The big biofueled Greenway Transit bus rolled to a stop at the Wilmington, North Carolina Riverwalk, a popular tourist spot not far from where the historic battleship USS North Carolina is permanently berthed. Out poured an eager, but slightly groggy busload of Duke University undergraduate and graduate students (and a faculty mentor) who had boarded the ecobus at 6 a.m. in Durham nearly three hours away.

They soon boarded the Cape Fear Riverboat, Henrietta, whose viewing deck filled with students and faculty from campuses across North Carolina including Catawba, UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, UNC-Greensboro,  and UNC-Wilmington. Other NC campuses would also have been represented but had to close and were inaccessible because of the devastation from climate change fueled Hurricane Helene.

These future environmental leaders had signed up for the Rachel Carson Council’s third Cape Fear Riverboat cruise to observe and learn about the devastating environmental effects of the industrial scale production of wood pellets by two corporations, Enviva and Drax, who clear cut forests in North Carolina, across the Southeast, and, recently, in California. Whole trees are ground, shaped and dried into pellets, stored in twin domes in Wilmington harbor that hold 90,000 metric tons of wood pellets. They then are shipped overseas and burned in former coal-fired plants to make electricity.