Journalist Drew Kann credits his father for his love of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. “I’ve been going to Okefenokee since I was a kid,” he says. “I grew up camping down there.”
But one early trip might have ended differently if not for his father’s watchful eye.
“He saved me from stepping on an alligator when I was about eight years old, backing a canoe into the swamp,” Kann recalls. “He gave me a timely shout that I was getting too close to one of the guys laying in the water. I might not be here today, if not for that.”
Today Kann is the one paying close attention to Georgia’s environment, as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“I think it’s an amazing state,” he says. “We have amazing mountains up in the Appalachian corner of the state. We’ve got beautiful forests, incredible beaches and marshlands, and then wild places like the Okefenokee.”
It’s also a state that generates a lot of storytelling for environmental journalism.
“Georgia is really at the center of so many of the biggest environmental energy issues that are not just dominating our country, but the world,” Kann says. “We’ve been seeing tons of battery manufacturers, electric vehicle manufacturers, and we have the biggest solar panel manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere, not too far from Atlanta and Northwest Georgia. There’s just a lot going on here.”
Those two realities collided in recent years when a company called Twin Pines Minerals announced a plan to mine for titanium and other minerals near Okefenokee. Residents and activists feared the proposed mine would cause insurmountable damage to the swamp and its hundreds of unique plant and wildlife species, not to mention the human communities nearby.
Activists fought the project on multiple fronts, and won several victories along the way, including convincing the National Park Service to nominate Okefenokee for listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site (an effort spearheaded by The Revelator’s publisher, the Center for Biological Diversity).
Meanwhile Kann and other AJC journalists dug into it from other angles, such as looking into the mining company’s less-than-stellar record and examining the mine’s potential effects on local hydrology and wildfire risks.
The collective efforts resulted in a massive victory this past May: A nonprofit called The Conservation Fund paid about $60 million to acquire the 8,000-acre proposed mine site and the mineral rights to the land, halting the project.
The Revelator spoke with Kann about this success, the role of local media in protecting the environment, and what comes next. (This conversation has been lightly edited.)
How did you get involved in the Okefenokee mining story?
There’s been interest in mining on the swamp’s edge for decades. Back in the 1990s, there was a proposal by the materials and chemicals giant DuPont to mine near the swamp, and that faced a lot of opposition from environmentalists and the federal government. Ultimately, DuPont backed off and donated most of the land to the Conservation Fund.
This latest attempt to mine near the swamp started to gain traction in 2019, while I was still at CNN. When I joined the AJC in 2021, I knew that this mining threat would be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, stories I’d be covering here. It was actually the first story I wrote for the AJC, explaining how the permitting for this mine ended up in the hands of the state instead of the federal government.
Activists have been fighting this mine for years and have had a lot of success along the way. What role did the media play in the final outcome?
Obviously the media brought accountability to the issue. We spent a lot of time… my colleague Dylan Jackson and I, our investigations team, spent months digging into the company behind the proposal, Twin Pine Minerals, and their parent company. We found that the company and its affiliates had a pretty spotty environmental track record.
There were certainly other news organizations who covered bits and pieces of that, but I don’t think the full picture of the concerning environmental interactions would have come to light.
The AJC put a full-court press into this, with investigative reporting, a rare front-page editorial, a note from the publisher, and cartoons by Mike Luckovich. Why did the newspaper go all-in?
We felt it was important for people to know what was potentially going to happen on the doorstep of what many consider one of our nation’s last wild places. We’ve heard from readers about how important this issue was for them.
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Are there any memories that really stick with you about the reporting process?
I just love every time I get to go back to the Okefenokee. I’m excited to do it. It’s kind of like you’re going back in time.
On one of my visits, I was with the refuge manager. We pulled up next to a big floating peat bed. It’s so thick in places that we were able to step out on it and walk on this island of peat in the middle of the Okefenokee. Pretty incredible experiences like that.
Honestly, I love just popping into little shops and restaurants and stores in the area in Folkston, which is the small town that’s kind of the gateway to the swamp, and talking to those people about their views on what’s happening, what could happen next. That’s my favorite part of this job.
After working on this story for years, what were some of your key takeaways?
I think it showed the value of being there and showing up to things. I made several trips down to the swamp and to Folkston for meetings. I think this whole process really showed me the value of getting out there and seeing things with your own eyes, talking to people in person. I feel it enables you to convey the richness and importance of a place like the Okefenokee.
What’s the state of local media in Georgia right now? According to some data I’ve looked up, there are 17 counties in Georgia that don’t even have their own paper, and a lot that are down to one paper. How important is it for local journalism to be able to dig into these stories, and what would have happened if you hadn’t been there?
It’s hard to say what would have happened had we not reported on this, but I think folks can imagine. There would have been a lot less information out there for both decisionmakers and the public to evaluate for a significant proposal like this.
It’s no secret that journalism is in a tough spot right now. We face a lot of different pressures from our business models to things like artificial intelligence and the current political climate.
I came here from CNN, and while that was a great experience, I’ve found that the stories I get to write about in local news are so much more interesting and compelling. The local level is really where things happen that affect people’s lives. I think it’s a tragedy that local news is in the spot that it is. Local news is vital to our state, our country, and democracy.
What are the other big environmental stories on the horizon for Georgia?
What I think a lot of regular folks are thinking about … is artificial intelligence. Georgia has already become a hotbed for data center development: warehouses packed with servers that power things like artificial intelligence, streaming services, digital finance, you name it. The Metro Atlanta area is one of the hottest destinations in the country for these kinds of things. They take up a lot of land, use a lot of electricity, and there are concerns about their water consumption. We’re seeing increasing friction on the local level to some of these proposals.
We have the state’s biggest utility planning a historic expansion of their electric generation capacity. We’ll see if that gets approved or not.
There’s a lot to be determined about the fate of wild places in Georgia… We’re going to continue to stay on [the Okefenokee story] and see what happens next, because I don’t think this is the end of potential mining proposals near the swamp.
For more, listen to Drew Kann and fellow AJC journalist Greg Bluestein discuss Okefenokee on the newspaper’s Politically Georgia podcast:
Previously in The Revelator:
Mining Policy Must Be Reformed
