Green Police: KFC busted for where it gets material for its buckets

The next time you snag a bucket of

Kentucky Fried Chicken, you might want to give a thought to just where the bucket came from. According to the forest activists in the Dogwood Alliance, a sizable percentage of the Colonel's U.S.-market red-and-white tubs were sourced from trees in the environmentally pristine Green Swamp in far southeastern North Carolina.

The Green Swamp is not old-growth forest. But it is an intact southern swampland of the type that was once common, but is now rare. According to the National Scenic Byways Program, the region is "dense with unique botanical qualities. Unusual plants and flowers can be seen throughout the Green Swamp." The Nature Conservancy adds that the Green Swamp "is the center of an incredibly rich assembly of plant life. Featuring a complex of longleaf pine savannas and limesink ponds bound together by thousands of acres of pocosin (a type of evergreen shrub bog), the area is home to more than 400 vascular plant species and provides habitat for animals such as red-cockaded woodpecker and black bear." Want to see a meat-eating venus flytrap or a carnivorous pitcher plant in the wild? This is one of the few places to do that, but habitat is fast disappearing.