NCEJN is airborne!

Last Friday, our staff Dr. Valerie Ann Johnson and Corey Curtis joined Larry Baldwin from the NC Environmental Advocacy Corps and Rolf Wallin from SouthWings on a flyover across Central NC. Environmental survey flyovers in small passenger planes like this are a great tool to document environmental injustice and collect information to inform EJ organizing. It allowed us to travel rapidly across the state, destinations included a Fred Smith Asphalt plant, Taylortown NC, Enviva wood pellet mill, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) & associated waste lagoons, and the Amazon data center in development in Richmond county. The sheer scale of these operations was shocking from our perspective ~1000ft in the air. Seeing industrial activity from this new angle painted a clear picture of just how close polluting facilities are clustered relative to each other and nearby homes. It also allowed us to get a peek into operations happening on otherwise private property, and observe construction progress of incoming polluting industries. Some of the pictures that we took during the flyover will be shared with nearby community members and used to inform their organizing strategy. We’d like to give a huge thank you to Larry, our Pilot Rolf, and @southwings; Thanks to them, we were in great hands and had a blast! Slide 1: Dr. Valerie Ann Johnson, Rolf Wallins, and Larry Baldwin (left to right) boarding our plane at the Moore County airport Slide 2: Corey Curtis in the cockpit and Larry Baldwin in the backseat, mid flight Slide 3: Dr. Valerie Ann Johnson in the cockpit and Larry Baldwin in the backseat, about to take off Slide 4: Aerial view of an Enviva wood pellet facility in Hamlet, NC Slide 5: Aerial view of Fred Smith Asphalt plant in Carthage, NC Slide 6: Aerial view of Taylortown, NC Slide 7: Aerial view of the Amazon data center project in Hamlet, NC Slide 8: Aerial view of a swine CAFO and waste lagoon somewhere in central NC