Dick Yarbrough

Syndicated columnist

Since we last discussed efforts to drill in our Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge for titanium dioxide so that mankind will never experience life without toothpaste whitener, nothing has changed – except a lot.

What hasn’t changed?

Gov. Brian Kemp; state Senate Majority Leader Steve Gooch, R-Dahlonega; Rep. Lynn Smith, R-Newnan; and bureaucrats in the oxymoronic Environmental Protection Division continue to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil of this audaciously bad idea that has garnered overwhelming public condemnation.

What has changed?

Twin Pines Minerals, an Alabama-based company dedicated to ensuring that our teeth are always whiter than white by drag-mining 580 acres on the edge of our Okefenokee, is sucking financial wind at the moment. On the personal property taxes for their equipment, they owed Charlton County $611,000 in principal plus $52,000 in penalties and interest, for a total of $663,000. They made a first installment of $300,000 and still owe $363,000. On their real property taxes, Twin Pines owed $30,000. The county had to file liens against them before they finally paid up.

That small fact doesn’t seem to matter to the intrepid public servants on the Charlton County commission. One commissioner who strongly supports the teeth-whitening effort is employed by Toledo Manufacturing Company and married to the owner’s niece.

Toledo Manufacturing is owned by Joe Hopkins, a timber baron and a political power in the state.

Toledo owns 30,000 acres immediately north of the Twin Pines Land. Hopkins has led the opposition to the Okefenokee Protection Act, which had the support of over half the members of the Georgia House but never got a hearing in Rep. Lynn Smith’s Natural Resources Committee. Toledo is also on record as opposing our Okefenokee as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In the 1990s, DuPont leased 23,000 acres from Hopkins in an effort to do exactly what Twin Pines is trying to do now. That effort failed, thanks to the intervention of then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and Gov. Zell Miller.

The rumor is that Chemours Corporation, which was spun-off from DuPont in 2015, will buy out Twin Pines if the permits to drill are approved by the state EPD, or maybe even before. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Only we don’t have Bruce Babbitt or Zell Miller around to help us today.

If Chemours does take over the effort, it is going to take public pressure to dissuade them from drag-mining our Okefenokee. Already, 19 investors/financial service companies with nearly $800 million of assets under management have sent a letter to Chemours CEO Denise Dignam urging the company to publicly commit to not drilling in our Okefenokee.

However, unless you are a major stockholder or an influential politician, your letter will never cross her desk, although you may get a “Thank you for writing. Your opinions are important” bug letter from a designated underling.

I would suggest you go to the Chemours website, www.chemours.com, and hold your nose past the self-serving platitudes (“We are guided by a commitment to do what’s good for people and the planet”) and to the “Contact Us” menu at the top.

You will be asked for your name and email and then the most important box: Inquiry. That is where you tell them to do the right thing and promise not to drill in our Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

Let me know what they say.

Since our state leaders continue to show us the Fickle Finger of Fate, I would urge you to contact our federal elected officials. But forget Republican U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter in whose district our Okefenokee is located. Remember, he publicly railed against the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service’s opposition to the drilling project. This, after he had signed a letter along with six Georgia Democrats urging the Dept. of the Interior to make the Okefenokee a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Like baseballer Billy Martin in the famous beer commercials, Mr. Carter seems to feel strongly both ways. He was also the recipient of $2,500 of Joe Hopkins campaign dollars this past election cycle.

I have been around politics long enough to know there is a lot of nodnod, wink-wink going on between the governor’s office and the local timber barons and the EPD and I resent them treating us like simpletons as if we didn’t know that. This is not their Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

It is ours. Yours and mine. I plan to stay on this issue. I hope you will, too.

You can reach Dick Yarbrough at dick@dickyarbrough. com or at P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.