Now that would be a troubling headline for Yum! Brands PR. It's not a "real" headline but it might as well be.

If the era of social media and web 2.0 taught us anything, it is that corporations and organizations no longer have full control of their brands and how consumers interact with them. Their best hope is that they will be able to "manage" brand perception.

So when KFC rolled out reusable containers for their side dishes and implemented certain other changes in their food packaging to make it more sustainable, they weren't acting in a vacuum of corporate social responsibility. They were acting, at least in some part, to manage brand perception.

The Dogwood Alliance, an environmental group dedicated to holding corporations accountable for their industrial forestry practices in the South, has been pressuring the fried chicken chain to stop the practice of using pulpwood from endangered forests in the south, and in particular, the Green Swamp of North Carolina.

The campaign, called "Kentucky Fried Forests," identifies KFC's biggest paper-wasting culprit as the ubiquitous KFC bucket. And does so by deftly superimposing a chainsaw on the illustrated image of Colonel Sanders, the patriarch of the KFC brand.

“[W]hen you look at Kentucky Fried Chicken, it stands out as an iconic southern brand," says Dogwood Alliance campaign director Scott Quaranda. "So the most recognizable piece of the campaign is the KFC bucket of chicken.”

The Dogwood Alliance, which according to Brandweek, staged a summer protest outside KFC's Louisville, Ky.-based headquarters, has adopted public-sphere strategies to push companies like Staples and Sony to adopt more sustainable practices. They pushed Staples so hard that the office supply retailer is now a Dogwood ally.

Despite the timing of KFC's announcements in 2010 about their implementation of more sustainable packaging processes into their product lines, company officials say Kentucky Fried Forests campaign 

had nothing to do with the decision.

"The activities of special interest groups have no impact on the work KFC is doing to reduce the brand's environmental footprint," KFC said in a statement.

Not only does KFC not recognize Dogwood's role in any of this, apparently KFC and fellow Yum! Brands (NYSE: YUM) sister restaurants Taco Bell, Long John Silvers and Pizza Hut have been reluctant to engage with Dogwood altogether. I'm not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with the chainsaw.

While the Dogwood Alliance has recognized some of KFC's packaging improvements, including introduction of reusable containers, as steps in the right direction, they aren't backing down from their main concern: paper products.

"I really appreciate the reusable container," wrote Dogwood's Scot Quaranda in reply our recent post, "but a bulk of KFC packaging is made from paper, in fact their iconic buckets come from endangered forests in the Southern US."

So is the chainsaw-wielding Colonel Sanders going away any time soon? Until KFC can do better with the bucket than making the lid from 30% recycled material, I'm guessing no.