The Celebration Chronicles by Andrew Ross Ph.D

Author:Andrew Ross, Ph.D. [Ross, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78846-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Apopka farmworkers before the last harvest. (Photo: Sister Ann Kendrick, The Last Harvest project, Crealdé School of Art)

I wondered what the lunatics would have done. From what we had learned, the Lake Apopka settlement was a missed chance to do the right thing for the environment and the workers alike. It could have been a golden opportunity to create a model of sustainable agriculture. A marsh flowway created by Conner to filter the lake water and retain the phosphorus had begun to show results, and further cooperation from the farmers might have led to some creative solutions in the fields themselves. Instead what we got was a corrupted but increasingly common form of environmental politics, where the polluter does not pay and the cleanup boosts the land value of property owners and primes the pump of luxury development.

The students on the trip had responses as varied as their diverse backgrounds allowed. For most, it was their first encounter with migrant workers, while others had parents who had once worked the fields in Puerto Rico. Some instinctively identified with the businesspeople, many more empathized directly with the workers, others were simply glad to have a day out of the classroom. Several told me they felt uncomfortable at being voyeurs of the workers. The next day in government class, students were asked to do some role-playing, representing the opinions of the different groups we had met in the course of our visit. In the course of the debate, the farm owners got short shrift, the workers got high respect, the government agency was coolly received, and the lobbyists generated a good deal of cynicism. With the exception of a few grandstanding males, with a knee-jerk reaction to bleeding hearts who stood in the way of growth and development, students were mostly agreed that justice should be done both to the environment and to the workers. But they clearly doubted that anything quite so fair would ever happen.

The government class was led by Melissa Rodriguez, aided by Debbie Delevan, a popular intern from the Johns Hopkins University. Rodriguez had been recruited as a social studies teacher from the upper Midwest in January, and had hit the ground running. She was the first Celebration teacher whose style I instinctively relished. Socratic and provocative, she pushed buttons, raised hackles, and rabble-roused from the get-go. In return, the students erected a solid wall of complacency. It was a familiar game, and a delight to watch it unravel, even in her first class a few months earlier:

“I grew up in a two-room log cabin without running water in Wisconsin. Part of your complacency is about how easy it is to access everything you want. I need you to come up with something you’re going to get riled up about.”

“I can feel the passion in this room,” one student quips dryly.

“I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, marched for NOW, went on a hunger strike, and boycotted our junior prom because the district wouldn’t provide services for non–English speakers.”

A deep pool of silence swallows up this last remark.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.