve seen how decades of expansion in wood production—from paper to biomass wood pellets—have fouled air and water while degrading millions of acres. I’ve seen how clear-cutting and the conversion of wild forests into single‑species plantations have devastated biodiversity, water quality, natural flood control, and carbon storage. I’ve seen entire communities become sacrifice zones, with low‑income, Black, and Indigenous residents bearing the brunt of pollution and forest destruction.
What I have never seen is a corporation’s promises of clean operations and economic prosperity actually materialize. That’s why I am more convinced than ever that our future depends on protecting standing forests
Today, we stand at a crossroads. After years of community organizing, public pressure, and scientific pushback, paper and wood‑pellet mills are shuttering. For those of us in rural and forest communities, this presents a rare opportunity to rethink what we want our economy to be. Do we continue down a path of destruction, or do we accelerate the protection of nature?
Into this moment steps a new pitch: data centers and AI as the next economic “miracle.” But their enormous appetite for electricity and water accelerates resource extraction, pollution, and climate impacts. The declining forestry industry is now trying to hitch itself to this swindle, promoting the burning of trees to power data centers as a way to prop up its obsolete business model—and calling it “progress.”
Progress toward what? Much of what these AI data centers produce is inflammatory content that fuels political outrage and deepens social division. No wonder people across the country are pushing back—and winning.
In so many ways, forests are the most advanced technology the world has ever known. They regulate temperature, store carbon, support food systems, and offer psychological grounding no device can replicate. When left intact, forests are self‑maintaining, self‑renewing, and infinitely more productive than any data center.
Study after study shows that time in nature improves cognitive function and a wide range of mental and physical health markers. Research also links depression, anxiety, and attention disorders to tech overload and reduced time outdoors. Science shows what we instinctively know to be true—nature brings people together. Protecting it is one of the few remaining ways to restore health and rebuild unity in a divided time.
Equally important, forest protection is a proven economic strategy for rural communities. The outdoor recreation economy generates far more revenue and jobs than the timber industry. Conservation and recreation jobs, ecological restoration, and community‑led development create long‑term prosperity without sacrificing land, water, or health. These sectors keep wealth local, strengthen small businesses, and attract people who want to live in places defined by beauty and belonging—not destruction and noise.
At Dogwood Alliance, we’ve seen what happens when communities reject extractive industry and shift to people power. Last year, we partnered with New Alpha Community Development Corporation to purchase Freedom Land, a 305‑acre property that will become a community‑led hub for forest conservation, ecotourism, and outdoor recreation. We also helped the Pee Dee Indian Tribe purchase 77 acres of wetlands to create an environmental education center celebrating Native American culture and heritage.
These projects offer a blueprint for a community‑led movement to save our forests and our towns. And they come at a critical moment, as rural communities face new threats from Big Tech’s land‑hungry, resource‑intensive infrastructure
We still have a choice: Allow hollow promises to lead us into a dead planet, or look to nature for survival and joy. Local and state governments should invest in protecting natural landscapes as the foundation of rural prosperity—not funnel more public dollars into yet another dirty and destructive industry.
We can and must build a future rooted in nature, not in the false god of AI technology. Nature is not just the original technology—it’s still the best.
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Trump EPA Risks Health of Millions With Giveaway to Corporate Polluters That Use Cancer-Causing Gas
"Walking back key regulations for ethylene oxide sterilizer facilities is essentially giving a highly polluting industry a get-out-of-jail-free card," said one campaigner.
Mar 13, 2026
While US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Friday presented a proposed policy change as a demonstration of the Trump administration's commitment to "ensuring lifesaving medical devices remain available," public health advocates warned that relaxing rules on emissions of the cancer-causing gas ethylene oxide puts millions of Americans at risk.
As The New York Times explained: "The move revived a long-running debate about the paradoxical effects of ethylene oxide on public health. While it plays a crucial role in sterilizing lifesaving medical devices like pacemakers and syringes, long-term exposure can cause leukemia and other types of cancer among people who work in or live near medical sterilization facilities."
The EPA proposal would amend the Biden administration's 2024 National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for facilities that use ethylene oxide, which the agency estimated would have eliminated over 90% of dangerous pollution from the gas. The previous policy was cheered by organizations including Earthjustice, which sounded the alarm on Friday.
"The 2024 standards would have delivered enormous public health benefits. EPA knows that ethylene oxide is carcinogenic and determined that sterilizers can install effective and affordable pollution controls," said Earthjustice senior attorney Deena Tumeh. "EPA has no basis to repeal this well-supported rule. By rolling back the rule, the Trump EPA is bending the knee to the sterilizer industry at the expense of millions of people's health."
Darya Minovi, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists' (UCS) Center for Science and Democracy, similarly stressed that "this dangerous decision puts people across the United States and in Puerto Rico at a higher risk of breathing dangerous fumes known to cause respiratory irritation, nausea, blurred vision, headaches, and various cancers. Children are especially vulnerable to the cancer-causing harms of ethylene oxide exposure."
As Minovi detailed:
According to UCS analysis, nearly 14 million people in the United States live within five miles of at least one commercial sterilization facility, and more than 10,000 schools and childcare facilities fall within those areas. These communities are disproportionately made up of people of color or those who do not speak English as a first language...
This decision is a reckless and self-serving handout to big industry, which asked for this rule to be rolled back. This process sidestepped community input from the start and is an affront to communities that have unknowingly lived with ethylene oxide exposure for decades. These actions show, yet again, that this administration has little to no regard for the health and welfare of working people or any interest in protecting children from exposure to toxic chemicals.
Minovi declared that "ethylene oxide emissions controls need to be strengthened—not dismantled," an argument echoed by Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics and chair of the Sierra Club National Clean Air Team.
"Walking back key regulations for ethylene oxide sterilizer facilities is essentially giving a highly polluting industry a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sterilizers are some of the largest, most toxic chemical manufacturing facilities in the country,” said Williams. "Rather than regressing on key protections, these facilities need even more controls in place to ensure the safety of workers and nearby communities."
People who live near sterilizer facilities also spoke out against the proposed rule, which now faces a 45-day public comment period.
"We understand that industry applied heavy pressure to weaken the previously finalized rule. We also understand that industry remains more concerned with their profits than the lives of those who live near sterilizer facilities, like my community in Laredo," said Tricia Cortez, executive director of Rio Grande International Study Center in Texas.
"Sterilizer facilities like Midwest must be held accountable for their dangerous, cancer-causing emissions," she said. "We need an EPA that works to protect us, the people, not financial interests and corporations that continue to cause so much harm to so many."
Victor Alvarado, founder and coordinator for Comité Diálogo Ambiental, said that "I remember the EPA informing us that Steri-Tech's ethylene oxide emissions in my hometown of Salinas, Puerto Rico, were so high that we had one of the highest rates of toxic air cancer risk in the United States... Eliminating the new protections against ethylene oxide emissions is unjust."
The EPA proposal comes after President Donald Trump in July signed a series of proclamations easing pollution rules for over 100 facilities focused on energy, chemical manufacturing, iron ore processing, and sterile medical equipment. His "regulatory relief," as the Republican called it, applied to dozens of sterilization plants.
The Southern Environmental Law Center and Natural Resources Defense Council responded by filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of CleanAIRE NC, Sustainable Newton, Savannah Riverkeeper, and Virginia Interfaith Power & Light.
"We always knew the presidential exemptions issued last year were part a broader plan to put the interests of corporate polluters above the health and well-being of American families," Sustainable Newton president Maurice Carter said Friday. "But we won't stop fighting to protect our community by demanding commonsense, reasonable measures that even the EPA has said would reduce harmful emissions by 90% and lower cancer risks by 92%."
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'Direct Attack on the Health of Americans': Trump EPA Greenlights More Mercury Pollution
Sierra Club said the rollback "puts the public at greater risk of heart and lung disease, cancer, and even premature death, as well as causing severe neurological damage to fetuses and children.”
Feb 20, 2026
The Trump administration on Friday finalized its rollback of clean air regulations limiting mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants, sparking condemnation from public health and environmental advocates who warned that the move will increase the risk of death or serious illness for millions of people in the United States.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it is repealing the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which were implemented during the Biden administration in order to protect people from mercury and other toxic air pollutants—including arsenic, lead, and chromium—from fossil fuel power plants.
The Trump administration contends that rescinding MATS will lower financial costs for utilities running older coal-fired plants during a period of rapidly rising demand from consumer and data centers powering artificial intelligence systems.
“The Biden-Harris administration’s anti-coal regulations sought to regulate out of existence this vital sector of our energy economy," EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Friday at the Mills Creek Power Plant, a coal-fired facility in Louisville, Kentucky. "The Trump EPA knows that we can grow the economy, enhance baseload power, and protect human health and the environment all at the same time."
However, the Sierra Club said Friday that "rolling back the new and more protective [MATS] will allow coal- and oil-fired power plants to emit more damaging pollution that puts the public at greater risk of heart and lung disease, cancer, and even premature death, as well as causing severe neurological damage to fetuses and children."
"According to the Sierra Club’s Trump Coal Pollution Dashboard, reversing the 2024 improvements and reverting to the 2012 standards will allow the dirtiest coal-fired power plants to emit 50% more mercury pollution," the group added. "In May 2025, the Trump administration exempted 68 power plants—including some of the biggest polluters in the nation—from MATS after soliciting exemption requests from big polluters over email."
Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign director Laurie Williams called the MATS rollback "a direct attack on the health of Americans."
Last June, Sierra Club was a key part of a coalition of environmental and community groups that sued the Trump administration over the exemptions.
“These protections from mercury and other toxic pollution existed to protect communities from reckless polluters," Sierra Club campaign organizing strategist Bonnie Swinford said Friday. "By repealing these protections, the Trump administration is giving handouts to the coal industry elites—and waging war on the public’s ability to hold polluters accountable."
The Environmental Protect Network also decried the MATS repeal, saying it "will allow hundreds of facilities across 45 states to avoid meeting critical safety standards—jeopardizing public health, degrading ecosystems, and disproportionately harming children, pregnant people, and communities already overburdened by pollution."
"This is no way to make America healthy again."
Moms Clean Air Force co-founder and director Dominique Browning focused on the harms to children the rollback will inflict.
"The science is clear, and profoundly alarming. No amount of mercury is safe for babies’ developing brains," she said. "Mercury is a dangerous neurotoxin that damages the architecture of babies’ and children’s developing brains."
“The mercury rules were working," Browning argued. "Toxic emissions from US coal plants were dropping, and water bodies were getting cleaner. But now EPA Administrator Zeldin’s rollback... will allow coal plants to emit more toxic heavy metals like mercury, chromium, and lead—pollutants that contaminate our air, fall into our lakes and waterways, and poison our food supply."
"This is no way to make America healthy again," she added, referring to one of President Donald Trump's campaign slogans.
Julie McNamara, associate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program, said in a statement Friday: “Once again, the Trump administration is abandoning science and abandoning statute to give polluters a free pass. And once again, the Trump administration is doing so at the expense of people’s health."
National Resources Defense Council senior attorney John Walke asserted that "the coal industry is in decline, and dismantling clean air protections won’t bring it back."
“It will only lead to more asthma attacks, more heart problems, and more premature deaths, especially in communities living in the shadow of coal plants," Walke added. "We have a right to breathe clean air, and we will fight for that right even if Trump’s EPA refuses to.”
The EPA’s newest decision will allow power plants to emit more brain-damaging mercury and dangerous soot pollution, putting frontline communities at especially greater risk of heart and lung disease, cancer, and premature death.
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— NRDC (@nrdc.org) February 20, 2026 at 9:09 AM
Friday's EPA announcement followed the agency's repeal earlier this month of the endangerment finding, the Obama-era rule empowering climate regulation over the past 15 years that treated six greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels as a single air pollutant for regulatory purposes.
Speaking at a Friday press conference in Washington, DC organized by Moms Clean Air Force, Talia, a local fourth grade student, said that “climate disasters are becoming more common, and they’re hurting our planet, our health, and the future of kids like me."
“Adults in the government are supposed to protect kids from climate change and not ignore it," she said, adding in a message to Trump officials that "we are taught to listen to scientists and doctors and moms—why don’t you listen to them?”
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