It’s a tall task, but Danna Smith, executive director of Asheville’s Dogwood Alliance, says she’s up to it. The 43-year-old quit her job at a law firm in 1993 to work for GreenPeace. "I wanted to do something more meaningful with life than negotiate contracts," she says. In 1996, she started the nonprofit Dogwood Alliance, an environmental activist network and Southern forest conservation group whose original goal was to shut down chip mills. The mills, used for making paper, were popping up at an alarming rate all over the South, and Smith felt that the slow encroachment on forestland, by giants like Weyerhauser, Georgia Pacific, Abitibi Bowater and International Paper, was basically going unchallenged. "They silently came in and started clear-cutting," she says. Through protests and, later, business meetings, Dogwood convinced huge paper consumers—Staples, Office Depot, Office Max and fast-food packaging companies—to use more post-consumer waste and recycled paper in their products. Dogwood also has ongoing campaigns to protect endangered forests and end large-scale clear-cutting.

The group’s latest effort, a pilot project with Staples, is called the Carbon Canopy. It’s basically a new kind of carbon market, one that rewards private landowners for not allowing all of their land to be logged. Once a company like Staples commits to sourcing its paper from well-managed forests, landowners have an incentive to leave at least some trees standing. "They’ll have some income from logging trees and additional income from the carbon that gets sequestered because they haven’t clear-cut the land," Smith says. "It doesn’t mean the landowner can’t log any forests. They just have to do it differently." — J.M.