May 4, 2022
Contact:
Linden Jenkins
lindajenkins177@yahoo.com
606-986-8687
BOSTON, MA – Groups gathered outside Boston’s Westin Seaport Hotel today to protest the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) award of “Private Company Board of the Year” to Wareham, MA based mining company, A.D. Makepeace. The company’s mining and sales operations are in the globally rare Pine Barrens forest in Southeastern Massachusetts. Jim Kane, formerly of MassDevelopment, is the company’s President and CEO. The groups protested Makepeace’s destruction of forests, waterways, and Wampanoag Indigenous cultural sites.
Makepeace owns about 7,000 acres in Southeastern Mass, accumulated since the company’s founding in the 1850s. The region is the ancestral home of the Wampanoag Native American people and evidence of Indigenous peoples are present on lands throughout the area. The groups say Mass Historic Commission is not protecting the sites from Makepeace’s mining and extraction. The region is a unique ecosystem with 220 species of plants and animals protected by the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act and state and local officials are not enforcing the law. The region contains unique deposits of “silica” sand, a globally rare commodity.
Makepeace uses “cranberry farming” as a cover for its mining operations. It promotes itself as “sustainable,” citing a recent project with Brightview Landscape to provide “engineered soils” to Harvard’s Science & Engineering Complex – earth materials obtained by destroying biodiversity and Indigenous cultural sites. With Borrego Solar, Makepeace has clear-cut and strip mined over 350 acres for 13 large industrial solar projects. Makepeace plans to use toxic copper chromated arsenic (CCA) treated poles in cranberry bogs for a “dual use” solar panel project under the state’s SMART solar subsidy program.
“Makepeace is greenwashing. NACD must strip Makepeace of this award and hold the company accountable,” said Linden Jenkins. “The board of directors is violating standards for social and environmental responsibility, and they don’t deserve this.”
GROUPS PARTICIPATING: Mass Peace Action-Indigenous Subgroup, Extinction Rebellion Boston, Save the Pine Barrens/Community Land & Water Coalition
Photos from the May 4th protest against A.D. Makepeace award