A conservation group announced a $60 million agreement on Friday to purchase land near the Okefenokee Swamp from a mining company. This acquisition follows years of environmentalist opposition to a proposed mining project that many feared could cause irreversible harm to an ecological gem.

The Conservation Fund shared that it plans to acquire all 7,700 acres owned by Twin Pines, an Alabama-based company, effectively stopping its mining initiatives near the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Georgia.

Stacy Funderburke, vice president for the central Southeast at the Conservation Fund, remarked, “This is a significant challenge, but the threat it posed to the entire refuge was too great to ignore. While we have undertaken larger projects in terms of land size, financially, this is our most substantial deal to date in Georgia.”

Twin Pines had worked since 2019 to obtain permits to mine titanium dioxide, a pigment used to whiten products from paint to toothpaste, less than 3 miles from the southeastern boundary of the Okefenokee refuge near the Georgia-Florida line. It is the largest U.S. refuge east of the Mississippi River, covering nearly 630 square miles in southeast Georgia.