Don’t look now, but there is an elephant in the room. Well, it’s not exactly a room. It is our state government. And it’s not an elephant, either. It is our Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, which they want to pretend isn’t there and wish we would, too.
Fat chance.
As we all know, the Okefenokee has been a political tug-of-war over mining the swamp for titanium dioxide, so the world will never have to confront the frightening prospect of running out of toothpaste whitener. To this point, the politicians have held the upper hand. A number of them own timberland, and whether they do or don’t, they are the beneficiaries of political contributions from outside interests that would profit financially from mining the area for titanium dioxide.
There is the mistaken impression that this matter was resolved when The Conservation Fund stepped in last June and paid $60 million for 8,000 acres to stop Twin Pines Minerals from mining along Trail Ridge, the ancient barrier island that makes up the Okefenokee’s eastern rim. This, while our politicians sat on their hands. Maybe some applauded the decision, but most remained mute. Campaign contributions can do that.
Twin Pines Minerals was a disaster in the making. The company was delinquent in paying property taxes, faced several lawsuits for unpaid services, and was defaulting on loans, all while our intrepid public servants looked the other way.
Actually, they did more than that. For the past four years, Gov. Brian Kemp and legislative leaders have blocked every effort to consider passage of the Okefenokee Protection Act, first introduced in the Georgia House of Representatives by Rep. Darlene Taylor (R-Thomasville).
The Act, which would prohibit the issuance of mining permits on Trail Ridge, had nearly 100 bipartisan cosponsors from across the state.
That was more than enough to win passage.
But to no avail. It sat in Natural Resources & Environment with its chair, Lynn Smith (R-Newnan), never to see the light of day.
Smith obviously was just a puppet doing the leadership’s bidding. She didn’t even have the good grace to respond to your calls and emails explaining her actions.
Then there is the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (insert oxymoron here), which received approximately 80,000 overwhelmingly negative comments during public comment periods and did nothing. More than a quarter-million comments at the state and federal levels have been received since the project was first proposed in 2018, also overwhelmingly negative.
After Twin Pines Minerals had crawled back into the hole from whence they came, Toledo Manufacturing, the largest remaining private landowner along the swamp’s southeastern boundary, publicly solicited the Chemours Company, the world’s biggest titanium mining company, to join forces. That’s not likely anytime soon. It turns out that Chemours has announced it is laying off one-third of its workforce in Georgia due to a slump in titanium dioxide prices and a global glut of the stuff, thanks to the Chinese.
In addition, new research by University of Georgia scientists suggests that mining in or around the swamp could affect groundwater supplies relied on by millions of people.
Now that drilling for toothpaste whitener in our Okefenokee is no longer economically feasible and UGA scientists have said it’s an ecologically unwise thing to do, wouldn’t this be a good time to stick a fork in the whole thing and pass the Okefenokee Protection Act?
The answer is (a) yes and (b) don’t hold your breath.