Word: florida
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stake than the future of a habitat for alligators, wading birds and other swamp life. "This is not just an argument between greedy farmers and anxious environmentalists," says the Wilderness Society's Webb. "It's a planning issue of fundamental proportions. It's the future of South Florida." If the river of grass turns into a sea of cattails, the water supply for coastal cities from West Palm Beach to Miami could dry up, and a sunny subtropical paradise could become a barren wasteland. Floridians are coming to realize how much they too depend on the vast marshland that once...
...good way to catch a reader's attention is to start off with a bang. This book does so. Chapter 1, first sentence: "The most perilous work in America is the harvest by hand of sugarcane in South Florida." Holy mackerel, stop the presses! A lot of coal miners will certainly be relieved to learn this, not to mention scads of military test pilots. And just how perilous is this work, which is principally performed by laborers brought in from the Caribbean? An answer is tucked in at the end of a paragraph 245 pages later...
This is certainly ending with a whimper. Yet such a dying fall hardly saps the considerable strengths of Big Sugar, subtitled Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida. Forget the comparative dangers of cutting sugarcane. Wonder instead why roughly 10,000 West Indian men, chiefly Jamaicans, come to South Florida each winter to do it. That is what Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, did when he came across this information in a 1984 newspaper story. Other questions aroused Wilkinson's interest as a reporter. Among them: Is it not odd that a major domestic cash crop...
...looking for an expose -- a big U.S. business using and abusing desperate, impoverished workers -- and in large measure he found what he wanted. Florida accounts for around 40% of the sugarcane grown in the U.S., and producers there have been using West Indian cutters for more than 45 years. Mechanical harvesting would be much less expensive, but there are substantial areas in the state where the soil is too fragile to bear the ravages of machinery. So the brunt of cost consciousness falls on the cutters, who invariably take their lumps. They are routinely cheated of some time spent...
Dinkins wins the Democratic primary by stressing racial reconciliation. -- A flap over a gay prostitute leads the list for congressional sex scandals. -- Spreading farms and urban sprawl pose a deadly threat to Florida's Everglades...