Feminist Environmental Justice

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FEMINIST ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE:

CONFRONTING LEGACIES OF RACIAL SEGREGATION

IN JUPITER, FLORIDA

Britni M Hiatt

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Wilkes Honors College

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

with a Concentration in Women’s Studies

Wilkes Honors College of

Florida Atlantic University

Jupiter, Florida

April 2013

FEMINIST ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE:

CONFRONTING LEGACIES OF RACIAL SEGREGATION

IN JUPITER, FLORIDA

Britni M Hiatt

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Wairimũ Njambi, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEEE:

______

Dr. Wairimũ Njambi

______

Dr. William O’Brien

______

Dean Jeffrey Buller, Wilkes Honors College

______

Date

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis is dedicated to the brave and vibrant Limestone Creek community.

Dr. Wairimũ Njambi—thank you for your leadership, wisdom, book lists, high standards, and everything I’ve learned about social justice with you in Women’s Studies. I am forever grateful and humbled.

My Women’s Studies classmates—thank you. I treasure the academic triumphs and personal revelations we share.

My family—thank you for supporting and inspiring my greatest accomplishments.

Dr. William O’Brien—thank you for your dedicated second readership and for everything I’ve learned in your classes.

Shout-outs: Professor Dorotha Lemeh, Lake Worth activists, Feminist Student Union, Stop Owlcatraz! Coalition, FAU community, and my cat Linus.

iii

ABSTRACT

Author: Britni M Hiatt

Title: Feminist Environmental Justice: Confronting Legacies of Racial

Segregation in Jupiter, Florida

Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Wairimũ Njambi

Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

Concentration: Women’s Studies

Year: 2013

Despite pervasive claims that the United States is a ‘post-racial’ society, racial segregation did not end after Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. Today, environmentally hazardous zoning and biotechnology land developments continue to determine which families are most exposed to risks of pollution and displacement, and which families are not. Utilizing documentation of local history and research in Women’s

Studies, Eco-Feminism, and Critical Race Studies, I examine the legacy of racial segregation in Jupiter, Florida, by charting the biotechnology ‘cluster’ encroaching upon the historical Limestone Creek community. In this feminist analysis are challenges to assumptions about race, gender, class, and the environment. In solidarity with residents of color, I emphasize accountability on the part of those who have benefited from unjust racial legacies in order to prevent further racial segregation and land exploitation of the

Limestone Creek community.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION…………………………………….……………...... 1

CHAPTER 1: HISTORIES AND LEGACIES

I ENVIRONMENTALISM…………………………………….…...….. 4

II ECO-FEMINISM………………………………………….…..…...…. 5

III RACE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE………..………....….… 9

IV CONFRONTING WHITE PRIVILEGE IN ACTIVISM...…….....… 18

CHAPTER 2: LIMESTONE CREEK

I HISTORY…………………………………………...... …...... …... 21

II BIOTECHNOLOGY EXPANSION INTO LIMESTONE CREEK… 23

CONCLUSION………………………………..….…………………....…..… 29

BIBLOGRAPHY……………………………………….…………....……..... 30

INTRODUCTION

My implications within power/privilege dynamics act as a conduit for historical oppressive systems. These systems include but are never limited to capitalism, racism, patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, ableism, homophobia and heteronormativity.

My actions within systems of hierarchical oppression are always ‘aware/unaware,’

‘covert/blatant,’ and ‘unintentional/self-righteous’ in varying combinations therein

(Yamato 1990, 20). While I critique and actively engage in organizing against exploitations including environmental racism in Palm Beach County, I am living out and often perpetuating the privileges of capitalist white supremacist structures because I am white. I am a white heterosexual woman by standards I did not set and privileging I did not earn. None of us are so pure as to escape implication within these systems, and I embrace these complexities. Yes, I am oppressed as a womb-wielding woman within the patriarchy. No, I won’t stop there as many liberal white feminists have. Beautifully, I am not alone in mobilization toward justice.

My implication with the Limestone Creek community is that I share a town with the residents. My involvement began when Palm Beach County environmentalists and I joined the community in solidarity to fight a proposed road extending into the Limestone

Creek community’s historic land dating back over one hundred years, and biotechnology development in Jupiter’s Briger Forest. Though I am not an authority on the Limestone

Creek community, nor do I claim a part in it, I have done due diligence by researching the history, attending Palm Beach County commission meetings, and communicating with residents. The road would link the Hawkeye property slated for biotechnology

1 development to Indiantown Road, providing relatively easy automobile access to the site from the nearby exit from Interstate 95.

Located on both the north and south side of Indiantown Road, the Limestone Creek community is connected ‘socially, culturally, historically, and by blood relation, the two neighborhoods are one and consider themselves so” (Fire Ant 2012). The main neighborhoods that make up the historic community are called Limestone Creek on the north side of Indiantown Road, and Kennedy Estates and Baker’s Park on the south.

Island Way Road is proposed to run adjacent to Kennedy Estates—directly through the neighborhood of Baker’s Park—to the Hawkeye property. The proposed road had three alternatives, and “all four of the alternate road plans presented to the County include increasing traffic exponentially—in [Kennedy Estates and Baker’s Park] which currently has no through-traffic—within 50 feet of a park and playground” (Stop Scripps in Palm

Beach County 2012). Allen Ciklin, the attorney for Hawkeye Unlimited, which plans to construct the biotech facility, “said the road would not run through Limestone Creek but would be ‘built adjacent to Kennedy Estates’” (Fire Ant 2012). Residents at the

September 11, 2012, Palm Beach County Commission hearing “responded loud and clear that the Kennedy Estates neighborhood is part of the 100+ year old Limestone Creek community. It has only become so severed from the northern remnant of this historic community as a result of the racist road-building plans and real estate speculation schemes that now define modern Jupiter” (Stop Scripps in Palm Beach County 2012).

Through the years, “white Jupiter's luxurious homes and gated communities sprang up,” along with a recent multi-million dollar investment in biotechnology expansion (Fire Ant

2012).

2 The Scripps Research Institute is located on the Florida Atlantic University

MacArthur Campus in Jupiter, Florida. The subsequent biotech developments such as the neighboring research facility, the Max Planck Institute, are accredited to Scripps’ arrival in Palm Beach County. As a “consequence of the arrival of Scripps Research Institute in northern Palm Beach County, a line of development dominoes threatens to collapse on

Kennedy Estates” (Fire Ant 2012).

I study at the Honors College at Florida Atlantic University in Jupiter. My dorm room looked out to the tall, spiraling Scripps Research Institute building, and I would fall asleep to the sound of its generator churning from across the student parking lot and an empty field. My university has a vested interest in the expansion of biotechnology facilities onto the Hawkeye property across from Indiantown Road because of its affiliation with Scripps.

For my Environmental Art class during the fall semester in 2012, I produced a short documentary of my walk through the Kennedy Estates and Baker’s Park, which I transposed with audio and video footage from the Palm Beach County Commission meetings (Hiatt 2012, Part I-III). I met community members at Palm Beach County

Commission meetings regarding the proposed road and listened to their testimonies of ongoing resistance. I am taking my initiative with the documentary a step forward with this thesis. Utilizing documentation of local history and research in Women’s Studies,

Eco-Feminism, and Critical Race Studies, I examine one legacy of white privilege in

Jupiter, Florida by charting biotechnology development encroaching upon the historical

Limestone Creek community.

3 CHAPTER ONE: HISTORIES AND LEGACIES

In a few decades, the relationship between the environment, resources and conflict may seem almost as obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and peace.

-Wangari Maathai

I. ENVIRONMENTALISM

The Island Way road expansion through the Limestone Creek community is focally about the families directly impacted and it is simultaneously an environmental concern.

Environmental justice maintains that people and environment are integral. Environmental movements in the U.S., however, have never been a unified cause. In 1913, conservationists such as Gifford Pinchot, who advocated for more careful resource use, were pitted against preservationists such as John Muir, who advocated for protection of

‘wilderness.’ These early environmentalists did not consider who has access to these resources needing conservation or preservation and who is historically excluded.

(Darnovsky 1992)

The failure of many historians of U.S. environmentalism to critically evaluate the preservationist and conservationist legacy of exclusion supports ideologies of an environmentalism that is still tinged with the turn-of-the-century assumptions about race, class, gender, and nature. In addition, most of these histories omit consideration of the many urban reform efforts initiated by African Americans. These efforts were contemporaneous with preservationism and conservationism and targeted problems now clearly considered as environmental issues (Darnovsky 1992, 26). For most of its history, environmentalism largely ignored urban and municipal issues. John Muir, for instance,

4 contrasted dark, smoke-filled cities with the purity of mountain air and the clarity of

Whitewater Rivers, waterfalls, and lakes. Sublime nature was perceived as benign and available almost exclusively to white tourists; cities were portrayed as black and malign, and the home of the unclean and the undesirable (Merchant 2003, 385). The urban spaces largely occupied by communities of color were not part of so-called pristine ‘nature’ and therefore those spaces were not sites for environmental causes. While environmentalists, mostly male and white, were arguing over preservation or conservation for the ‘wild’ and

‘pure’ spaces, the verdict is clear on the men’s similarities. Such males were not engaged in struggling for justice for Native Americans, African Americans, their white women, and other marginalized peoples who all throughout United States history have endured and resisted violence, displacement, systematic unequal access to resources, and environmental hazards. Jupiter, Florida, is a site that displays such inequalities.

II. ECO-FEMINISM

Feminism challenges legacies of inequalities such as "sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression" in a movement to end them (hooks 2000). Not all feminist-identified people adhere to this definition, but it is one that holds a compass toward an end to historical systemic oppressions and exploitation. Eco-feminists are defined by their allegiances to environmentalism and to feminist politics (King 1990). Eco-feminism brings us to the idea of maintaining that humans, non-humans, and ‘nature’, or the Earth, are interconnected in struggle. It seeks more inclusive approaches to addressing environmental challenges. The environmental movement before the 1970s was male dominated and largely excluded women (Gottlieb 2005). Movements such as ‘ecofeminism’ emerged under this condition, reflected on concerns about this exclusion, and

5 pursued a political commitment to socio-economic justice. More recently, with the advent of the Environmental Justice movement, we see accounts of both racial and gendered intersectionalities aligned with an environmentalist cause (ejnet.org). Concern about the impact of road construction in the Limestone Creek community in Jupiter is one example of such a commitment.

At the same time, eco-feminism has a history similar to the environmental movement for championing advocacy for ‘all women’ while maintaining perspectives and engaging in issues pertinent mostly to women similar to themselves: white, western upper/middle-class, heterosexual, Christian women (Plumwood 1992). Moving beyond this relative exclusiveness, feminist environmental justice calls for an integrated discourse that recognizes that white people are racialized and privileged as such. United

States history carries the branding of patriarchal domination and white supremacy. A lesson from this exclusive history of environmentalism and feminism is that we can all be dominators and perpetrators of abuse—even as we attempt to be liberators—as women of color have pointed out in their criticism of white feminists’ notion of ‘sisterhood’ (bell hooks 2000; King 1990, 113). Several movements, including eco-feminism, are shifting their focus toward justice, reshaping goals to suit the dire needs of our times in response to capitalist exploitation of all peoples, non-humans, and ecosystems globally.

In others words, a gendered analysis is clearly important; however, it is incomplete without simultaneously contextualizing historical and systemic discriminations from racial and class-based analysis. Eco-feminist Carolyn Merchant examines part of United States’ symbology of nature that translates to our treatment of the environment, humans, and non-humans. European colonizers settled in North

6 America, spurring a history of viewing non-human nature as “female” (Merchant 1980,

20-22). White European colonizers’ subduing the continent and its peoples was viewed as the nation’s Manifest Destiny to justify the colonization of the ‘New World’. This ideological association has never quite left United States popular culture, i.e., a gendered

‘mother’ earth and the noble Native Americans who harmoniously cultivated in the distant past. So the narrative goes, Native peoples were deemed in this narrative as

‘closer’ to nature: wild, savage, and needing taming by western rule (Merchant 1980).

Eco-feminists introduced to the white, western, male-dominated environmental movement the necessity of recognizing the social implications in environmental issues

(Merchant 1980). Feminists of color introduced to white, western feminists the demand and necessity of intersectional discourse (Smith 2007). Despite white, western environmental feminist activists’ attempts at a single narrative and ‘helping’ women, white feminists have a lot to learn from feminists of color. Also, contrary to dominant

Western ideologies about ‘First World’ superiority, we in the United States have a great deal to learn from eco-feminist activists from other parts of the world. This knowledge is not only in terms of criticism of Western practices, but also in terms of strategies of resistance. Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai (2008) documents how Wangari

Maathai and women of her local community in Kenya mobilized the still-active

Greenbelt Movement in 1977. They grew seeds and planted trees, providing needed food and firewood for their families. Greenbelt members’ work not only went toward a sustainable future for their community, but also benefitted the women who are at the forefront of defending democracy in their area. Wangari Maathai’s causes were specific to the needs of her community. Eco-feminist causes in the United States must also be

7 about the needs of our local communities. For these reasons, this project is identified as an eco-feminist analysis that aligns its interests with those of Jupiter’s local Limestone

Creek community.

Eco-Feminist analyses are not confined to human interactions with the natural world. They connect the interplay between human and non-human oppression and exploitation within environmental movements (Merchant 1980). Eco-feminists often draw parallels between “the treatment of animals in factory farming, and especially in experimentation, and the treatment of women. One of the frightening aspects of this overlap is the use of male violence as a tool of domination” (Seager 1993, 209).

Patriarchal control over white women’s reproduction, for instance, ensures the legacy of whiteness is kept ‘pure.’ Anti-miscegenation laws from the Jim Crow era and a prevailing anxiety among white men for maintaining hegemonic control over white women’s reproduction are contemporary forms of patriarchal oppression for white women. Eco- feminist Joni Seager stresses the link between the reproductive control over women and animals, stating that violence against animals often evokes a sexualized violence: the repeated forced pregnancy of dairy cows, the “rape racks” used by breeders, animals bound and splayed on dissection tables in laboratories (Seager 1993). Both women and animals are the “other” to a distant, male scientific research establishment that directs considerable energy to manipulating the reproductive processes of both animals and women (Seager 1993, 209).

Non-humans affected by technoscience are limited to neither laboratory dissection tables nor the dinner table. They are also in the trees of the Briger Forest across from the

MacArthur Campus in Jupiter and in their burrows on the FAU Boca Raton campus.

8 Integral to pursuing justice for the people and land is the pursuit of justice for non- humans forcibly implicated in the devastation of the planet. Feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway argues that “movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture,” a dichotomy forged by scientific fields such as biology, and justified using broadly trusted yet problematic sources including evolutionary theory over the last two centuries (Haraway 1991). Yet, indeed, animals are tested on in laboratories and genetically modified in studies for human consumption and pharmaceutical development.

Animal research by Scripps Research Institute scientists has already begun in Palm

Beach County and would likely occur at the biotech facility at the Hawkeye property.

While the Limestone Creek resident have their attention focused on opposing the road project, the animal rights aspect of biotech forms an area of potential mutual interest for eco-feminist activists and the local community.

III. RACE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

A valid criticism of many white, western environmentalists and eco-feminists is that they neglect to integrate a racial analysis and instead focus mainly on the exploitation of animals and ‘wild’ spaces. People of color, such as most residents of Limestone Creek, have always resisted environmental racism, yet the white activists who dominated the narrative excluded them from the environmental discourse. In his 1991 account of “The

American Environmental Movement,” D.T. Kuzmiak argues that the environmental movement in the U.S., “largely through ‘grass roots’ groups, seems to have managed to unite large numbers of people behind the cause” (Kuzmiak 1991, 276). More accurately,

9 however, the dismissals of concerns relevant to peoples of color lead to the argument that

“the environmental movement is as white [and male] as it is green” (Kuzmiak 1991, 274).

And yet, such minority communities have been struggling against environmental injustice for many decades. Despite the systemic exclusion of people of color from US environmental discourse, for instance, by the early 1900s “unionized people of color began expressing their concerns about deplorable working conditions” (Taylor 1997, 8).

People of color in cities “experienced on the job discrimination-- they were stuck in the most dangerous, dirty, and hazardous work sites with little or no chance of promotion, and for lower pay than whites” (Taylor 1997, 8).

Whether then or now, environmental racism results from elite bodies of power seizing land and segregating communities of color into areas either already impacted by or zoned for industrial toxics such as commercial or private development, dumping, and overall health risk (Bullard 1994). In the case of Limestone Creek, the community is faced with new road construction that will impact the perceived quality of life in the

Kennedy Estates neighborhood. Environmental justice—as opposed to environmental equity—is the direct response to environmental racism, developed by peoples of color resisting in grassroots movements (Newton 1996). According to Environmental Justice

Net, environmental justice is oriented differently from environmental equity (ejnet.org).

Environmental equity suggests that all people should be equally poisoned or otherwise impacted by corporate decision making on factory outputs, industrialization, etc.

(ejnet.org). Environmental justice demands that no land or families should be so impacted.

Race is more of a factor than class for exposure to environmental injustices (Bullard

1994). In their 2002 article, ‘The Evidence,’ Clifford Rentshcaffen and Eileen Gauna

10 highlight the racial inequalities present in the localities of toxic waste sites (Rentshcaffen

2002). In 1987, a national study conducted by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ) reported a significant relationship between the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities and uncontrolled toxic waste sites and race. The results conclude that although socio-economic status appeared to play an important role in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities, race still proved to be more significant. This remained true after the study controlled for urbanization and regional differences. Incomes and home values were substantially lower when communities with commercial facilities were compared to communities in the surrounding counties without facilities (Rechtschaffen and Gauna 2002, 57).

The disproportionate distribution of environmental exposures among systematically impoverished people and communities of color intersects and translate to

“health impacts, lack of access to quality health care, lack of access to better living conditions, housing markets, mortgage monies, and the discriminatory practice of

‘redlining’” (Mantaay 2002, 586). The outcomes of environmental injustice are risk, exposure, and impacts on the abilities for the affected people to carry out their lives and provide for their children the chance for a livelihood. Nearly every aspect of community member’s lives is impacted by living near toxic waste facilities and living in low-income housing. This is not limited to the food people eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. The environmental hazards include buildings they frequent: homes, schools, and the workplace because of systematic neglect and toxic zonings from local officials, whether intentional or not. This does not apply unilaterally to all people of color;

11 however, the factors indicating risk exposure are more race-based than class-based

(Bullard, 1994).

Environmental injustice is also tied to white privilege, as white communities can typically expect not to be exposed to unwanted land uses in the way communities of color are impacted. Examining white privilege in terms of environmental impact identifies agency in economic, residential, and policy systems of power and privileging in the

United States. White privilege is the ability to not see all that white people have and do, and how this appears to those defined as ‘Other’ (Mahoney 2011, 306). Peggy McIntosh describes white privilege as giving white individuals unearned privileges, “like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” (McIntosh 2005, 121). Through this socialization of exceptionalism, white people generally do not see their own privileges and just how segregated they are.

The United States is profoundly geographically segregated and based on a concept of whiteness as neutral, non-ethnic, or non-racial. Whiteness therefore seems invisible when white people “interact with people who are not socially defined as white and when [they] interact with other white people, when race doesn’t seem to be involved”

(Mahoney 2011, 306). White people must therefore make conscious efforts to confront racism. One important characteristic of whiteness in the U.S. is how white people can have little contact with people of color in the workplace, in schools, and in neighborhoods. As Mahoney states, “Many white people live predominantly white lives without being more than intermittently conscious of ‘choosing’ whiteness-- or may live this way without ever consciously choosing whiteness if instead the person is choosing a

12 ‘good neighborhood’” (Mahoney 2011, 308). The qualifications for ‘bad’ and ‘good’ neighborhoods are highly racialized. During the 20th century, the United States was suburbanized racially by government-sanctioned policies that purposefully produced segregated outcomes. I dwell in those spaces of racial inequality and am privileged by them.

As a white woman, I learned about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but not until recently was I taught to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage (McIntosh 2008, 123). I have broadened my conception of environmentalism by addressing these intersections of environmental destruction and social, particularly gendered, classed, and racial oppressions. When industrial waste and pollution are dumped in people of color’s neighborhoods, white people’s neighborhoods remain relatively clean. This, of course, is not a monolithic narrative. Oppressions are complex, interconnected and institutionally enforced injustices that are systemically sustained.

These segregated and otherwise racially unjust outcomes are tied to a broader theme of racial discrimination and oppression in American history. In the South, Jim

Crow was racist system of laws, regulations and enforced customs meant to prolong and validate racial segregation and white supremacy post-slavery and pre-civil rights movement from 1876-1965 (Alexander 2012). Eradicating and undermining African

American success was a popular strategy of control for white Southerners during Jim

Crow. The achievements of African Americans are numerous in the face of the indignities and injustices perpetrated by white people. The white Southerners sought all avenues to “systematically disenfranchise black men, impose rigid patterns of racial

13 segregation, manipulate the judicial system, and sustain extraordinary levels of violence and brutality" (Litwack 1998, 218), in order to reinforce and maintain the construct of white supremacy. White people acted violently “not because blacks had demonstrated incompetence but because they were rapidly learning the uses of political power. Not because of evidence of black failure but the far more alarming evidence of black success"

(Litwack 1998, xii). These acts of brutality perpetrated by white Southerners maintained an image of African Americans as inferior and needing white guidance-- a form of paternalism that was created by white masters since slavery. Such views were not, however, limited to the South. Nationwide, racial segregation remained intact and unquestioned by the majority of white people. Racial tensions in the region were heightened because “whites acted to assert the permanent political, economic, and social subordination and powerlessness of the black population" (Litwack 1998, 218). W.E.B.

Du Bois reminds us that white men have been hoisted to their positions of greatness by marginalizing peoples whose labors are exploited for white capital (Du Bois 1940).

To this day, white-dominated communities nationwide drive out their African

American populations by force and custom. Many towns, once called 'Sundown Towns', posted signs declaring that any African American people seen out after dark would face violence. Other towns passed ordinances “barring African Americans after dark or prohibiting them from renting or owning property; still others established such policies by informal means, harassing and even killing those who violated the rule” (Loewen

2005, 4). The suburban Sundown Towns are an artificial utopia wherein middle-class white people deny that they live in a multicultural world. Jupiter was a Sundown Town

14 during the Jim Crow era and still maintains its historically racially segregated residential patterns (Stout 2009, 1).

A nation forged through inequality will take much effort to render just, especially considering the backlash from those who are unwilling to relinquish their power in exchange for justice and equality. Most white Southerners fought hard to maintain the racial caste system after Jim Crow by attempting to halt or delay integration of public schools by any means necessary (Sokol 2007). More than half a century after the supreme court "decreed in Brown v. Board of Education that whites cannot keep blacks out of white schools, and more than forty years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal to keep them out of restaurants, hundreds of towns and suburbs still keep African

Americans out of entire municipalities” (Loewen 2005, 21). While no longer a sundown town in this sense, Jupiter is one of the many communities throughout the US that maintains de facto residential segregation. The majority of the town’s African American residents live in either the Limestone Creek or Kennedy Estates neighborhoods.

Racial inequalities remain across the United States and white people maintain “a deep resentment toward blacks—if no longer a condescension or denial of humanity” that has lasted well beyond Jim Crow and the civil rights period, and is fueled by fear of losing the power that comes with the privileges of whiteness (Sokol 2007, 111).

The legacy of white supremacy in the United States thrives today, and has evolved from slavery to sharecropping schemes and convict labor during the years of Jim

Crow to now as what Michelle Alexander (2012) refers to as "The New Jim Crow"— mass incarceration of majority African Americans, Latinos, and undocumented populations in the for-profit prison industrial complex complemented by the drug war.

15 The civil rights period, it is then arguable, has not yet ended until the systematic privileging of whiteness ends. Privileging whiteness systematically perpetuates current forms of institutional racism, thus shaping livelihoods based on racialized job discrimination and a “not in my back yard” (NIMBY) mentality. The voting power behind NIMBY places environmental burdens and pollution onto people of color who assuredly do not want the pollution in their front yards.

Segregation and environmental racism is enforced through processes such as zoning. Zoning is a means of social control by the white elite using “race-neutral” language that has distinctly racial implications (Cashin 2004, 106-109). Zoning creates a racial divide that systematically privileges white people who occupy the less polluted spaces. African Americans, in contrast to white suburbanization, were mostly exposed to public housing in the city, often called urban ‘ghettos.’ Roads have also played a significant role in changing the character of communities of color. The construction of the interstate highway system in the US has in some cases gone through the centers of such communities. This was the case in the historically black Overtown community in

Miami, Florida, which was divided by I-95 and the Dolphin Expressway in the 1960s.

These and other highways have also divided cities “by race, often creating a firewall separating ‘good’ white neighborhoods from ‘bad’ black ones” (Cashin 2004, 113).

Though most white people did not do anything ‘personal’ in this process of racial discrimination, they still benefit from racist institutions that displace and enforce poverty in many neighborhoods of color.

If the two-lane road is expanded through Kennedy Estates, the impact will take the form of increased traffic through the community, including near a playground park. Also,

16 the pollution of waterways “poses direct threats to all North County residents in the

Loxahatchee River watershed and those who drink from Jupiter’s well-fields which surround” the Hawkeye site (Stop Scripps in Palm Beach County, 2012). The waterway impacts are also ecological, with increased runoff from roadways and potentially from biotech waste affecting flora and fauna around the can and river system. The plan straddles one of the cleanest and most ecologically important canals in the County: the C-

18” (Stop Scripps in Palm Beach County 2012). This canal “maintains the historic connection between the Loxahatchee Slough and the Loxahatchee River. Further polluting the C-18 will impact one of the wildest and most well-utilized natural recreation resources in the Treasure Coast region” (Stop Scripps in Palm Beach County 2012). As demonstrated, the road expansion is not an isolated development and will potentially impact far beyond the historic land of Kennedy Estates.

The problem of polluted African American communities is not a new phenomenon.

Historically, toxic dumping and the location of locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) have followed the “path of least [powerful],” meaning that disproportionately, communities of color and impoverished white communities are burdened with high exposure to environmental hazards (Bullard 1994, 3). African American activists have framed their concerns as “civil rights issues,” and these issues certainly are simultaneously environmental and civil rights issues in so far that “environmental amenities and freedom from environmental harms are critical to the good life and should be available to all”

(Smith 2007, 3). In this sense, the environmental movement is forced to reorient itself from bio-centricity to environmental justice.

17 IV CONFRONTING WHITE PRIVILEGE IN ACTIVISM

As a white person, I embrace critiques of white supremacy and actively engage against it because “the invisible cannot be combated, and as a result privilege is allowed to perpetuate, regenerate, and re-create itself. Privilege is systemic, not an occasional occurrence. Privilege is invisible only until looked for, but silence in the face of privilege sustains its invisibility” (Rothenberg 2011, 107). In seeking to dismantle white supremacy in environmental movements and at large, white activists are required to acknowledge and make meditated advances to dismantle white privilege. In my case, as an FAU student, my privileges also include the resources that stand to be gained for FAU if Scripps is successful at developing further in Palm Beach County.

As a substitute for denial, antiracists ask white activists to think about privilege, to be attuned to hierarchies and exclusion that happen in organizations, and to work to overcome them because pretending equality is already here is a recipe for maintaining inequality (Podur 2011, 138). Structurally redressing inequality makes groups, and movements, stronger. For racially just environmental movements, luckily we can all learn not only from the direction of activists and community members of color, but also from the mistakes made from white activists. In Forward Motion, a magazine about socialist ideas and action, writers John Tan and Eric Odell highlight several ‘hard lessons’ that white student environmental activists with Student Environmental Action Coalition

(SEAC) learned after their organization was nearly ‘capsized’ from ‘issues of nationality’

(Forward Motion Magazine 1996). Their use of the term ‘people of color’ suggests that they more likely were experiencing a racial divide based on unchecked white privilege.

The white environmental activist students’ acknowledgements of white privilege are

18 outlined in this list I synthesized of ‘hard lessons’ they learned about organizing with activists and communities of color. These are lessons that may be extended to eco- feminist, environmental justice activist relations with community members in the case of

Limestone Creek.

1. Justice, not ‘help’ or self-service.

◦ When white activists take up an issue that is

impacting a community of color, you should do so

because it is the right thing to do, not because it’s a

way to “diversify” or gain credentials with people

of color.

2. Listen without an agenda.

◦ White people must move cautiously in

developing relationships with oppressed

communities, neither barging in with your own

agenda nor assuming you have the right to proclaim

who is the vanguard of that community.

3. Reach out and build alliances, not quotas.

◦ Predominantly white groups should make a

dedicated effort to broaden their culture and reach

out to underrepresented groups. But when people of

color decide to work in their own formations, accept

it and give support. Build principled alliances.

19 4. Support People of Color supporting each other,

and do not homogenize individuals.

◦ Within a predominantly white organization,

people of color will almost invariably need to get

together. You can and should make demands on the

larger group for resources, political representation,

and so forth. But make sure that, as an organized

entity, you yourselves represent the breadth of

perspectives of people of color within the

organization, and not just those of one subgroup or

faction.

Our most serious environmental problems start at home where forms of environmental and social oppressions combine and inform one another. We must actively confront historical injustices in their present manifestations, and we must hold each other and ourselves accountable as active agents in order to smash these historical systems of oppression for an emancipated and just world.

20 CHAPTER 2: LIMESTONE CREEK COMMUNITY

It is only possible for the white race to prove its own incontestable superiority by appointing both judge and jury and summoning its own witnesses.

-W.E.B. Du Bois

I. HISTORY

The Florida Black Historical Research Project describes Limestone Creek as a historical African American and Black Seminole community in north Palm Beach County,

Florida (www.fbhrpinc.org). According to the Florida Black Historical Research Project,

Florida was Spanish territory and a ‘Freedom Land’ for Africans escaping enslavement and Native peoples escaping European colonialism during the time when Southern colonies and later Southern states were dominated by plantation slavery

(www.fbhrpinc.org). The Seminoles combined both Native and Africans members who engaged in the Seminole Wars against the US in the 19th century. The Florida Black

Historical Research Project describes the Seminole Wars as the costliest war in both money and bloodshed that the U.S. engaged in until the Vietnam War. In 1838, the

Loxahatchee River Battlefield in northern Palm Beach County was a battle site in the

Second Seminole War (www.fbhrpinc.org). African American and Native Seminoles were outnumbered and outgunned compared to the 1,500 US Army soldiers. The African

American and Native Seminoles fought bravely for their freedom until the U.S. Army dishonorably captured them under a flag of truce (www.fbhrpinc.org). African American peoples were “captured and either delivered to ‘slave catchers’ from states to the north of

Florida, or deported on the deadly Trail of Tears to reservations west of the Mississippi

21 River” to Tampa, shipped to east Texas, and marched to Oklahoma (South Florida Times

2012).

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the descendants of freed slaves and Seminole peoples who survived the Seminole Wars settled in the Jupiter-Tequesta area where they lived and intermarried (www.fbhrpinc.org). They founded the Limestone Creek

Community in what is now West Jupiter. The descendants of the community founders worked in the area’s thriving industries including the local orange groves, ferneries, dairies, sawmills and farms and on developmental projects like the historical Jupiter-Juno railway, the Celestial Railroad (Stout 2009). Real-estate speculators and developers who worked with politicians from the surrounding affluent town of Jupiter later fragmented this large, historical African American community over time (Fire Ant 2012).

The historic Limestone Creek community once stretched from the area around the present day Florida Turnpike and I-95 corridor to the area that was later converted into the C-18 canal in the west, to Center St. on the east end, and the boundary stretched north almost to the Martin County line and south to present day Jupiter Park Drive (Stop

Scripps In Palm Beach County 2012). Beginning in the late 1950’s and then again in

1960’s, Florida lawmakers and developers displaced residents when they decided to route both the Turnpike and I-95 through the western parts of the community

(www.fbhrpinc.org). During the 1960’s, the southern portion of Limestone Creek was further divided and the subdivisions were renamed Kennedy Estates and Bakers Park.

During the late 1970’s and early 80’s came the construction of Jupiter Park of Commerce, an industrial commercial park southwest of the Limestone Creek community (Stop

Scripps In Palm Beach County 2012). In the 1980’s came an influx of development, and

22 little to none of it benefitted the historical community. In fact, it caused more harm than good. The Town of Jupiter widened Indiantown Road to accommodate the new growth, severing the Limestone Creek Community in half. The locally owned businesses surrounding the construction were bought out or forced to close down. The following few decades have seen further encroachment from the south and the east with luxury homes and commercial centers (Stout 2009).

After many years of false promises of affordable housing, the construction of

Habitat Village in Kennedy Estates finally commenced sometime in 2007-08 and is still ongoing (Stout 2009). Recent victories for the Limestone Creek community during the

1990’s include “winning a garbage pick-up service, a park for the children of the community, and paved roads for the South end of the community. The community is still fighting for paved roads, sidewalks for the children to walk to the local elementary school, and the removal of dangerous drainage ditches throughout the community” (Stout 2009,

16).

II. BIOTECHNOLOGY EXPANSION INTO LIMESTONE CREEK

The Limestone Creek community’s resistance to the two-lane road expansion of

Island Way reflects preceding themes of environmental justice. The plan is to construct a road through the middle of part of the greater Limestone Creek community called the

Baker’s Park subdivision. The road would skirt the boundaries of the Kennedy Estates neighborhood-- also part of the Limestone Creek community-- and lead to a proposed industrial biotech park on a property called Hawkeye.

Community members who spoke at the September 11, 2012, Palm Beach County

Commission meeting were not in opposition to one another, however, some were more

23 willing to compromise than others. Verline Smith—a lifelong resident and organizer for the Limestone Creek community—is not convinced that any compromise will be enough to compensate for the road development. She reminded everyone at the Palm Beach

County Commission meeting that the Limestone Creek community has even had to fight for mail pick-up (Hiatt 2012, Part II and Part III).

Concerns that some resident community members voiced during the county commission meetings included increased risk of safety to pedestrians/children that walk and bike to school/work, increased pollution, noise pollution, and traffic of 5,000 vehicles per day, unidentified bio-hazardous waste will be transported on this road because an accidental transportation spill is not a question of ‘if’ it will happen, but ‘when’ it will happen (Hiatt 2012, Part II and Part III).

The short documentary I filmed at the September County Commission meeting captured the content of the fourth out of five such meetings. Each meeting included the presence of numerous Limestone Creek community residents. People concerned with what is called the ‘road realignment’ included Limestone Creek community residents, allied county members, the president of Palm Beach County’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and environmentalists from Palm Beach

County Environmental Coalition (Hiatt 2012, Part II and Part III). Several speakers— including Limestone Creek community resident and organizer Falinda Holland—cited the road as “environmental racism” (Hiatt 2012, Part II and Part III).

At the September 11, 2012 meeting, “the commissioners declined to sign off on the Hawkeye road, directing the Kennedy Estates residents and developers

Shapiro/Pertnoy to sit down and bargain further, with Town of Jupiter reps and County

24 Administrator Bob Weisman to participate” (Fire Ant 2012). Residents had already complied with measures to reach compromise with developers Shapiro/Pertnoy before this fourth meeting (Fire Ant 2012). The compromise reached was that if the road realignment must go through Kennedy Estates, according to the Broward New Times,

“then they ask for a new park in return and a modest scholarship fund for local children— in the hope that they might someday participate in the bioscience bounty” (Fire Ant 2012).

The commission announced that the fifth and final vote on the roadway would be rescheduled for a month later on October 16, 2012, after the residents and developers sat down for one more round of compromise.

On October 16, 2012, I returned to West Palm Beach to witness and record the

PBC commission vote. Though a few Limestone Creek residents were willing to compromise, most were “unmoved” when “the developers, the county and the Town of

Jupiter…offered a package of landscaping, neighborhood improvements, and $200,000 for 4 years of job training and tutoring of neighborhood residents and their kids” (Fire

Ant 2012). Many residents preferred instead for the developers to find another route for the road. After all had a chance to speak, “Commissioners Shelley Vana, Burt Aaronson and Priscilla Taylor voted no. Commissioner Paulette Burdick was absent, leaving the seven-member body tied” (Fire Ant 2012).

This standstill vote meant neither victory nor defeat. “County Attorney Denise

Nieman said the split vote doesn’t result in either a formal approval or rejection.

Commission rules could allow the item to come up in the future in front of the full board but do not require that it be taken up again” (Sorentrue 2012). A December 28, 2012 article in the Palm Beach Post documents Jupiter Town Manager Andy Lukasik

25 explaining that “although the final alignment wasn't established by the commission, the seven lots still need to be purchased to establish a right of way and create future recreational facilities and workforce housing” (Miller 2012). Further organizing against the plan is in commencement.

Alongside the impact to the Limestone Creek Community, “according to County reports, all four road plans also include a loss of habitat for the endangered gopher tortoise, whose burrows provide homes for other animals including indigo snakes, gopher frogs, foxes, rabbits, quail and burrowing owls. In Florida gopher tortoises are on the

Endangered Species list categorized as a Threatened Species. Their primary reason for being endangered is a loss of habitat” (Stop Scripps in Palm Beach County 2012).

Beyond the Kennedy Estates site, industrial development in the sensitive Jupiter lands like the Briger Forest across from Scripps along Donald Ross Road increases this loss of habitat. The Briger Forest is a 683 total acres “mixed public and privately owned site currently used for horse-riding and recreation. In it’s current state it is a uncommonly large and valuable piece of habitat in the eastern corridor of sprawling south Florida”

(Stop Scripps in Palm Beach County 2012). While developers continue to eye the historical Limestone Creek land, residents and environmental allies continue to advocate for the road to be built elsewhere. Among the benefits of keeping the Briger Forest entact, environmentalists cite:

The Palm Beach County’s Department of

Environmental Resource Management (ERM) had

“previously recognized Briger as a property worthy

of protection and listed it as a priority for

26 acquisition into the County’s Natural Areas

program. The County is now partial owner of 70

acres on the property, directly across from the FAU

Jupiter Honors College campus. A small portion of

this area could be used as a public pedestrian

entrance to the forest as an educational area for

environmental study of the endangered species

habitat, allowing the partnership with FAU and the

County to continue where the Scripps plan is left off.

The private land, which may likely be beyond the

County’s budget to purchase, could be offered

Conservation Easements to ensure its protection in

perpetuity. This would also allow the horse stalls on

the south end to continue using the existing trails

and providing a source of revenue for the

landowners. (Stop Scripps in Palm Beach County

2012)

The environmental impact that Scripps threatens with its ongoing biotechnology sprawl continues to be challenged. Recent studies by the U.S. Forest Service have indicated that “pine forests, like the Briger Forest Tract, are particularly adept at sequestering carbon—significantly more so, for instance, than hardwood forests (trapping up to 3 times as much carbon)” (Waters 2009). Industrial development destroying a

“healthy functioning native forest ecosystem results in direct and immediate warming and

27 drying of the entire area” (Waters 2009). The Briger Forest is located “very near

Florida’s Atlantic coast. Coastal forests and swamps are critical to tempering the intensity of the winds and storm surges of hurricanes. The impacts of Hurricanes Andrew, Katrina,

& Rita (as well as that of the Indian Ocean tsunami of late 2004) were noticeably lessened in regions where coastal mangrove forests, swamps, marshlands, and rain forests were left intact” (Waters 2009). Areas of land around the Briger Forest are already overdeveloped. Land-falling hurricanes—especially stronger ones—would do untold damage to Jupiter communities.

28 CONCLUSION

The Limestone Creek community continues to seek justice by having no further damage dealt to their historic land. Justice, however, is not only a preventative measure.

Justice requires redistribution of power and resources. Identifying or simply acknowledging racial oppression is only liberal lip service unless powerful actors are held accountable, because under-privilege is the direct result of over-privilege. The “real problem” is the “social and political construction of race in a way that advantages whites over people of color in economic markets, political institutions, and social policies”

(Williams 2008, 91). People of color resisted white supremacy to “overcome the racial oppression in the workplace in order to relieve occupational discrimination and segregation,” and “workers of color were left to their own devices or social networks to resolve their problems” because white people who feign ‘color blindness’ uphold white supremacy in unwritten laws and social narratives (Taylor 1997, 8). Therefore, the ‘real’ solution in the United States is to redistribute the power historically held by white people.

White people must be accountable to the privileges we cash in on from the violent historical oppression of people of color who have resisted racial discrimination all along.

Justice is a concerted balancing of power in dedicated support of an equal world for all.

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates. -Vandana Shiva

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