![]() I migrated here in 1982 with my mom, dad, sister, and brothers WALKES: The Glades welcome my family from the island of Barbados. TOLAN: Soon after, they called on Colin Walkes, then the mayor of Pahokee. Phillips says, this is an environmental justice issue. TOLAN: Then their colleague Robert Mitchell formed the Muck City chapter of Black Lives Matter. PHILLIPS: We came on board and refused to be quiet about it. TOLAN: So Kina Phillips, working with the former mayor of South Bay, called in the Sierra Club. But when all of these things start happening at one time, you're like, wait, hold on, there's a problem here. Or we having to call the ambulance for the kid, to send them to the emergency room because of the shortness of breath and respiratory problems. PHILLIPS: Witnessing the increase of people coming in and having to be put on an asthma machine. TOLAN: She worked in a hospital and had already started noticing something. And it got to the point where we had to put him on a machine. PHILLIPS: When my grandbaby was born, we noticed that when we take him outside and because it was the burning season, he struggled to breathe. TOLAN: But then Kina Phillips had a grandson. Why is this happening? Like, you just don't think about it. PHILLIPS: You really didn't think like, wow, all these people got asthma like this. TOLAN: This is community activist Kina Phillips of South Bay. This is what we've been seeing all our life. PHILLIPS: You know, we felt like, okay, this is just normal. But all that comes with a message: Don't mess with the burns. They helped pay for a couple of local parks and a community center. Sugar sponsor little leagues, scholarship programs. But the three towns that make up Muck City are company towns. TOLAN: It would be crazy just about anywhere else. It's like, wow, man, this is this is crazy. You know the smoke can block the sun out. VOICE 10: It's like it's almost apocalyptic at times, especially when fields are being burnt simultaneously. VOICE 9: You would think, like, where is this coming from? Why is it like this? You know, my drink has ash in it, and I have to do something about this. VOICE 8: I'm sitting out trying to enjoy a drink. You know, he wants to run and climb the trees. VOICE 7: As much as I can try to keep him indoors and say, son, we can't go outside. VOICE 6: Stay inside, keep your windows down or whatever. ![]() I have natural hair, and when it gets in there, it's really hard to get out. VOICE 5: It messed up our cars and messed up our houses. VOICE 4: Out of nowhere, you know, you're just sitting there, boom! Ash is on you, you look at your clothes, hey, I got ash on my clothes. VOICE 3: It's like black ash all over the place. Ash is just raining down upon everything in the community. VOICE 2: The ash, unaffectionately known as the black snow. The people of Muck City told me about it. TOLAN: From the fire comes smoke from the smoke: ash. TOLAN: To understand that, I get back on the ground, ride down a washboard cane road, and stop my rental car in front of the flames. What it does is it removes what they would call the trash material until only the sugarcane stalk is left. And it will continue burning until that entire field has been burned. So, on the left side of the plane here, we're seeing a massive sugarcane burn that starts along that crop line there. TOLAN: Allie Hartman is with Friends of the Everglades - part of a coalition of environmentalists and local Glades residents fighting the pre-harvest burns. We can see Muck City - the nickname for the largely black towns of Belle Glade, Pahokee, and South Bay. Sugar, and to Florida Crystals, part of the Fanjul sugar empire. Most of that sea of monoculture belongs to U.S. TOLAN: At a thousand feet, we look down on the source of that wealth: half a million acres of sugarcane. Just along the shore, the mansions of the sugar barons of Palm Beach. ![]() TOLAN: The Atlantic Ocean sparkles in the east. HARTMAN: So, what we're passing is called the Everglades Agricultural Area. Decades ago, hundreds of square miles were dug, drained, and scraped, then the rich muck planted in sugarcane. TOLAN: The single engine Cessna flies low, its shadow flitting along the edge of the Everglades. VOICE 1: Maintain a traffic white highway departing 110. But burning still persists in Palm Beach County Florida, where, with support from the Pulitzer Center, reporter Sandy Tolan found this cheap old-fashioned method is imposing disproportionately high health costs on nearby communities of color. Many modern sugar growers use mechanical harvesters to strip away those tops and leaves rather than pollute the air with ash and particulates from burning. Sugar cane is a perennial grass that can be harvested as many as five times before being replanted, and for centuries growers would set fields on fire to burn off the tops and leaves before harvesting the sweet canes stalks. BASCOMB: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Bobby Bascomb.
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