SUCCESSFUL CYPRESS DAY OF ACTION

The Save Our Cypress Day of Action this past Saturday was a great success! From California to Mobile to Boston, citizens mobilized to inform consumers of the dangers of cypress mulch and tell Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart to stop selling unsustainable cypress mulch! Great work everyone!

Here in New Orleans, they were expecting us at Lowe’s, and we even had the suspicion that the store manager came in specifically to deal with us. In Lafayette, the manager actually gave the activists a copy of the “talking points” that the corporate headquarters had circulated, and in Salt Lake the manager told our friend Mary he’d been expecting her.


Just think of folks in the Lowe’s corporate headquarters deliberating on the best way to counter our action and spending staff time and resources to deal with us. They’re going to realize soon that it will work better to just stop selling unsustainable cypress mulch. Many of the points they recited at events around the country don’t tell the whole story. One employee said that the mulch is only by-product of the logging industry, but that’s a tired point that was proven untrue over a year ago. You can go see the photos of whole trees being fed to the mulch machine at www.saveourcypress.org. Photo below courtesy of Atchafalaya Basinkeeper.

While people were visiting stores to inform customers and managers of the problem, others were calling the corporate headquarters to voice their concerns as well.

Lowe’s employees also mentioned a three-year moratorium on cypress mulch, which is incredibly misleading. Lowe’s has put a moratorium on purchasing cypress mulch that comes from south of I-10/I-12 in Louisiana excluding the Pearl River Basin. The endangered forests extend well beyond those boundaries, but more bothersome is the company’s inability to actually verify the source of the products they’re purchasing. When we first raised this issue with Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart almost a year and a half ago, Lowe’s and Home Depot promised that none of their product was sourced in southern Louisiana. On the ground investigation proved that this claim was patently false, and suppliers were willing to obfuscate the source of their goods.

The bottom-line is that as long as Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart continue to sell cypress mulch that is not certified as sustainable by a credible third-party verifier, they are not living up to the sustainability principles and policies that all three companies consistently trumpet.

In many cases, the employees of the stores are genuinely interested. Mike happened to run into a regional manager at the Wal-Mart he visited in Tampa, and he was genuinely interested and concerned about the issue and promised to bring it up to his superiors in Bentonville. For anyone who lives on the Gulf Coast, no matter who your employer is, the decision to protect cypress swamps is a no-brainer.

It is the effort of hundreds and thousands of concerned citizens that has lead these companies to espouse environmental policies, and it will be our continued vigilance and action that ensures they actually live up to the hype.

Thanks to everyone who got out this weekend to save our cypress! You are the reason we will win this campaign.

Dan Favre is the Campaign Organizer for the Gulf Restoration Network.