Broken links: How rural forest landowners in the southeastern United States contemplate forests, climate change, and bioenergy

Abstract

Bioenergy proponents, scientists, policy makers, local leaders, and rural forest landowners in the southeastern United States have varying perceptions of climate change and of the role of wood-based bioenergy to either mitigate or exacerbate it. In the context of widespread skepticism regarding anthropogenic climate change, our ethnographic research shows that advocates of wood-based bioenergy development claim that it will continue regardless of the “truth” about climate change. Many environmental advocates believe climate change is a vital issue to address but question bioenergy's climate-mitigating impacts. One key group that all of these actors target is rural forest landowners, as their willingness to provide biomass feedstocks is vital to the success of a bioenergy facility in a planned location. While landowners' buy-in is often taken for granted, these assumptions are based on the presumption that landowners will act in their economic best interest. The reality is far more complicated. For rural forest landowners, neither bioenergy nor climate change is an isolated issue, but rather they are embedded within a matrix of cultural values, political ideologies, and personal lived experiences. Our ethnographic research conducted in and around rural communities across the region that are home to both forest-based economies and to wood-based bioenergy facilities has revealed complicated linkages between how rural forest landowners think about climate science and renewable energy and about how they perceive the relation of these issues to their own forests and communities.