Dogwood Alliance (then led by Green Corps alumna Sarah Hodgdon) joined NRDC and Bowater, Inc. in an agreement that will increase protection for hundred of thousands of acres on the Cumberland Plateau and across the South.

When the Dogwood Alliance wanted to convince the largest newsprint manufacturer in the United States to stop destroying southern forests, they looked to Green Corps for help.

In 2005, three Green Corps organizers worked with the Dogwood Alliance to protect southern forests from destruction by the paper industry.

The Cumberland Plateau—extending from West Virginia and Kentucky through Tennessee to Alabama—is a remote forest ecosystem that is being threatened by unsustainable logging by large paper companies. These corporations are harvesting timber and paper pulp made from millions of acres of this hardwood forest in order to manufacture toilet paper, newsprint and office paper. Clear-cutting these forests and replacing them with vast plantations of non-native pine has destroyed crucial habitat, wiping out the region's species and devastating the local populations of songbirds.

To protect this pocket of pristine forest from further harm, Dogwood Alliance launched a campaign against Bowater, the largest paper company operating in the Cumberland Plateau. The grassroots pressure generated by Green Corps trainees helped bring the campaign to a climax, prompting a quick response from Bowater headquarters.

Green Corps trainee Eva Hernandez built a student group at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., the location of Bowater’s headquarters. Her outreach mobilized students and professors, including associates of Bowater’s CEO, Arnie Nemirow. As student interest in the Bowater campaign increased, word of Eva’s campus rally reached the ears of executives at Bowater.

As a direct result of Eva’s organizing on campus, Bowater officials agreed to negotiate with Dogwood Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council. After several months of negotiation, Bowater agreed to substantially alter the way they do business by agreeing to end the conversion of native forests to pine plantations on all company lands; work with private landowners to stop conversion on their lands; and regulate aerial spraying more strictly than currently required by any state in the region.