Sugar industry housing ploy?
To the editor:
Many of you may not know of how the sugar industry plans to build housing all along the south of Lake Okeechobee. Housing which will no doubt provide shelter for workers of the sugar industry. Most would say what’s the big deal?
The big deal is the fact that building homes along this area will guarantee that water will never be sent south naturally into the Everglades as Mother Nature intended, never re-creating the river of grass to restore the Everglades, and never stop the flow from discharges to the Caloosahatchee River, and the St. Lucie River on the east coast.?
It is critical to send the water south to save our communities from pollution with off the chart nutrient levels, extremely high salinity levels mixed with fresh water that travels right into our Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, while killing our rivers, estuaries, canals and streams in the process. Then there is the fatality rates of all wildlife, sea creatures and all sea life that depend on healthy water quality.
It is no coincidence the record-breaking manatee fatalities were right here in Lee County last year during the nightmare discharges. Plan 6 sat on the governor’s desk since Charlie Crist left office. Our present governor, Rick Scott, has let it sit there on his desk for his entire term, basically ignoring it.
Housing being built is a direct attempt to never allow Plan 6 as an option, for a real-time solution to our real time water quality issues. Building a wall of homes that equates to basic shelter for the field workers in the sugar industry is a ploy to stop the flow going south, forever. Just as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had done to raise awareness about slave labor and inadequate housing provided for its workers in a tomato fields, clean water activists should also be looking into this realm of possibility within wrong doings by the sugar industry, while the field workers who will no doubt be placed in these “homes” planned to be built south of the lake.
The sugar industry is fully responsible for the destruction of our water quality. Now it seems as if the sugar industry is going to be fully responsible for providing inadequate housing for field workers to simply build the wall against Mother Nature and its natural flow way into the Everglades.
John G Heim
Clean Water Activist
Fort Myers Beach
—— There will be a “Stop Sugar Hill/Buy the Land” press conference at the FDEP South District Office, 2295 Victoria Avenue, Fort Myers on Wednesday, Oct. 1, at 5 p.m. Read a commentary on the subject in this issue on page 8.