"Black communities are disproportionately impacted by Big Sugar's agricultural practices".
"Black-gray smoke billowed into the sky and blocked the sun, forming a thick plume behind Florida’s Pahokee Middle-Senior High School. As student Madison Jones watched flames rise from a nearby sugarcane field, it struck her how normal it seemed. Seeing cane fires flare up on a school day was as common as watching thunderheads gather on the same horizon. Sometimes the smoke clouds brought what her dad called “black rain.”
In spring 2023, while mulling her senior art project, Jones shot a picture of the blaze to capture its contradictions: A fixture of local farming. An aggravator of her and her mom’s respiratory disease. A normality most Americans probably wouldn’t tolerate—or be expected to.
“I thought it was really interesting that seeing something like that is very common for people who live in Pahokee, and very common to see from the high school,” Jones said. “Nobody points it out when it happens. But I realized if that were to happen to somebody from a more affluent community, it would be really shocking.”
Her small town borders the southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee, where fresh water once flowed to the Everglades. In the 19th century, speculators drained the grassy waters for the rich soils below. Today, the nation’s largest sugarcane crop checkerboards the jet-black muck, eternally flat but for the palm trees, sugar refineries—and smoke plumes."
Cynthia Barnett reports for Sierra magazine with photos by Rose Marie Cromwell June 13, 2024.
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