Wilson and his wife, Cara Leverett, live in a small shack with their young son and two dogs in the middle of the largest swampland in the U.S. It’s called the Atchafalaya Basin. The basin’s thousands of acres of cypress, bottomland hardwood trees and coastal marshes are a refuge for wildlife. They also act as a sponge when hurricanes cause the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico to surge.

Despite the Atchafalaya Basin’s size, Wilson and Leverett are the only employees of Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, which is the only nonprofit dedicated to overseeing the basin’s hundreds of miles — extending from the southwestern tip of Louisiana at the Gulf of Mexico to north of the state capital.

The fact that few others are watching over the Atchafalaya has made Leverett and Wilson the default warning system for any perceived threats to the woods.

In 2008, Wilson was able to trace bags of cypress mulch being sold at Walmart, Home Depot and other retailers — labeled as sustainably harvested — back to clear-cut Atchafalaya woodlands. He and his fellow Louisiana activists pressured the companies to stop selling the mulch.

It was a big victory for Wilson and his ilk. Wilson said he’s noticed a drop in logging in the Atchafalaya since 2008 because of that win.

But now he worries that the demand for biomass in Europe will reverse his work to protect the woods.

“They said not a single cypress was being used, but they lied in the past,” he said. “Why wouldn’t they lie again?”

In 2007, the European Union set an ambitious goal to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 20 percent below their 1990 levels by 2020. That, in effect, required power plants across the continent to quickly find new ways to make energy. Some turned to wind and solar. But for coal-fired power plants it was much cheaper to convert their facilities to burn wood. The conundrum for those companies is that much of western Europe doesn’t have sufficiently large forests left to meet the demand, and the remaining woodland is heavily regulated. So corporations turned to the Southeastern U.S., where wood is plentiful, and regulations about what can be done on private land are lax.

Wood pellet manufacturing in the U.S. is now booming.

Drax, Britain's largest coal plant, is in the process of converting most of its operations to biomass fuel, and other power plants across the continent are following suit.