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COPYRIGHT 2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation
Every time you go to a place
That has those animals on its face, It makes you laugh and cheer Because it's fun out here. We love you Everglades! We'll help to save the place! Poem written by a group of six-graders on a bronze plaque at the Pay-Hay-Okee boardwalk overlook.
The Everglades has long been the site of culture wars over the future of environmental standards in the United States and in Florida. Environmental and development issues are continuing to generate increasing conflict in Everglades' communities, which are already under stress from rapid social change. The current restructuring of the agricultural industry and new environmental legislation have highlighted the differences in approaches to the maintenance of place that exist within Everglades communities and the proposals for development that are being presented by industries and governmental agencies. These differences are challenging communities to respond to changes initiated from outside their boundaries.
There has been a substantial effort on the part of community-based organizations to engage citizens in the decision making process of legislative policies. The current threats to environmental justice make community involvement and education even more significant than past concerns about equity and participation in the formulation of environmental planning.
This paper explores the position and interaction of Everglades communities as they struggle to maintain a sense of place in an arena where the federal and Florida state governments have pledged to spend an estimated $16 billion dollars in restoration activities over the next ten to thirty years. It will do so within a framework that argues against attempts to analyze communities through the postmodern discussions of "deterritorialization" and "flexibility of capital" that now characterize much of the analyses of globalization. These abstractions fail to assess the conditions of community resistance to outside forces, as Nash (2001a, b) so strongly notes. It proposes that what is needed are more localized descriptions and histories that influence global forces and help interpret their prominent role in local developments.
A Brief History of the Everglades
The Florida Everglades is a unique environment that is characterized by subtropical vegetation, wildlife, and hydrology. Created more than 6,000 years ago by changes in the Atlantic Ocean's water levels and characterized by heavy rainfall and a low-nutrient soil, it was taken over by subtropical plants and a "river of grass" that extended from the banks of Lake Okeechobee to the Florida Bay. The Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) is now situated in an area of intense commercial and real estate development, managed by a complex interaction among local, state, federal and private interests. The private investments are primarily in sugar production, although the increasing introduction of new vegetable crops and attempts at building a tourist industry have also greatly affected the current discussion.
The EAA is a drained swamp established by government decree in the mid-19th century when 20 million wetland acres were handed over to Florida lawmakers, and "reclamation" became a statewide rallying cry (cf. Roberts 1999). Reclamation meant turning the land from swamp into palatable farmland that could support rice, cotton, citrus and sugarcane. The land was restructured by the construction of canals that drained the swampy water into the Atlantic Ocean, thus exposing a mucky soil inhabited by sawgrass. By the 1920s development of the area was in full swing, with the population growing tenfold between 1900 and 1930 (Roberts 1999). By the end of the drainage project in the 1960s, over 18,000 square miles had been drained, utilizing 1,000 miles of canals, 720 miles of levies and over 200 water control structures (Scully 2001: B13-14).
As David McCally tells us:
The Engineering plan that was formulated in the 1940s ... effectively killed the Everglades. To be sure, wetlands did not totally disappear from peninsular Florida, but these remnants are decidedly not the Everglades, even though the name still appears on maps. Of the three traits that characterized the pre-drainage system in the Everglades--habitat heterogeneity, large spatial extent, and a distinctive hydrologic regime--the new water-control works most directly affected the last, but the destruction of the system's hydrologic regime led, inevitably, to a reduction in the size and biotic diversity of the wetlands (McCally 1999, quoted in Scully 2001: B13).
Despite the many obstacles that confronted the early farmers on what turned out to be a low-nutrient soil, sugar production in the area began to swell, particularly with the development of new strains of sugar crops that were more adaptive to the local environmental constraints. The area began to commercially thrive. But the real story begins with the Cuban revolution and the consequent embargo on Cuban sugar. The impact of the revolution and the United States response to it drew more outsiders to the area, including former Cuban sugar producers. By the mid-1960s, sugar acreage had increased tenfold, making it a major industry in the Florida that rivaled citrus production and tourism. In the process, The folksy GLADESMEN (1998) and sugar producers that are portrayed in accounts such as BIG SUGAR (1989), CRACKERS IN THE GLADE (2000), TOTCH, A LIFE IN THE EVERGLADES (1993), and THE EVERGLADES: RIVER OF GRASS (1947), have been replaced in the agricultural fields and communities of the EAA by the harsh realities of Alan Bum's MAYA IN EXILE (1993), a tale of the migrant labor that feeds the production of cane and vegetables that are sold all over the world.
The sugar industry has manifested an overwhelming influence on state and federal regulations, and plays a large role in electoral politics. Sugar companies were a major contributor to the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Jeb Bush election campaigns. Bruce Babitt, the Clinton administration's environmental chief, managed to win over the support of the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society despite the harm many environmental critics and local communities claimed the Clinton policies would produce. This was the same Bruce Babbitt who devised a market-oriented environmentalism that negotiated with environmental groups, ultimately convincing the Sierra Club to work with him to pass legislation that halved the old growth that remained in the Pacific Northwest. (1) The Sierra Club had initially taken a stand but did not actively oppose NAFTA, which by general agreement of environmental scientists and activists weakened existing environmental policies. All these environmental organizations receive large corporate contributions, and positions that threaten corporate funding also threaten organizational viability.
The Clinton Administration's plan for Everglades restoration bore an uncanny resemblance to a plan championed by the sugar industry. The plan calls for restoration to begin south of the sugar farms and requires that Florida taxpayers pay half the $700 million cost for filtration marshes. In a highly politicized move also initiated by Florida Crystals, the sugar industry was exempted from the NAFTA deregulation of industry until at least 2008, while its production continues to be subsidized. The arrangement defies free trade logic, while irking refiners and consumers (Barboza 2002).
While the sugar industry does not have the magnitude of environmental pollutants of, e.g., the electrical machine industry and its use of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) (Nash and Kirsch 1986, 1988 1994), the heavy use of phosphorus as a fertilizer has raised concerns about the area's flora and fauna. The sugar industry has poured millions of dollars into discrediting studies documenting the harmful effects of phosphorous, successfully directing the flow of information to the public through advertising and private research.
There has been almost no documentation of the effects of sugar burning on the area's residents, who report that there is an increase in rashes on children's legs during the burning season. There has also been little research concerning the rise of asthma, as one of the many health concerns voiced by citizen's groups. Without a doubt there are other pollutants and health concerns that have been ignored due to the immigration status of the area's workers and the concern (and threats) about the possible loss of jobs. Thus, the conditions of work run counter to residents and their communities' engagement with the maintenance of land and resources (cf. Portes and Stepick 1985). As it is, prospects for agricultural work are worse than they were when Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame was filmed in 1961, writes Jere Longman, who notes that Belle Glade, the largest center on the lake, lacks even a movie theatre but welcomes its visitors with the sign "Her Soil is Her Fortune" (NYT, November 23, 2001, pp. A27-28).
In recent years, farming cooperatives have risen as an alternative to the major corporations, and many have been more engaged with environmental concerns and the health of their workers. A myriad of lawsuits involving sugar farmers and migrant workers has resulted in the mechanization of harvesting, and while housing and health care has improved for some, workers are mostly relegated to sugar planting and manual harvesting, forced to...
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