Mark Woods: Drawing a line in the ancient sand ridge next to the Okefenokee Swamp

In the early 1990s, Carr Smith and five friends from the Seminole Canoe Club of Jacksonville spent three days paddling across the Okefenokee Swamp.

Thirty years later, at age 75, Smith still has vivid memories of that experience in the largest wilderness area in the eastern United States, the largest remaining intact blackwater swamp in North America.

They started paddling on the eastern edge of the Okefenokee near Folkston, camping one night on a platform, the next in a cabin on Floyds Island.

It was April. The mosquitoes swarmed each evening. Not that this spoiled the trip. He recalls spending the days gliding through the dark water, through sweeping meadows of water lilies, past birds and alligators, between stands of old-growth bald cypress.

“It was a feeling like being in a gothic cathedral, with pillars and the tops of the trees arching over,” he said. “It’s an amazing place.”

He says that is a place worth fighting to preserve — even if you never set foot, or paddle, into an inch of its 700 square miles.

And he’s hardly alone.

Earlier this year the Georgia Environmental Protection Division received more than 100,000 public comments about a proposed strip mine on the southeastern edge of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.

The comments were overwhelmingly opposed to the mining. Many raised concerns — backed by studies done by a University of Georgia hydrology professor and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — that it risked permanent and irreversible impacts not only to the swamp, but to so much intricately connected to it, like the St. Marys and Suwanee rivers that flow out of it.

These are not new threats and concerns.

Recurring plans for edge of Okefenokee

Back when Smith paddled the Okefenokee in the 1990s, DuPont was trying to mine on the same edge of the Okefenokee. Pushback to that proposal eventually led DuPont to withdraw those plans and donate land for conservation.

But spin ahead to 2019. That’s when Alabama-based Twin Pines Minerals again proposed a titanium dioxide mine on part of Trail Ridge — the raised land that formed eons ago as a barrier island and now stretches from Jessup, Georgia, to Starke, Florida.

The Georgia Conservancy says: “Trail Ridge is not only ecologically important in and of itself, but also serves as a scaffolding for the health of the Okefenokee.”

Smith describes it like this: Picture the Okefenokee as this gigantic, shallow plate. Now picture Trail Ridge as one of the edges of that plate. And picture what happens if you compromise that edge.

Twin Pines, which initially had a plan to mine more than 10,000 acres, says the latest proposal only involves 582 acres, with the nearest corner 2.9 miles from the boundary of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. It says it will dig no deeper than 50 feet, and this will do no harm.

“Any assertion that mining activities would drain the swamp is just wrong,” it says in a video.

The company’s video also makes a point to say that the mineral to be extracted is “of great significance” to the nation, noting that titanium is used in aircraft, military weapons, prosthetics and medical devices.

It is true that titanium has such uses. But mineral experts say the titanium dioxide that would be mined from Trail Ridge isn’t hard to find elsewhere — and likely would be used primarily as a pigment for white coloring for paint, paper, plastic and more.

Beyond that, opponents of the mine say Twin Pines has a questionable environmental record — and that mining on these 500-some acres would open the door for the company to move toward its original plan of mining thousands of acres, some practically right next to the largest national wildlife refuge in the eastern United States.

They describe it as a Trojan Horse.

So the Okefenokee Protection Alliance (a coalition of more than 40 organizations from Georgia to Florida) and others have been trying to draw a line in the heavy mineral sands of Trail Ridge.

'A place that can't be replaced'

Smith is serving as the liaison for the Sierra Club’s Northeast Florida group.

He spent 34 years working for railroads, starting in Chicago before coming to Jacksonville and CSX. He worked as a roundhouse laborer, switchman, brakeman, freight conductor, yardmaster, trainmaster and more. He did enough different jobs that he recalls one of the railroad old-timers quipping, “It looks to me like you can’t keep a job.”

In his 50s, he made an even more dramatic career change. He went to law school. He spent 12 years working as an assistant public defender under Bill White, before he was one of the lawyers purged when Matt Shirk took over the office. He then worked for Jacksonville Legal Aid, representing developmentally disabled children and adults facing service cuts from the State of Florida.

He already was involved in the local Sierra Club when Janet Stanko, chair of the local group, moved to Tampa a few years ago. He recalls her saying, “There’s this mine proposal, I think it’s dead, but just in case would you be willing to be the liaison?”

It wasn’t dead. It came back to life with the Trump Administration’s challenges to the Clean Water Act. That took oversight for the Twin Pines project away from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and, after a series of legal twists, left Georgia’s EPD as the only governmental body with authority over the proposal.

That led to a call for public comments about the Twin Pines Mining Land Use Plan. They came from people with generations of roots in and around the swamp. They came from some of the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the Okefenokee every year. They came from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — which said it “believes the proposed mining operation … poses a risk of permanent and irreversible impacts.”

They came from someone who paddled across the swamp 30 years ago and was struck by how it felt like a 7,000-year-old cathedral.

“It’s a place that can’t be replicated,” Carr Smith said. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Fighting proposed titanium mining next to Okefenokee Swamp