Walk for the Earth - 700 miles thru Florida

The Animals Speak Out

by W.B. Park

Good evening. We’re here to try to convince you that unless you folks wake up, our whole eco system is going to crash. Agri-business and lawn sprinklers are draining our aquifers and swamps. DDT, dioxin, and a soup of other toxins are seeping into our drinking water and eating away our ozone protection. Mining and ranching interests slash and burn our jungles. Paper and lumber companies level whole forests in days. Developers concrete what’s left. As a result, our source of oxygen is disappearing. Our topsoil is eroding. Whole species are in danger. The food chain has holes. Cancer, respiratory diseases, miscarriages, dropping sperm counts…I mean, how bad does it have to get before you people start trying to help? Hello? Is anybody out there listening? 

This is a chapter from my book entitled 'Come Together Right Now: Organizing Stories from a Fading Empire'. At the time of this I was working for the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice.

I drove the 700-plus mile Walk for the Earth route four times before our official beginning in late February, 1996. I had plenty of time to think about the enormous undertaking and what it was “all about.” During these long drives I mapped the walk route and scouted for places for the campers to sleep. I met with local groups along the way and got them to commit to join the walk when it passed through their community. 

Many of the groups took on the task of organizing meals for the walkers. I made contact with the local media to publicize the walk and the local issues we’d be illuminating. Quite often, there was a community forum to set up.

I knew that we were going to walk through communities of color where poor people were struggling, often alone, over local environmental issues. I knew we were going to try to help return a sense of power to people in our state who feel powerless in the face of corporate political dominance. What I didn’t know was that water contamination would be the issue that everyone talked about, up and down the state.

The Everglades are being diced up—big sugar, citrus groves, vegetable production and urban sprawl are impacting South Florida’s primary water source. We met with black people in Belle Glade and listened to their stories about water contamination from sugar cane production.

In Polk County, where miles and miles of phosphate mining has impacted poor communities, water contamination has reached epidemic proportions. While in this region, we met with black people whose communities were contaminated by the phosphate industry. There are no environmental groups speaking out for the people. Even the Audubon Society is taking money from the phosphate industry while poor people die from cancer.

While walking through the citrus belt of Central Florida, walkers met with Hispanic farm workers who talked over and over again about pesticide poisoning. We learned that drinking water is being contaminated by these chemicals.

Urbanization (whether in Miami, Orlando, Tampa, or Jacksonville) is creating massive amounts of pollution (from more and wider roads and millions of cars) that is getting into our underground water aquifer.

We held a protest in the Ocala National Forest where the Navy has had a bombing range since World War II. Once out in the middle of nowhere, the range is now being surrounded by urbanization.

Up in north Florida, in Perry, deadly dioxins are being dumped into the Fenholloway River by the Buckeye paper mill. The river carries the toxins from the plant right into the Gulf of Mexico where aquatic life is now dying as a result. We held a rally in front of the paper mill while standing in the pouring rain. 

At each stop, local authorities talk about dilution. They admit that pollutants are reaching the aquifer, but insist that they are diluted when they enter the enormous underground water systems. But this is a lie because pollutants are entering the aquifer up and down the state in such vast amounts that they must certainly be having cumulative adverse impacts.

What we learned from the local people we met on the walk is that they want someone to stand up with them. They want someone to tell it like it is. They can’t drink the water. They can’t eat the fish. The birds are dying.

Our walk was led by Bobbie C. Billie, the spiritual leader of the Independent Traditional Seminole Nation. His family, still legally at war with the U.S. government, is the one holdout family within the Seminole people who never submitted to the reservation system. Bobbie was the only person who was able to walk every single step of the 700 mile walk. On the weekends, members of his family would join us for the walk.

Bobbie C. Billie

One high school teacher from Miami brought a busload of her students to begin the walk in the Everglades and ended up bringing them back virtually every other weekend as well.

At the end of the Walk for the Earth, about 600 people turned out from all over the state to march the last three miles to the State Capitol in Tallahassee with us. Two days later, about 50-60 of us went into the capitol to lobby. Some of us held a day-long vigil inside the capitol rotunda, while others visited their representatives. One of our signs read, “The corporations control the government.” Corporate lobbyists, running around with their cell phones, were not amused. But many capitol staffers came by and discreetly whispered, “You’re right.” The native people from South America who joined us played their magical flutes inside the rotunda, and people were drawn to us like snakes responding to charmers. It was an exciting and empowering day.

When you speak the truth in the heart of power, sparks literally fly. The Walk for the Earth: A Journey for Future Generations was a success. We saw that with our own eyes. We heard it from the public with our own ears. And now we must speak about it with our own voices.

If there is to be a future for our children then we must move now to protect what little natural life is left in Florida. We must stand before the government and the corporations and say “enough!” We must call for a moratorium on growth and development in Florida. If we don’t, who will? 

Bruce