DESANTISLAND
Florida Diary: Environmental Protection or Bust
Strip mining of phosphate, “Bone Valley,” Florida. Photo: Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
March 23 – Bone Valley, Florida
If there’s one thing about ecology everybody should know, it’s the story of shit. If you already do(o), or are squeamish, please skip the next paragraph.
Back in pre-industrial and pre-capitalist days, farming was sustainable. Poop, and pee too, were collected and used as fertilizer to nourish crops, creating a virtuous cycle of growth, digestion, deposition and re-growth. That system was destroyed by industries requiring a large, concentrated labor force, cities located far from agriculture, and flush toilets.
For the first time, human waste was not returned to the soil, but carried off as sewage and put into streams, rivers and oceans. This “robbery system,” as the German plant scientist Justus von Liebig called it in 1862, created a metabolic rift that could only be overcome by the application of alternative or artificial soil nutrients. Initially, it was bones harvested from European graveyards and battlefields, and then, when that ran out, guano – bird droppings harvested from a few islands off Peru. When that source too was exhausted, scientists discovered a method (the Haber-Bosch process), of producing ammonia from water, methane and atmospheric nitrogen. However, other nutrients are also needed to fortify soils, most of all phosphorus. That’s collected from mines, some of the biggest of which happen to be in central Florida.
If you drive due west on Route 60 from Vero Beach to St. Petersburg, like we did today, you pass subdivisions, cattle farms, spent orange groves, and strawberry fields. Just past Mulberry, Fl. (pop. 3,592) you see on your left a mountain rising several hundred feet in the air. It’s a “gyp-stack” containing about five million tons of phosphogypsum, the byproduct of phosphate mining. There are some 25 of them in this part of Florida, an area called “Bone Valley” because the phosphate is mixed with prehistoric fossils. The largest U.S. producer of phosphate and potash (also used in agriculture) is The Mosaic Company, a global corporation headquartered in nearby Tampa. It employs 13,000 people in the region, and mines about 15 million tons of phosphate every year. Zora Neale Hurston, writing nearly 100 years ago, managed to romanticize the industry. She described “sweating black bodies, muscled like gods, working to feed the hunger of the great tooth…They go down in the phosphate mines and bring up the wet dust of the bones of prehistoric monsters, to make rich land in far places…”
The miners back then, however, didn’t just sweat – they died; phosphate mining is a poisonous business. To get at the stuff, you strip everything off the ground – in this part of Florida it’s mostly wetlands — and then dig. The process produces vast quantities of waste, most of it toxic, and some radioactive. After a mine is exhausted, the terrain cannot be restored to its prior state.
Sinkholes sometimes open beneath gyp-stacks, and dam breaches occur, imperiling millions of Floridians and billions of fish and other marine creatures. True to form, President Trump recently declared potash a “critical mineral” and is expected soon to give the same designation to phosphate. This will further weaken already inadequate E.P.A. regulation and ensure even greater contamination of water. Air too: fine dust from the mines contains heavy metals that can lodge in lungs.
There is an alternative to phosphate: pee. If Americans recycled their urine, they could produce as much phosphate as all U.S. mining operations. (I can show you the math.) In addition, if phosphate fertilizers were applied more judiciously, we’d have a surplus. Then, the U.S. could sell its pee globally. But by that time – the start of Trump’s fourth term — other countries would also be in the game and there would be reciprocal urine tariffs. The headline writers would have a field day: “TRUMP AND E.U. GET INTO PISSING CONTEST.”
March 26 – A Georgia Gumshoe
Like Jekyll Island, where we stayed last night, Saint Simon’s is one of the Georgia Sea Islands. However, it’s not planned and manicured like Jekyll, and Mallery Street, which runs down to the harbor, feels like a seaside Main Street of old: tourist shops, bait and tackle stores, fish restaurants and cafes. We were looking for the office of David Kyler, one of our A2 (Anthropocene Alliance) members who runs the Center for a Sustainable Coast. After twice walking past his address — 221 Suite B – we saw the numbers stenciled above a tattered white door. We pushed it open, climbed the blue painted concrete steps and reached Suite B. That’s when it hit me: Sherlock Holmes also worked at number 221 B!
The seated man we met bore little resemblance to Conan Doyle’s hero. He was older (between 70 and 80) and lacked pipe, deer stalker, violin, and drug paraphernalia. Nor was there any Doctor Watson, Mrs. Hudson or Baker Street irregulars. Kyler in fact, is pretty much a one-man show — more Sam Spade than Sherlock Holmes. His office walls testified to his open cases; they were covered in photos, press releases, magazine clippings, graphs, and government reports. There may have been a desk beneath the piles of paper in front of him. As we came in, he started talking in media res:
“…forwarded you a link to a You Tube video I made about the technology deployed by the oligarchs – the ‘Nerd Reich’ and Techno-Feudalists. UCS [?] appreciated it. They called this morning asking me to write letters opposing the dismantling of EPA, and protesting the Savannah River pluton bomb facility — already $15 billion over budget and it’s not clear there’s any plan to prevent there what happened over in Hanford…”
We hoped to interest Dave in grassroots community organizing on St. Simons. He demurred. He volunteered instead to do research and writing for other organizers in Georgia — which would be great! He’s got knowledge, experience, and doggedness. After 40 minutes talking (or listening), we thanked him and left. Was that a violin tremolo I heard as we descended the stairs?
March 27 – Breakfast fashions
Harriet and I drove early the next day from St. Augustine to Melbourne, Florida, where we planned to meet Camille Hadley, of Little Growers, Inc. She’s running a climate resilience project that our organization, A2, helped fund – more on that tomorrow.
Finding a vegan breakfast on the road is a challenge, especially in rural America. There, “tofu scramble,” “avocado toast” and “oat milk” are a foreign language. But vegans in the South have an ace-in-the hole: grits. Except for cheese or “gravy” versions (flour, bacon grease and milk), they are totally vegan. (The word “grits” admits either singular or plural pronouns). Combine them with hot sauce, and you have a tasty dish. Add home fries or toast with jam, and you have a meal – though perhaps not a very nutritious one. Grits was what we aimed for.
Entering Bunnell, Florida (pop. 3,276), on U.S. 1, we passed Railroad Street, where there’s no longer a railroad, and Anthony’s Fish Market which had a special on Galveston oysters. A few yards further, I spotted on the right, the Southern Table Restaurant. Checking the rearview mirror, I slammed on the breaks and turned sharply into a gravel parking lot, kicking up dust. The restaurant was cool inside, well lit, high ceilinged and busy. A young waitress in a yellow apron escorted us to a table, where we quickly ordered coffee, grits, home fires and toast. A bottle of Texas hot sauce sat comfortingly on the table, beside the napkin dispenser and saltshaker.
That’s when I noticed that most of the men in the restaurant were wearing baseball caps with sunglasses perched on the brims. They also had silver or gold chains around their necks. The location of the sunglasses, though surprising, might just be a matter of convenience, but the chains? Then it came to me: It was a Country version of Hip-Hop, another example of Southern white colonization of a Black, subcultural style. Satisfied with my glib analysis, and eager to tuck into the grits in front of me, I reached for the hot sauce, but as I did, something else caught my eye. A stout white man with a grey beard at the table closest to me – cap, sunglasses, gold chain, tattoos, and flip flops — was picking up pancakes from the plate in front of him and daintily tearing each into bite-sized pieces. When he finished, he drizzled the plate with syrup, and handed it to his little girl, age about seven. He then reached over and picked up the plate of the patient little boy next to her, aged about five, and performed the same, deliberate operation. At once, the cap, sunglasses, gold chain and cultural appropriation vanished – all I saw was love.
March 28 – “Make a Green Noise”
We arrived at the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Melbourne, Florida, at about noon. The Community Room was buzzy and full of people – Black, white and Latino. Harriet quickly spotted Camille Hadley. While they embraced, I scanned the room and saw enlarged photos on easels showing flood impacted neighborhoods, maps of the Indian River, and flip charts covered with handwriting and colored post-it notes. Camille was leading a day-long conference called, with synesthetic flourish, “Make a Green Noise;” the goal was to advance a community-led project of coastal resilience planning. Harriet had written the grant that got Camille’s organization, Little Growers, $670,000 of funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a private non-profit charted by Congress, supported in part by federal appropriation.
Most such planning initiatives are carried out by local, state or federal agencies with little public input. That’s why this effort — and about 50 others like it that we support – is significant. The people worst impacted by climate change have the most knowledge about it but are least heard. The fate of Camille’s project, however, is uncertain. Anything that even hints at “environmental justice”, is being targeted for elimination by the “Nerd Reich.” To stay beneath the radar and protect our member communities, A2 recently changed the last word of its website tag line “…fighting for environmental justice” to “protection.” After all, there is still an Environmental Protection Agency. It’s unlikely that will help, but with so many bigger targets, lawsuits, and a recession on the horizon, we just might escape notice and Little Growers and sub-grantees get their plan for flood protection, emergency resettlement, community farm, rain garden, and bioswale.
March 30 – A boycott debate
Harriet is Executive Director of A2. I’m her unpaid sidekick, officially “Director of Strategy.” On long drives, we often discuss staff issues, organizing, fund raising, and politics. Today, on the drive from Melbourne, Florida to Tampa, we discussed boycotts. It wasn’t our finest hour:
Harriet: “I think we should say we’re gonna boycott the U.S. because of Trump.”
Me: “OK, when do you want to announce this?”
H: “Now, right away!”
Me: “But we’re still in Florida.”
H: “So what? The point is to tell people we won’t come here again.”
Me: “That’s like saying you’re swearing off ice cream in the middle of a banana split.”
H: “I don’t agree. So, what do you propose?”
Me: “Some decent interval. Six months? A year?”
H: “You’re saying we agree to boycott now, but delay the announcement so people can forget we had an ice cream sundae?”
Me: “Banana Split. OK then, three months? Um, what are you doing on your phone?”
H: “I’m web searching: rules for boycotts.”
Mangrove swamp, Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge, Vero Beach, Florida. Photo: The author.
April 2 – Grassroots vs grass-tops in Tampa
Last summer, we saw the writing on the wall: Trump would win and federal support for local environmental justice organizations would evaporate. So, we decided to go all in on community organizing. Rather than just offering fund-raising, technical assistance and communications support for our 400+ member-communities, we’d help them grow their own bases. Coercive federal and state power had to be met with local, peoplepower.
We reached out to Wade Rathke, head of ACORN, the former community organizing powerhouse that until it was brought down in 2010 by accusations of mismanagement (subsequently disproved), boasted more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in some 100 U.S. cities. In its heyday, ACORN waged successful campaigns against predatory lending and in support of affordable housing, veterans’ care, better public schools, voter registration, tenant rights, improved access to healthcare, and a living wage. Today, ACORN has a growing number of international chapters, and is re-grouping in the U.S. Our aim is to deploy ACORN’s organizing strategies to build and support a working-class environmental movement. Wade has been a big help.
We came to Tampa to meet Lena Young Green, founder of the Tampa Heights Junior Civic Association (THJCA). Tampa Heights has the distinction of being the city’s first suburb; its (slightly) higher elevation was thought healthful in the 19teens, and streetcars made it easy to commute to downtown. In subsequent decades, the population prospered and grew until the 1970s, when de-segregation efforts led to white flight. The construction of the I-275 corridor split the community in half, leading to further neighborhood decline. Now the area is fast gentrifying and real estate prices have gone sky high. There are million buck townhouses near to where THJCA has its headquarters – a refurbished former church built about a hundred years ago, now nestled against the I-275.
Green’s organization works to train young people – mostly Black and working class, but some white kids too – in the skills necessary to succeed in school, go to college and find
Postcard, Seventh Avenue, Tampa Heights, 1912. Photo: The Author.
rewarding work. The plan is to join them up with other community-based-organizations in Hillsborough County and provide them a community organizer to help grow them into a powerful, political force. Together, they’ll be better able to develop a resilience plan to prevent or mitigate the impacts of climate change, pollution and bad development. Lena told us she didn’t want a huge, federal grant – even if one was available — just a small one to help them do their educational, organizing and community work. “We’re the grassroots, not the grass-tops. We don’t have the interest or ability to do all the accounting and reporting required by federal agencies. That’s not what we do.”
To get a better idea of what they do, Lena led us outside to see their community garden. It was heaven for vegans! There were raised beds with all types of Brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, kale, collard greens, etc.), as well as onions, garlic, tomatoes, potatoes and all kinds of herbs. There were flowers too and lots of butterflies and bees. There is also a shed, greenhouse, solar panels, and a drip-irrigation system for all the beds. Anybody in the neighborhood that wants to farm pays $60 a year, and get in return seeds, water, planting advice, access to tools, regular pep meetings and the fruits of their labor.
Lena Young Green in community garden run by the Tampa Heights Junior Civic Association. Photo: The author.
April 4 – Liberation Day
As it happened, the date of our flight back to the U.K. was April 4, Trump’s tariff Liberation Day, when the U.S. stock market fell 7%, on its way to a total decline (as of April 8) of nearly 20% from its recent high. A recession is now likely, with rising unemployment and falling wages to follow. Harriet and I also kept up with Trump’s illegal deportations.
From the comfort of a British Air lounge at Gatwick, the unfolding crisis had an air of unreality. Though our retirement investments were taking a beating, we would be relatively insulated from the worst outcomes. In fact, prices of goods and services in the U.K. might decline if rising tariffs meant the U.S. was no longer the predominant global market. A Trump instigated recession would also bring down costs. Of course, Keir Starmer and the U.K. Labor Party were already headed in that direction, all on their own.
My mind was filled with questions, beginning with the following: From the point of view of the capitalist class, how is an imbalance of trade and illegal immigration a problem? Answer: It isn’t. Capital benefits from labor arbitrage in both cases: finding cheap manufactures for its parts and products abroad, and hiring low paid, immigrant laborers at home. Indeed, the profitability of American capital – now barely distinguishable from global capital — is reliant upon international supply chains and labor. Some 40% of cars made by General Motors are assembled abroad. 50% of the parts of U.S. made cars are manufactured offshore. The same is true, only more so, for Boeing, Nike, Apple, Nvidia and many other of the largest U.S. based multinationals.
What about the working class? Will they benefit from tariffs? Answer: No. While it’s true that the labor arbitrage somewhat lowers U.S. wages, that’s compensated by the low price of goods manufactured abroad. The reason most people in the U.S. can afford a smart phone (90%) and big screen TV (70%) is because of low-cost labor (and poor environmental standards) in Asia. Clothes at Target and elsewhere are inexpensive because of sweatshops in the southern hemisphere and China. Avocados are cheap (or were before tariffs) because of imports from Mexico.
None of that, however, protects the U.S. working class from poverty, poor health and low life expectancy. The only thing that would alleviate those deficiencies would be regulation of the multinationals, higher taxes on corporations and the rich, better health and social services, and most of all, union protection that is as global as the manufacturing supply chains. None of that, of course, is on offer by Trump, Musk and the rest. What they aim to do is to make us all – or at least the 70% of Americans who count as working-class — poorer, weaker, and more divided. The response to that must be organizing, solidarity, protest, and political change. Trump may have inadvertently given that movement the impetus it needs. As our plane lifted off for London, I thought about the American debacle below, and the opportunities ahead.
