Speaker: Sara Maxwell, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, University of Tennessee at Knoxville School of Natural Resources
The part of the energy sector that manufactures wood pellets in the United States and ships them across the Atlantic to burn in historically coal-fired power plants in Europe has been
growing rapidly for more than a decade. The industry and its scientific allies tout the wood-pellet-powerplant complex as “green energy” because “trees grow back.”
Meanwhile, in North Carolina, today the world’s top wood pellet producer for this purpose, African American and Native American environmental justice communities in the shadow of four gargantuan wood pellet factories complain of noise, dust on children’s toys in their yards, and epidemic rates of chronic upper respiratory disease. Ask a number of environmental scientists and ecologists whether this industry as a whole is good for the environment, and you will get that many responses.
Maxwell will share the results of her statistical analysis of 60 scholarly articles on the industry, tracking a correlation between the scientists’ research results and the scientists’ own funding sources. Maxwell goes on to advance the argument that, contrary to popular conceptions about the “objectivity” of natural science, it is impossible to divorce the scientist from their class positionality. She concludes with a brief retrospect to the science of Darwin, Bohm, and Simard, with this argument in mind.