In 1870, African Americans won the right to vote, followed by women 50 years later. In 1971, the voting age went down from 21 to 18, a critical victory for young soldiers who fought and died in wars without any voice in the political establishment — not that they were smart enough to vote responsibly, according to a handful of politicians and conservative pundits.

“[Voting liberal is] what kids do. They don’t have life experience,” one legislator said about young voters. “They just vote with their feelings.” The legislator was New Hampshire Speaker William O’Brien (R), explaining the need for tighter voting restrictions to an assembly of Tea Party members in January.

In recent months, voter ID laws have provoked heated debates throughout the country. Republican lawmakers claim voter fraud is a pressing issue and that voter ID laws present a solution. Opponents tend to be women, minorities, college students and the poor — who are far more likely to be inconvenienced by voter ID laws and, coincidentally, more likely to vote Democrat.

In 2008, only Indiana and Georgia had voter ID requirements. At the start of 2011, both had adopted strict voter ID laws, followed more recently by Kansas, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. None of the most recent laws are in effect yet, but they will be by January 2012, before national elections.

There are currently three levels of voter ID law restrictions: non-photo, photo requested, and photo required. Florida’s laws fall under the middle category. A “current and valid” photo ID must be provided at the polls. For those without valid driver’s licenses (namely the elderly, the poor and students without cars), the restrictions are a hindrance. Luckily, alternative forms of ID are accepted, including a student ID with a photo and a signature. This works out fine for UF students, but the latest Santa Fe ID does not include the latter.

Is preventing voter fraud worth the inconvenience and potential deterrence to legitimate voters? The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law pointed out in 2006 that voter fraud is a “foolish way to attempt to win an election.” In exchange for just one extra vote, offenders risk thousands of dollars in fines and up to five years in prison. As a result, “fraud by individual voters is both irrational and extremely rare.”

In the 2008 election, for example, 2.9 million votes were cast in Wisconsin. Out of those votes, 18 were reported as cases of ID fraud (less than one thousandth of 1 percent). Other closely scrutinized elections in 2004 revealed similar ratios: 0.0009 percent in Washington State and 0.00004 percent in Ohio.

Comparatively, Campus Progress estimates that 15 percent of low-income voters, 18 percent of the youth (read: students), and 24 percent of black voters would lack the qualifications to vote in 2012 based on the requirements of current voter ID laws. Additionally, a majority of women change their names after marriage and may face further complications with paperwork when discrepancies arise from previously issued IDs.

Richard Scher, a professor of political science at UF and author of The Politics of Disenfranchisement, contends voter fraud is a partisan fabrication. He points out that there’s a difference between voter fraud and voting fraud. The former means to accidentally vote twice, while the latter classifies any ballot that must be thrown out for being marked incorrectly in some way. This means even the trivial number of cases marked in studies as “voter fraud” may be incorrectly classified.

“In the old days during the Emancipation up until 1865, the Democrats were trying to keep blacks from voting,” he said. “Everybody does it. Now it’s just Republicans’ turn.” As far as the new laws in Florida, Scher said he thinks Florida has gone as far as it can with a “back-door approach” because “no matter what your politics, people just aren’t going to buy it.”

Voter ID laws are not the only bureaucratic obstacle threatening inclusive participation in Florida’s elections. Erin Murphy, president of the College Democrats at UF, contends that third-party registration is the most important change in the state’s voting laws. Now, all third-party organizations, from College Democrats to the NAACP, have to register with the Florida Division of Elections to get approved for registering citizens. But that’s not all. Every registration has to be meticulously documented, the forms numbered, and any mistake results in a $50 fine per form.

Murphy had some experience with the issue as a legislative intern for Senator Nan Rich of Florida last spring. She helped file 18 amendments against House Bill 1355, which “requires that third-party voter registration organizations register with Division of Elections and provide division with certain information.” Though none of them passed, she said, “it did make a statement and at least delayed the process of passing.”

Third-party organizations have been a great convenience to those who aren’t able to get to specially designated locations for registration, especially college students who don’t have transportation or permanent addresses in Gainesville. Murphy said that of all those who registered with the help of College Democrats for the 2008 election, 90 percent came out to the polls.

She said College Democrats is currently registering people of any party at Turlington on Mondays and Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

So, what’s Murphy’s advice in these bleak times for would-be voters? “Register,” she said. “Just get it done.”

Florida’s Laws
The following types of ID are accepted at the polls: Florida driver’s license, Florida ID card issued by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, United States passport, debit or credit card, military ID, student ID, retirement center ID, neighborhood association ID, public assistance ID

(Note: If your picture ID does not contain your signature, you’ll need additional identification with a signature.)

Top: Voter ID laws, state-by-state. Info graphic by Kelley Antoniazzi. Information courtesy of the Florida Divisions of Elections and the National Conference of State Legislatures. For complete state-by-state requirements, see NCSL’s website.

For the latest coverage of voter ID laws, see Campus Progress’ website.

Fight Back Florida is a network of progressive students, labor activists, and workers throughout Florida that fight for accessible education and the rights of working families.

In the spring of 2011, the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, unleashed his assault against Floridians with a host of laws ranging from tuition increases for college students to pay decreases for teachers. An affordable college education would be a thing of the past: Florida students would be saddled with increasingly high student loans as they pay 15 percent more per year in Scott’s tuition increases, while at the same time slashing Bright Futures scholarships. Governor Scott went after all state employees next, proposing that they pay 3 percent of their current salary into the Florida Retirement System as a forced “contribution,” while also weakening their labor unions through bills designed to cripple their ability to function and negotiate with employers.

The people of Wisconsin were facing similar legislation affecting teachers, students and the rights of union members. In Madison, Wisconsin, over 100,000 protesters occupied the capital building opposing laws very similar to the ones brought to Florida.

It was the ongoing sit-ins and protests in Wisconsin that really jolted several organizers in Florida to “bring Wisconsin to Florida.” The very night that much of the de-unionizing and budget cut legislation was passed in Wisconsin, five student and labor organizers from Tampa, Tallahassee and Gainesville decided to build a network to connect people from all over Florida willing to fight back against the right-wing assault. Fight Back Florida was born that night, in early March.

In order to be an effective resistance, we needed to unite all the labor and student groups around the state. Within a week, groups such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Florida AFL-CIO, and central labor councils all over Florida signed on to the call for a statewide demonstration. Floridians statewide planned and networked for the big event. There was an excitement in the air that had not been felt in some time. It seemed as though people felt they were finally a part of something that would give the people of Florida their state back from those who refrain from taxing the rich while asking the average citizen to sacrifice.

Finally, on March 25, Floridians from all walks of life rallied in over 10 cities around the state of Florida to say no to union busting, no to anti-worker bills, and no to attacks on affordable education. They demanded that tuition stay low so that education could be accessible for all and that unions continue to be allowed to fight and negotiate for their members.

One of the largest rallies in the state was held here in Gainesville. Hundreds took to the streets and marched to city hall, proclaiming Gainesville a “Labor Sanctuary.”

These rallies, alongside an unprecedented unity among all the labor unions of Florida, led to the defeat of most of the proposed legislation. From this success, we realized the need to maintain the network we created not only to fight back against future bills, but also to create an organization that could create a sense of activism both within the student and labor movements.

We set up permanent groups in many cities around Florida to continue to meet and plan. This came to a head during the state wide Fight Back Florida Conference in Orlando on Nov. 5. Over 50 student and labor activists from over seven cities came together to develop a plan for the upcoming year. The strategy was to expose the budget cuts, tuition hikes, and anti-worker legislation for what they really were – attacks on the working majority of Floridians by powerful right-wing politicians.

This Jan. 21, Fight Back Florida is gearing up to lead the struggle against the government’s plans to place the burden of the state economic crisis onto the backs of the people with a multi-city, coordinated rally. Then, uniting activists from all over the state, Fight Back Florida will continue to give average Floridians a voice against Rick Scott and the corporate interests he represents by mobilizing to Tallahassee for a day of action on Feb. 25. Fight Back Florida plans to host another statewide conference at the end of May to plan for the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa on Dec. 6.

Fight Back Florida was created less then a year ago to confront anti-worker and anti-student legislation. We have already helped gain meaningful wins, but the fight back continues.

For more information, check out Fight Back Florida’s website.

The Monthly Manifesto is a podium for local organizations to tell Gainesville what they’re about. Submissions and inquiries should be sent to editors@thefineprintuf.org with the subject “Monthly Manifesto.”

In the early morning hours of Nov. 29, a female student was raped somewhere between midtown and Fraternity Row. The 20-year-old victim said she accepted a ride from a man she did not know after leaving 101 Cantina and the man then sexually battered her in his car. She was able to escape from the car afterward and was picked up by a female driver passing by who saw her running from her attacker. The driver called the police and took the victim to the hospital.

In both the UF news release of the attack and an e-mail alert sent to the entire university listserv, the University Police Department took the opportunity to remind people of some “basic safety considerations.” The list included: “Avoid walking alone” and “Stay in well-lighted areas away from alleys, bushes, and entryways.”

These “safety considerations” are rape myths. According to a 2005 National Crime Victimization Study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, 73 percent of all sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim, not strange masked men lurking in the shadows.

“Most of the cases we see are not the stranger jumping out of the bushes,” said Chris Loschiavo, Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution at UF.

Loschiavo said almost all sexual assault cases at UF involve “two students who have had a lot to drink and the issue is, was one person able to consent to sexual activity.”

In addition to perpetuating false advice and rape myths, every link on UPD’s website that is supposed to lead to UF policies and procedures concerning sexual assault as well as links to rape awareness resources are broken. One link directs to UF’s own rape awareness group, CARE, which is not only a broken link, but is a group that no longer exists on campus.

Despite the public image that UPD presents today, this was not always the case. At one time, UF was a national leader in rape awareness and prevention tactics. Now, in light of the fact that local and national rape statistics have not improved in decades, UF is beginning to make an effort to once again learn and implement effective ways of preventing rape.

STRIVE, UF’s current rape awareness program, reports on its website that one in four female college students will be victims of sexual assault — defined as any unwanted sexual contact. The U.S. Department of Justice confirms this statistic, and states that once women graduate college, the ratio widens to one in six.

STRIVE has also been able to bring that one in four statistic closer to home.

“When we give an anonymous poll in a classroom of 500 and ask ‘Have you experienced a sexual assault?’ it matches up. We’ve asked every time and it’s always in the 20 percent to 25 percent range,” said Ron Del Moro, peer educator in the STRIVE program.

STRIVE, which stands for Sexual Trauma/Interpersonal Violence Education, aims to educate the university community by holding “open, non-judgmental forums where we explore questions such as ‘Why does this happen?’ and ‘What can we do?’”

This January, STRIVE plans to expand by implementing a new program modeled after the University of New Hampshire’s successful program called Bringing in the Bystander. This program has a heavy focus on bystander intervention.

“A lot of people stand around and see a lot of shady stuff go down,” Del Moro said. “We want to get those people involved.”

According to the UNH Bringing in the Bystander website, under the tag line, “Everyone in the community has a role to play in ending sexual violence,” the program “approaches both women and men as potential bystanders or witnesses to risky behaviors related to sexual violence around them.”

UNH developed this program through in-house research conducted by Prevention Innovations, a consulting, training and research unit that develops, implements and evaluates programs, policies and practices to end violence against women on campus. Vice President Joe Biden spoke at UNH in April on the success of the program and called on everyone to take responsibility. Biden, a long-time proponent of rape awareness, co-authored the Violence Against Women Act that passed in 1994.

Back in the 1980s, cutting-edge and innovative rape awareness programs like the current one at UNH were few, but UF had one of the best.

SARS, Sexual Assault Recovery Service, and COAR, Campus Organized Against Rape, were both founded by therapist Claire Walsh in 1981 and 1982, respectively. Throughout the ‘80s, Walsh and COAR representatives spoke on at least a dozen national TV talk shows, supplied information to more than 500 universities and media organizations and served as models for similar programs at other schools.

In the 1988 book titled, “I Never Called It Rape,” one of the first extensive studies of rape on college campuses, COAR was called out as “one of the nation’s most comprehensive programs,” which included a rape-myth quiz, a slide show of sexual stereotypes in the media, and discussions of body language and assertiveness in dating. COAR also made it a point to discuss the societal and cultural attitudes of men, women and relationships that may lead to rape situations as well as ways to enhance general communication between men and women.

Walsh credited COAR’s success to its unique approach to involve both men and women as its target audience. Half of COAR’s members were men.

“We see males as absolutely crucial in helping to change attitudes that are put out by the culture,” Walsh told the Gainesville Sun in 1986. “Women can’t do it by themselves, males can’t do it by themselves — we need to work together.”

However, this nationally recognized and successful program came to an end in 1991. A mess of differing politics, separate budgets and general bureaucracy crippled, defunded and eventually disbanded COAR entirely. SARS was redistributed from the Infirmary, where SARS counselors were able to focus specifically on rape victim counseling, to Mental Health Services, which left rape victims to check in as mental health patients and be randomly assigned to a general counselor, regardless of the counselor’s specialization. Basically, both programs were eliminated

Since COAR and SARS, UF has seen a few half-hearted and not nearly as passionate attempts at rape awareness. The names change almost yearly and are hard to research and keep track of.

“It could change names as the mission evolves and as funding changes,” said Jennifer Stuart, coordinator of STRIVE. “But there is a mandate that any university has to have education on sexual assault. So that will happen.”

That mandate is the Campus Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights of 1992, which requires all federally funded schools to provide sexual assault prevention programs as well as provide information on what to do if an assault occurs and who victims can contact. The mandate is a part of the 1990 Clery Act, named in memory of a sexual assault and murder victim of 1986. The Clery Act also requires every university to publish an annual report of its past three years’ worth of campus crime statistics.

The sexual assault definition used in these reports is “forcible rape,” defined as: “The carnal knowledge of a person forcibly and/or against that person’s will; or not forcibly or against the person’s will where the victim is incapable of giving consent because of his/her temporary or permanent mental or physical incapacity (or because of his/her youth). This offense includes the forcible rape of both males and females.” It also includes “forcible sodomy,” “sexual assault with an object,” and “forcible fondling.”

Between 2008 and 2010, 17 “forcible rapes” were reported at UF. This seems more than a little bit shy of the one in four statistic reported by STRIVE and most rape advocate groups.

“The reality is that these kinds of cases go woefully under-reported,” Loschiavo said.

This past summer, in an effort to increase reporting and awareness, the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights sent a “Dear Colleague Letter” to universities and school districts nationwide. The letter clarified exactly how Title IX should be interpreted and what misconduct code guidelines to abide by, specifically in sexual misconduct cases. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education or activity.

Though the letter does not have force of law, the 19-page “policy guidance” outlines the standards that will be considered if a sexual assault case in a school or university is investigated by the Office of Civil Rights. But, if the same sexual assault case is brought to state court, the standards may be different.

“State law has some different standards and so the institution now is forced to choose: do we want to lose in state court if an accused appeals and says these regulations are invalid and violate my due process rights, or do we want to lose in an OCR case? That’s really the choice we have,” Loschiavo said.

In light of how few cases of sexual assault are actually reported and prosecuted, the Bringing in the Bystander program aims to reduce the number of victims overall. Loschiavo is optimistic about the new program, though he does think it’s going to take a long time to effect change.

“We’re working against the culture,” he said. “Even when there were minimal consequences to the bystander getting involved, bystanders have chosen not to get involved. As a campus, we’re trying to have a culture shift to empower bystanders to intervene.”

Legal systems, police departments and rape awareness groups can only go so far in prevention and recovery tactics. The Bringing in the Bystander program affirms that encouraging people to speak up is the most effective way to help reduce sexual violence.

Illustration (top) by Susie Bijan.

(Above) On Friday nights before home games, the spirit of “United Downtown” casts a shadow over local businesses. Illustration by Susie Bijan.

Indiegainesville is a labor of love by locals (and for locals) to protect the interests of independent businesses in Gainesville. We are a collective of locally owned businesses that came together over the summer to celebrate Gainesville’s unique indie spirit and to ensure that the voices of local businesses would be heard in public forums and receive equal consideration. Prior to indiegainesville’s conception, we couldn’t shake the feeling that our voices were drowned out by the interests of national chains and property owners.

Our incentive to organize came in July when the City Commission proposed to install parking meters downtown and eliminate free parking for our customers. No one from the city consulted us about their decision. They had, apparently, consulted the Gainesville Downtown Owners and Tenants Association, which was not working with us at the time. We petitioned and successfully convinced the commissioners not to install parking meters downtown. The tenants association eventually changed its mind about the issue and joined us in the fight for free parking.

Another event that prompted us to organize was a series of pep rallies collectively known as United Downtown, sponsored by United Way and planned by the tenants association. To sum it up, every Friday night before a home football game, the central region of downtown gets closed off to make room for street parties, which involve corporate beer, food, gator gear and live music at Bo Diddley Plaza.

We weren’t against the event in theory, but we were against the poor planning and lack of notification. Many small business owners learned about United Downtown only two weeks before the first event. Preparation for United Downtown involved blocking off the streets around us early in the day, limiting access for customers. On United Downtown Fridays, local businesses suffered losses ranging from 20 to 50 percent of their usual income.

And who is on the streets of United Downtown? National chains, including Macy’s, Belk and Zaxby’s. Our latest walk through United Downtown on Sept. 30 showcased a sparse variety of vendors, the majority of which were not independent or local businesses. When the tenants association planned the United Downtown event, there was little outreach to the small business community, and what outreach did occur took the form of threats. More than one person was told something along the lines of, “If you don’t support United Downtown, we’ll put you out of business.” We were promised we would make more money and our skepticism was ignored.

We differ from the tenants association in that membership to indiegainesville is free, and members of independent businesses from all over Gainesville are encouraged to join.

We’re working on a few projects that will have a positive impact on Gainesville, including a bike rack installation project, which would involve the placement of bike racks, welded by local artists out of recycled bikes, in various locations downtown and, eventually, throughout the community. We hope that the new bike racks will increase bicycle traffic while highlighting local artists and the independent bike shops that sponsor them. We’re also talking to the City about making downtown more inviting by keeping it better lit at night, among other ideas.

When you enter a locally owned, independent store, you see a selection of products based on the needs of your community. You get to influence the buyer, who’s usually the local business owner, rather than having the buyer push their products on you. As feminist Carol Hanisch wrote, “the personal is political.” Where we choose to shop is a ballot we cast. Our money is our weapon. The products we purchase are votes of confidence in the people who make and sell them. We support local jobs, progressive labor policies and living wages for all workers, and we want to see that support reflected in our purchases, no matter how small.

The Monthly Manifesto is a podium for local organizations to tell Gainesville what they’re about. Submissions and inquiries should be sent to editors@thefineprintuf.org with the subject “Monthly Manifesto.”

Independent Researchers Fight to Save Florida’s Springs

As the sunlight fades over Adventure Outpost, a small shop along Highway 441, Lars Anderson returns his paddles, kayaks and canoes to their proper place after leading travelers down the Santa Fe River.

Anderson, who wears a brimmed hat and speaks with a Florida accent, says he spent his childhood in Gainesville and explored the springs whenever he could. These days, he leads tours along 60 different waterways in north and central Florida, and he gives three to four tours in a typical week.

“I just want people to have a great time with nature,” he says. When Anderson isn’t managing his shop, leading tours or writing travel guides, he studies conservation issues affecting the springs. “The future looks pretty grim with Rick Scott and the likes,” he says, closing his shop for the night. “There are people [in power] who want to ignore science in favor of their own short-sighted agendas.”

Anderson, who serves on the advisory board of the Florida Springs Institute, does whatever he can to educate others. Working groups throughout the state have gathered a solid collection of data, which indicates over-pumping, nitrate pollution, and irresponsible land use. They’ve also presented solutions. The next step is action, which at this point is lacking.

“With legislators standing in the way, people are sitting at these working groups, coming out with all this great research,” he says. “But the solid action is up against a brick wall. We’ve reached a low point in recent decades.”

Since 2001, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) spent up to $2.4 million each year on its Florida Springs Initiative program, which sought to identify problems facing the springs and solve them through research, education, outreach and restoration. The initiative also funded working groups, which brought together shareholders to better understand the issues associated with individual springs.

This year in July, state administrators abruptly ended funding for the Florida Springs Initiative. As a result, four of the most established working groups, which focused on Silver, Rainbow, Wakulla and Ichetucknee Springs, have been discontinued. A three-year contract to maintain the working groups and write restoration plans for each of the four springs has been prematurely terminated.

Florida’s leaders spent up to $24 million to keep the Florida Springs Initiative running throughout its ten-year existence. Comparatively, Florida has at least 900 artesian springs, known for their clarity and vibrant color, which contribute more than $300 million to the state economy each year through recreation and eco-tourism.

A small group of springs in central Florida, which includes Ginnie Springs, the most popular freshwater diving spot in the world, generates $10 million a year for surrounding communities. One local dive shop saw visitors from 46 different countries. Ichetucknee Springs, which includes a famous pool where children get baptized, generates $23 million in visitor spending each year, including $5 million in wages for local workers.

“We won’t have a strong economy if we have a weak environment, and that’s been proven throughout Florida’s history,” said Bob Knight, 63, director of the Florida Springs Institute. Knight began studying Florida’s springs more than 30 years ago. He worked under the mentorship of the late Howard T. Odum, the world’s first ecologist to document the flow of energy through aquatic ecosystems. His famous study, published in 1957, focused on Silver Springs.

Knight continued Odum’s work for decades, documenting changes over time in multiple springs throughout Florida. Silver Springs, the largest spring in the country, lost 30 percent of its output since 2001. Ichetucknee and Rainbow Springs lost 15 percent each, and countless others are close to drying out completely. Almost every spring in Florida connects to the Floridan aquifer, where the state gets 60 percent of its usable water.

“We need to reduce the amount of water we’re pumping out of the aquifer,” Knight said. “Water management districts are beginning to recognize this, but they’re still giving out permits for additional groundwater withdrawals. They’re handing them out like candy.”

Where does all the water go? Over 1,500 golf courses exist in Florida, more than in any other state, and the number is growing each year. Combine that with about 3 million suburban lawns, which soak up nearly half of the public water supply. Then there’s industrial agriculture, which the Florida DEP lists as the second most prominent force depleting the aquifer.

Laws exist limiting the amount of permits granted by water management districts based on the concept of minimum flow levels, defined as the amount of water that can be drawn from the aquifer without significantly harming springs and other natural bodies of water. Determining minimum flow levels is a scientific process, but the issue has been politicized, which opens the floodgates for reckless behavior.

“It is likely that [almost] every major artesian spring in Florida… experiences declining flows as a result of human consumptive uses,” Knight wrote in 2008. “By the time flow reductions become obvious in springs, they are often so great that significant ecological values and functions have already been lost.”

To make matters worse, the statewide use of nitrogen fertilizers causes nitrates to enter the groundwater, contaminating the aquifer and spreading outward into the springs. Knight said Ginnie Springs is an exceptional example, with a nitrate concentration 30 times higher than what should naturally occur.

Nitrate pollution triggers the growth of filamentous algae, otherwise known as “noxious algae,” which clouds the water, blocks sunlight, and decimates native plant life. As a result, all the animals higher up in the food chain — fish, turtles, birds, and otters, to name a few — begin to die off as well.

In regions of north and central Florida where artesian springs are common, groundwater nitrate concentrations have increased from natural levels of 0.02 parts per million to widespread concentrations of more than 1.0 parts per million (that’s 50 times higher), according to estimates from 2008. Knight pointed out that 50 percent of the biomass in Silver Springs has already been overtaken by noxious algae.

“The leaders of Florida are in denial that there’s a problem,” he said. “They say they’re dealing with it, but they just give out more permits. And the permits go against current laws, but nobody is challenging them. Because what you have to challenge is a very rich machine that is benefiting from these groundwater withdrawals and pollution. You have people that are benefiting at the expense of the whole public, and the public is not organized, aware, or well-funded enough to do anything about it.”

Knight wrote in 2008 that the Florida Springs Initiative had “contributed to a much better understanding of the springs and the problems they face” but that current levels of funding were “inadequate to turn the tide away from continuing degradation.” Two years later, instead of increasing efforts to protect the springs, state administrators slashed them from the budget completely.

“It sounds like the sky is falling and, you know, it actually is,” Knight said. “We really do have springs that are drying up. There are holes in the ground where there used to be flowing springs.”

In the face of recent setbacks, Knight is taking matters into his own hands. He started the Howard T. Odum Florida Springs Institute last year, which aims to expand on the work of the Florida Springs Initiative, with or without state funding. Knight is both director and founder, and he’s in the process of gathering staff. Since the 1950s, Odum imagined a research center in Silver Springs, but nothing ever came of it in his lifetime. “It’s sort of a dream Dr. Odum had. We had it together, and I’m starting it now.”

(Above) An egret swipes a fish out of the water at Ichetucknee Springs. All ecological and economic facts in this story, unless otherwise cited, are based on the most recent estimates from the Howard T. Odum Florida Springs Institute.

When administrators raise tuition, students raise hell. But did Rick Scott’s war on education leave UF with no other choice?

On Sept. 16, 40 students gathered near Turlington Hall, marched to the Plaza of the Americas and hung a $35,000 price tag on “Whispering Close,” a controversial 20-foot statue of two 19th-century socialites dancing.

The demonstration, organized by Students for a Democratic Society, was inspired by the University of Florida’s recent decision to raise tuition by 15 percent — the highest increase allowed by state law — thanks to Florida’s shrinking education budget.

In the last week of April, the Florida Legislature granted university administrators permission to increase tuition by 8 percent. Shortly after, the Board of Governors approved individual requests from universities, including UF, to raise tuition by an additional 7 percent, marking this the third consecutive year that UF’s tuition increases have hit the ceiling.

At the same time, student aid is moving in the opposite direction. The Florida Bright Futures Scholarship, which serves 98 percent of undergraduates at UF, has been unable to keep up with the rising number of college applicants. This Fall, students on average received 20 percent less aid from Bright Futures than they did last year.

In Student Government elections on Sept. 27 and 28, the question, “Do you support repealing the 15 percent tuition increase at the University of Florida?” appeared on the ballot after SDS turned in more than 1,200 signatures in favor of the question, and 87 percent of students voted to repeal the increase.

Is Raising Tuition Necessary?

Janine Sikes, UF’s director of public affairs, said she empathizes with students who oppose the tuition hike, but she also said they’re looking at this situation the wrong way.

“Obviously, this is a business,” Sikes said. “But UF is a value, and they’re not recognizing that.”

She pointed out that UF students pay a relatively low fee for the quality of the education they receive. Kiplinger’s “Best Values in Public Colleges 2011” ranked UF second in the country. An equivalent review from Princeton placed UF third.

The national average for tuition at public universities is $7,600, while UF sits at $5,700. The university ranks 75 out of 594 in the nation for total tuition costs.

Additionally, UF is part of the Association of American Universities, an organization of leading research facilities, and holds one of the lowest tuition costs in the group. However, 36 percent of the 61 schools are private, placing the mean well above the national average.

“It’s impossible to get the education you expect out of flagship institutions unless we invest back into the university,” Sikes said.

UF President Bernie Machen has to balance costs to keep the school running while competing with other schools for faculty salaries and keeping programs afloat. Cuts from positions, salaries and resources have reached more than $200 million in the past four years.

Sikes said that cutting salaries can result in the loss of valuable faculty to other schools, and it doesn’t solve the problem anyway. UF’s student-to-faculty ratio is poor, she said, and overcrowding is becoming more of an issue, sometimes forcing students to sit on the floor in larger classes.

Students at least have the opportunity to take advantage of numerous scholarships and financial aid programs, Sikes added. “We, as administrators, went to school just like you guys, and I worked my way through it. And I didn’t have a Bright Futures scholarship.”

The administration is trying to improve its understanding of students’ financial needs. For the upcoming application period, each applicant will be required to fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid form. The hope is that the FAFSA forms will give the university a clearer picture of where students fall financially.

The mean family income on record for UF students is $105,000. Sikes said she doesn’t know if new information from the FAFSA forms will inflate or deflate that number. Nor does she know if the president will continue to support a 15 percent increase each year.

If the 15 percent increases continue, Sikes expects to see more protests like the Sept. 16 rally. “We try to balance the ability for students to speak their minds and share their opinions on tough topics.” She said this rally wasn’t the first of its kind, nor will it be the last.

If students want change, they need to look farther west, she added. “They need to pay attention to what happens in Tallahassee and proposals going forward if they want their voices heard in the future.”

“Chop from the Top”

After the Sept. 16 rally, SDS organizers were promised a meeting with Machen to discuss their demands and financial solutions, none of which involve tuition hikes. But when they went to the meeting on Sept. 23, they found it had been canceled.

“They gave us the run-around,” said Chrisley Carpio, an organizer for SDS.

SDS found out they could not see Machen without a written proposal. Carpio said the demand came as a surprise.

The group does plan to write a proposal, but not to place in Machen’s hands. Instead, its members are hoping to gain support from students.

Another rally is planned for late October, and this rally will occur in conjunction with other student groups opposed to the tuition hike. Carpio expects a much larger turnout as students begin to fully understand the impact of tuition hikes on their wallets.

To alleviate UF’s financial problems, SDS wants administrators to “chop from the top.” The group believes six-figure salaries for faculty members are unnecessary and that Sikes’s claim follows a typical appeasement pattern.

“Chop from the Top” also targets the president’s mansion. Built in 1953, the mansion’s main function was to serve as the president’s home and office.

Nowadays, since Machen moved out in 2006, it stands vacant the majority of the time, punctuated by a few social events. Still, it still needs money to be maintained. Programs are being cut, supplies can not be refilled and tuition keeps increasing, but the school pays to keep a vacant mansion’s doors open.

“We don’t see them forced to make huge financial decisions, like making the sacrifices that they demand of the student body,” said Carpio. “Only students so far are carrying the burden.”

SDS also wants administrators to acknowledge that 42 percent of students hold a part-time job, something the SERU survey, UF’s method of calculating students’ income, shies away from exploring.

Tuition has undergone a 120 percent increase in the past 10 years, shown by university records. With a weak economy and state budget cuts, the university had to, and will continue to have to, find ways of generating money to keep the school running.

Still, Carpio wants the administration to find other avenues than students’ wallets. “If the administration is bragging about how UF is so affordable, let it stay that way.”

The True “Top”

Last May, Gov. Rick Scott proposed to slash Florida’s budget by $5 billion, including $3.3 billion in education cuts. That grinds down to $703 less in state funding per student than last year and pink slips for 8,700 state workers, teachers included.

The UF Board of Trustees can only work with what its given. Since Scott cut funding to education, the university had to pick up where the budget left off, and it looked to the students.

Tuition increases bring a bitterness to the student body, but the university has been left with little choice after the budget cuts made in Tallahassee. Recent protests show that students want their voices heard about tuition, but rallies against the administration may not be enough.

Scott’s influence in education runs deep with the Board of Governors, the governing body of the state university system. He appoints 14 out of the 17 members, and these members appoint trustees to govern each of Florida’s universities.

In January, multiple groups are planning to gather in Tallahassee to protest further education cuts during the Florida Governor’s Meeting. Participants are planning to come from across Florida.

Gainesville’s chapter of SDS, Florida State University Progress Coalition, Fight Back Florida and The Tuition is Too Damn High Party all plan to converge in Tallahassee shortly after the annual state legislative session begins. Anyone who is tired of these education cuts is, of course, encouraged to go to the capitol and have their voice heard.

Editorial cartoon (top) by Diana Moreno.

The pipeline would travel from Alberta, Canada to refineries in Texas, crossing dozens of waterways, the fragile Nebraska Sandhills, the Yellowstone River in Montana, and the nation’s largest water aquifer, the Ogallala Aquifer, which covers 175,500 sq. miles.

On Aug. 20 in Washington, thousands of demonstrators showed resistance to the project, which they believe threatens the nation’s natural resources, potable water supply, delicate ecosystems and the local economies that depend on these resources. In the months since then, the demonstration has grown to become the largest sustained environmental protest in U.S. history, despite more than 1,200 arrests.

Demonstrators are also calling attention to the contractor hired by the U.S. State Department to assess the environmental impact of the project.

Recently, in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, three Senators—Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—raised concerns about why Cardno Entrix, a firm that publicly claims TransCanada as a “major client,” was chosen to conduct an objective environmental impact study. The senators wrote the letter urging for a new, unbiased study to be conducted before the pipeline is approved. The letter noted:

“This is a critically important issue for our environment and the energy future of our country. At a time when all credible scientific evidence and opinion indicates that we are losing the battle against global warming, it is imperative that we have objective environmental assessments of major carbon-dependent energy projects.”

The process of extracting and processing oil from tar sands releases more greenhouse gases into the environment than other forms of fossil fuels, as explained in research conducted by Canada’s environmental ministry.

James Hansen, a climate scientist and director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, has called the pipeline “the world’s longest fuse to the world’s largest carbon bomb on the continent.” In a call to action signed by Hansen, Naomi Klein (a Canadian native and author) and Bill McKibben (long-time U.S. environmental activist and author) describe the pipeline as “a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.”

TransCanada’s safety and environmental records are also in question. The State Department estimates that the pipeline could potentially spill a maximum of 2.8 million gallons along an area of 1.7 miles. However, a report by engineering professor Johm Stansbury of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln claims that there could be up to 91 leaks along the XL pipeline that could lead to 6.5 million gallons of tar sands oil contaminating the Ogallala Aquifer.

The aquifer is vital to the production of  more than 11,000 acres of rangeland and 5,000 acres of agricultural lands. Bill Erasmus, the regional chief for the Northwest Territories of the Assembly of First Nations, said that, “If there is a spill in that aquifer, it will mess up the water for about 4 million people.”

The first Keystone pipeline, Keystone I, has already had 14 reported spills since June 2010, which released a combined 22,000 gallons of oil into the environment, according to the State Department. TransCanada officials claim that their pipeline’s automatic shutdown valves and back-up-systems would prevent catastrophes such as last July’s 42,000 gallon ExxonMobil spill along Montana’s Yellowstone River.

The BP oil spill still fresh in their minds, the protesters in D.C. know these types of systems are not 100 percent guaranteed. Several environmental groups have recently banned together and put forth a lawsuit seeking to end the preliminary construction of the XL pipeline. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Nebraska Resources Council and Friends of the Earth allege that TransCanada has already cleared a 100-mile pipeline corridor through the Nebraska Sandhills and has removed endangered species, despite the fact that there is no official approval for the project yet. Tom Zeller, a reporter for the Huffington Post, reported that TransCanada ordered pipeline materials and equipment early in anticipation of the pipeline’s approval. The State Department did not immediately  reply to his request for comment.

The State Department estimates the project will create 5,000 to 6,000 new jobs and raise more than $7 billion in revenue for the U.S. through supplies and permitting costs alone. Industry spokespersons and pipeline supporters also argue that the pipeline will create 20,000 construction jobs along the pipeline and make the country less dependent on foreign sources of fossil fuels.

However, activists argue that the oil is not guaranteed to be sold in the U.S. Additionally, they believe more sustainable jobs would be created if the government were to invest in rebuilding the country’s D-rated infrastructure, as rated by the American Society of Civil Engineers, in combination with establishing a new, comprehensive renewable energy portfolio. A study conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors of the Mayors Climate Protection Center describes expanding opportunities in the renewable energy market. The current number of green jobs in the U.S. totals 750,000 — a number projected to grow to 4.2 million over the next three decades.

Elizabeth Cori-Jones, a resident of Gainesville, was one of the people who felt drawn to Washington to voice her opposition to the pipeline. On Oct. 7 she spoke at the final public hearing alongside hundreds of other concerned citizens, ranchers, indigenous groups and non-profit environmental groups to voice a united opposition.

“Why would the U.S. agree to accept the risk of toxic spills and habitat destruction in our country for a project that seemingly benefits only Canada?” Elizabeth asked. “We are giving Canada refineries and shipping ports, which they don’t otherwise have. Yes, some temporary jobs would be created in the U.S., but nothing compared to the potential for new jobs in alternative energy development or infrastructure upgrades. The refined oil, it turns out, would not diminish our dependency on oil from ‘unstable’ areas of the globe, as it would be most likely shipped abroad.”

On Nov. 18, the 90-day period for collecting official comments regarding the State Department’s environmental assessment will end and Obama will have until the end of the year to decide whether to approve the pipeline. More than 2,000 people have already pledged to be in Washington on Nov. 6 to continue to protest the pipeline. They are committed to maintaining a “people’s voice” and presence in D.C. until the final hearing on Nov. 18th.

For addition information…

Keystone Pipeline Map TransCanada.com

“Crumbling Infrastructure Symbolizes U.S. Economy” from The Street

Built to Spill? Infograph

The Fine Print is back and ready for action. Stay tuned for weekly installments of Paper Cuts, our quick updates and occasional commentary on headlines that matter. If you think we’re missing something important, feel free to email us. Here are some developments you may have missed over summer.

Block tuition gets the axe.
If you’re new to UF, “block tuition” is the idea of charging students a minimum tuition fee equivalent to the value of 15 credit hours each semester, even if they’re signed up for less than fifteen credits. The policy was proposed by the administration last year as a way to pressure students into signing up for more classes each semester, thereby increasing UF’s four-year graduation rates. Students with part-time and full-time jobs would have had to pay about $500 extra for classes they simply didn’t have time to take. On a Sept. 6 Board of Trustees meeting, UF Provost Joe Glover said block tuition is no longer necessary, referring to a recent spike in four-year graduation rates. UF’s administration, therefore, decided to “withdraw the proposal indefinitely.” Not that widespread student opposition had anything to do with it.

Voting on the 15 percent tuition increase.
On August 30, members of Students for a Democratic Society turned in more than 1200 signatures to get a new question on the ballot for the next round of student elections, which will be held on Sept. 27 and 28. The question reads, “Do you support repealing the 15 percent tuition increase at the University of Florida?”

Former tobacco executive joins UF’s Board of Trustees.
In June, the Florida Board of Governors added a new member to UF’s Board of Trustees: Susan Cameron (previously known as Susan Ivey), the former CEO of Reynolds American, the parent company of R.J. Reynolds and the second largest tobacco company in the United States. The Gainesville Sun mentioned that UF’s Board of Trustees had “gone through a major turnover” after Governor Rick Scott appointed Atlanta health care executive W. Michael Heekin, Naples health care executive Alan M. Levine, and Florida Power and Light senior attorney Juliet M. Roulhac. What’s interesting about Cameron’s past, besides the merchant-of-death concerns brought forth by anti-smoking advocates, is the controversy over her company’s questionable treatment of farm workers.

UPD Officer Keith Smith ends his controversial career.
University of Florida Police Department (UPD) Officer Keith Smith was fired on Sept. 1 after pulling over a reckless driver and threatening to shoot him. If the name “Keith Smith” doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the same officer that got reprimanded in 2008 when he accompanied intoxicated Gainesville Police Department (GPD) officers in an incident that involved throwing eggs at “suspected drug dealers and prostitutes” in a poor black neighborhood. This would contribute later to accusations of racism among student protestors and community members, but the facts in this case were questionable. Two years later, he shot a physically handicapped black graduate student in the face, resulting in a life-threatening injury, a tidal wave of student protests, and a soon-to-be-released documentary. Smith no longer works for the UPD, but his termination had nothing to do with the shooting, according to UPD Chief Linda Stump. Here are the details.

No evidence for cancer clusters at the Superfund site?
To make a long story short, residents of the Stephen Foster Neighborhood in northwest Gainesville have been living in fear for decades due to the presence of a heavily polluted 90-acre region known as the Cabot/Koppers Superfund site. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released their Record of Decision, which details their long-term plans to remedy the site, on Feb. 2. In June, The Gainesville Sun reported, “There is no evidence to suggest neighbors of the Cabot-Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville are at an increased risk of developing cancer, according to a Florida Department of Health analysis released Friday… The Stephen Foster Neighborhood Cancer Review compared numbers of cancer cases in that neighborhood’s census tract with the rest of the state between 1981 and 2000.” In the same article, Anthony Dennis of the Florida Department of Health acknowledged that the study had limitations. On July 21, Anne Lowry, a former Hospital Director of Nursing and Director of Investigational Drug studies, wrote an unpublished letter to the editors The Gainesville Sun, calling the study “junk science” and criticizing the Sun for not being critical enough. “Proper and valid health studies take years,” she says. “They require thousands of people to be studied, tracking back over many generations, and must be designed and fully completed by scientists.”

Florida’s springs are not safe from budget cuts.
As originally reported by Emily Morrow for The Alligator: “On June 1, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection announced the end of all funding for the Florida Springs Initiative and the Springs Basin Working Groups, organizations dedicated to restoring and protecting Florida’s springs. ‘It’s just a real hard blow,’ said Bob Knight, coordinator of the Wakulla Springs working group. ‘We’re seeing the springs degrading, and then we hear the state no longer values them enough to fund their restoration.’”

Protecting manatees from speedboats is “against the Bible.”
Yes, you heard that right. In July, a Florida Tea Party group announced its intentions to fight restrictions on boating in Kings Bay that have been proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “We cannot elevate nature above people,” said Edna Mattos, 63, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.” Mother Jones added the following context in a blog post by Kate Sheppard: “Areas of Kings Bay, which is in Citrus County, have been designated as a federal wildlife refuge since 1980… The number of manatees in the bay has increased from 100 when the protections were put in place to more than 550 today. They are a major tourist draw to the area, but there has been an uptick in manatee deaths from boating accidents in the past ten years.” Paranoid Tea Party members have suggested that efforts to protect endangered manatees may have sinister ties to Agenda 21, an 18-year-old United Nations plan concerning sustainable development.

American Renewables, a private biomass developer based in Massachusetts, is partnering with Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) to construct a biomass power plant at GRU’s Deerhaven Station, just eight miles northwest of Downtown Gainesville.

GRU and city officials agreed that Gainesville needs an additional source of energy to meet the demands of its consumers by 2023. The 100-megawatt facility, capable of providing enough electricity to power 100,000 homes, will be primarily fueled by residual wood chips collected from forest and wood processing operations within a 75-mile radius.

According to Josh Levine, the project manager of American Renewables, biomass uses the leftover wood from trees that are initially harvested by logging companies, which mainly use the trunk of the tree, discarding the treetops and branches.

“In most cases, this wood is piled up and burned,” Levine said. “There are no emissions controls, no benefits from the burning of that material — just burned.”

The biomass plant was chosen as an alternative to a 220-MW coal facility that GRU had originally planned to build as an extension of their existing 250-MW coal facility at the Deerhaven site. Twenty-eight options were considered, including wind and solar energy.

Levine said biomass out-shined the competition because it’s the most cost-effective renewable energy on the market. Solar power and wind power are intermittent resources and wouldn’t provide adequate base-load generation, he claimed.

The Contract

In May 2009, GRU entered a 30-year contract with American Renewables. The biomass facility will be owned by American Renewables, but GRU will purchase its power for at least 30 years.

Many “trade-secret” components of the Power Purchase Agreement between GRU and American Renewables had been unavailable to the public. Opponents expressed concern about American Renewables’ intentions in concealing financial data.

Levine said American Renewables’ intentions were not to conceal information from Gainesville residents, but to protect the company’s trade secrets from potential competitors. On April 6, American Renewables fully exposed the contract. Levine said their decision had nothing to do with public pressure.

“The contract is almost three years old, so it’s dated,” he said. “The competitive landscape has completely shifted, which is why we’re more comfortable releasing the contract.”

Levine explained that between 2008 and 2009, Floridians were hyped up on talk of a more sustainable future. Florida was leaning toward signing a Renewable Portfolio Standard, a regulation requiring increased renewable energy production and usage. With this anticipation, American Renewables expected more biomass plants, owned by competitor companies, to sprout up all over the state. Since then, the surge of enthusiasm failed to generate the results Levine expected. Thus, competition fizzled out.

Job Creation

During the facility’s three-year construction phase, which began in late March, 350 temporary jobs will be created. Half of these construction jobs will employ local workers, while the other half will call for specialists, who may or may not be local.

The facility’s operation, which American Renewables foresees to extend beyond 40 years, will directly employ 45 people. Indirectly, GREC will provide an additional 160 jobs to the forestry, logging, and trucking businesses within the 75 mile radius, which encompasses 23 counties.

Director of Florida State University’s Center for Economic Forecasting and Analysis, Dr. Julie Harrington, conducted a detailed economic benefit analysis for the biomass plant. She estimates an additional 500 jobs will also be infused into the local economy once the plant is running.

Protecting Forests

The majority of Florida’s forests are privately owned, with many used as timberland. Periodic forest thinning is considered to be a good forestry practice, removing invasive species of trees that compete with native species for sunlight and nutrients. Thinning is currently uncommon because landowners do not have a market for their unwanted trees, making the practice economically disadvantageous.

The biomass facility would provide an incentive for forest thinning through GRU’s Stewardship Incentive Program, allowing landowners to sell wood chips from invasive, unhealthy or otherwise undesirable trees.

Joy Towles Ezell, who has been a tree farmer her whole life, expressed concern that the biomass facility may have adverse effects on the health of surrounding forests.

“They’re going to have to clearcut forests,” Ezell said. “There’s not going to be enough waste wood to run these things.”

At one point in her tree farming career, Ezell grew trees for a paper mill, but later terminated the contract because she did not consider their practices sustainable. Ezell worries the biomass facility will compete with paper mills for residual wood. Despite Levine’s claim that paper mills cut down trees and only process their trunks, burning everything else, Ezell contends that tree mills often process entire trees — leaving little to no residual matter behind.

American Renewables states that 1.2 million green tons will be used to fuel their facility annually. Eighty percent of the required tonnage will be derived from forest products, while the remaining 20 percent will be drawn from urban wood waste.

Gainesville’s Ad-hoc Forestry Committee, an advisory board of local experts, has developed a set of sustainability standards for the biomass plant’s procurement of residual wood. To ensure that these standards are upheld, American Renewables plans to trace the origins of all the wood they receive by collecting random samples.

The samples will be tested for moisture content and other indicators that may determine whether the biomass being burned was harvested from the trunks of healthy trees, which would indicate unsustainable harvesting. American Renewables also plans to employ two on-site inspectors who will monitor wood collection.

Ezell and other biomass opponents doubt the enforcement of these standards. Although American Renewables’ Fuel Procurement Standards assure that “GREC shall not utilize biomass fuel harvested during the conversion of a natural forest to a plantation forest,” Ezell worries that the biomass facility will quickly turn to clear cutting in order to meet their biomass supply needs.

Pollution

According to a study conducted by Dr. Mary Booth for the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, biomass facilities release more carbon emissions into the atmosphere than even coal facilities.

Booth, an ecologist from Massachusetts, has been fighting biomass for three years. The Manomet study found that, generally, biomass facilities emit 50 percent more carbon emissions than their coal-fueled cousins.

However, Gainesville’s biomass plant is designed to operate at a higher efficiency than most. Booth estimates that this one will emit 30 percent more carbon emissions than a coal facility generating the same amount of electricity.

Levine acknowledges that burning biomass, in the short term, releases more carbon dioxide than burning coal. Nonetheless, he asserts that from a life cycle perspective, biomass plants are actually carbon negative (yes, you heard him right).

“Our facility will result in cleaner air for the region,” Levine said.

His argument is based on the notion that biomass plants are capable of offsetting emissions that would have otherwise gone back into the atmosphere due to wood decomposition. When wood decomposes, it releases both carbon dioxide and methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas.

Booth resolutely dismissed Levine’s argument, claiming that the environmental impacts of wood decomposition are negligible compared to the actual burning of biomass. She explained that the release of methane through decomposition is minimized by methane-consuming bacteria in the soil. Furthermore, wood takes years to decompose. Burning biomass would release high amounts of carbon dioxide immediately.

In addition to carbon dioxide, biomass emissions include dioxin, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, chlorine, heavy metals and particulate matter.

Health

Dr. Christopher Teaf, a toxicologist who testified on behalf of American Renewables, conducted a toxicology and human health risk assessment and concluded that the biomass facility would not pose any health risks to the environment.

“Our facility, from an air pollution standpoint, will not contribute to adverse health effects for anybody living near the facility,” Levine said.

Nonetheless, several organizations across America, including the Florida Medical Association, the American Lung Association, Physicians for Social Responsibility and North Carolina Family Practitioners are deeply concerned about the air pollution associated with biomass energy.

In 2008, the Florida Medical Association (FMA) issued a resolution strongly urging the state government to minimize their approval of biomass plants.

Dr. Ronald Saff, an allergy and asthma specialist living in Tallahassee, is a member of FMA’s Council on Public Health. In 2009, he played a key role in halting the construction of a permitted biomass plant in Tallahassee.

Saff contacted the Alachua County Medical Society (ACMS) to voice his concerns about biomass pollution in hope that local experts will join the fight against biomass.

“I am very disappointed with my physician colleagues in Alachua County for not speaking out about the dangers of biomass plants,” said Saff, who feels ACMS has been negligent in their duty to protect residents from this “great polluter.”

The Rush

GRU recognizes that Alachua County is not in need of a new energy supply until 2023, at the earliest. Biomass opponents want to encourage local residents to further distance that date by improving energy conservation practices.

American Renewables’ hasty progression with the biomass plant draws curiosity and speculation among their opponents.

The biomass facility calls for a capital investment of about $450 million, which will be fronted by American Renewables. If companies like American Renewables act quickly enough, they are eligible to have one third of their investment reimbursed through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (otherwise known as the Stimulus Bill). In order to to be eligible, American Renewables must complete the facility’s construction by the end of 2013.

Pick Your Poison

When it comes to biomass, many elected officials like to play the “pick your poison” game.

Karen Orr, Chairwoman of Energy Justice Network, a national grassroots energy agenda, asserts that biomass advocates try to set up a situation in which biomass, coal and nuclear power plants are the only energy options.

“The false dichotomy presented by government and corporations is one that must be exposed for what it is and strongly rejected if we plan to continue in the world,” Orr said. “We advocate a complete phase-out of nuclear power, fossil fuels, large hydroelectric dams and ‘biomass’ incineration within the next 20 years. What is holding us back is only a lack of political will.”

Research published in Scientific American proves that 100 percent of the world’s energy needs can be met with wind, water and solar power as early as 2030. Opponents of American Renewables are hoping Gainesville can resist the temptation of biomass long enough for cleaner sources of energy to become economically feasible and politically attainable.

Illustration by Susie Bijan.

This misrepresentation of facts was recently highlighted by the “is it just me or is it cold outside, so global climate change must be a scam” bandwagon that assaulted our airwaves this past winter. To be perfectly clear, it is just you.

We had a cold winter this year because the temperature of the Earth is rising.  Arctic ice is melting, causing the ocean to absorb sunlight that otherwise would have been reflected. This causes the air above the water to heat up, pushing the arctic air current further south and creating lower temperatures in the southeastern United States. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, the global temperature has increased 0.74°C (1.33°F).

A 2010 article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 to 98 percent of climate scientists recognize the evidence for man-made climate change. The last scientific body to hold a dissenting opinion, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, changed their position in 2007.

The Media

A recently leaked internal Fox News document posted by Media Matters states very clearly that, in the spirit of “fair and balanced” coverage, every time climate change is mentioned it must also be said that the data has been called into question by critics.

The media’s coverage of climate change plays on a very important concept within the scientific community: skepticism. Scientists are, by trade, among the least trusting people on the planet. You would be hard-pressed to find a scientist who doesn’t think there needs to be more research on climate change or other widely-held theories like evolution, or even gravity.

Under the guise of the media, the word “theory” has shifted in meaning from a well-established, tested and verified hypothesis to the random opinion of some guy in his basement. Worst of all, the word “skeptic” has been hijacked to mean an active denial of the scientific consensus. A Pew study in 2009 found that 76% of scientists feel the media is doing the public a disservice by failing to distinguish between research that is well-founded and research that is not.

To make climate change seem like more of a “controversy” than it is, the media divides air time disproportionately between the 97 percent of climate scientists who recognize the evidence for climate change and the dissenting 3 percent (as well as non-climate scientists) who do not.

No ones pays attention to the flat-earth society. Why? Because there’s no political or financial incentive to manufacture a controversy over the shape of the Earth.

Conservative Think Tanks

If someone has an economic interest in denying or advocating for something, there’s a good chance they’re spinning the truth. A 2008 study in Environmental Politics found that 92% of the 141 anti-environmentalist books published between 1972 and 2005 were funded by conservative think tanks (CTT). These books questioned the existence of climate change, ozone depletion and the like.

The list of CTTs that deny climate change while promoting corporate interests is extensive, but here are three of the top offenders.

• The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) circulated a letter in 2006 offering $10,000 to any scientist willing to criticize a soon-to-be released report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By 2006, the AEI had received $1.6 million in funding from ExxonMobile.

• The Heartland Institute hosts the annual International Conference on Climate Change. Their list of “climate experts” is low on actual climate scientists and their list of co-sponsors is low on actual science organizations. Their donors are kept secretive now, but according to Media Matters, they have received money from the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart) and ExxonMobil.

• The George C. Marshall Institute has received funding from ExxonMobil and still denies that chlorofluorocarbons destroy the ozone, that second hand smoke causes cancer and that acid rain exists. One of their chairmen, William Happer, is a physicist (not a climate scientist) who testified before Congress in 2009 that increased CO2 in the atmosphere will be good for humans.

According to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, climate change lobbyists spent over $500 million to influence legislation and on electoral campaigns from 2009 to 2010. Their efforts have paid off. Of the 20 Republican senate candidates for the 2010 midterm election, 19 were climate change deniers.

Research published in the December 2010 issue of Psychology Science reveals that Americans are less likely to believe in climate change if it questions their worldview. Participants in the study who believed in a just world were more likely to deny climate change when shown negative videos or articles – that is, something that shows the adverse consequences of climate change. In other words, Americans who believed the world is just, orderly and stable were likely to dismiss ideas that challenged their view.

According to a Rasmussen poll conducted in January 2011, 38% of Americans are not concerned with climate change and only 33% are taking it very seriously. As soon as the media presents climate change as a real, tangible threat rather than a matter of debate, we can move forward and start finding solutions.

You might notice that this month’s issue is not dedicated to the current month of March. You might also notice that you are reading this online and not on actual paper.

There are two reasons for this. One, March seemed too binding for our free-flowing creative energies. We needed a more fluid title and mid-spring sounded vague, yet still specific. Two, we did not go to actual print because we are dedicated to the conservation of our planet’s Rain Forests and…

Okay, we missed our March deadline.

It’s actually not what you’d assume of a not-for-profit, volunteer-run newspaper; we’re broke and can’t afford to print. We are definitely broke, but we actually do have the money to print.

We missed the March deadline because we are simply out-numbered and under-staffed. We have more stories than writers and more new ideas than ways to implement them.

If we were able to do The Fine Print as a full-time job, we’d jump at the opportunity. But unfortunately, we all have to pay rent or go to class (and pass) and therefore need to keep our boring but real full-time jobs or continue to go to class and do the work.

We need help. We are calling upon you, dear readers, to help The Fine Print and get involved. “Get involved” always sounds empty and intimidating, so we’ll be specific.

We need you to write for us. You don’t have to be a journalist. You just have to be able to write and work with our editors. We need you to be photographers, illustrators and copy editors. We need people interested in web design and Word Press. Our website always has some new kink or new feature that needs work. We need you to be our advertising department and sell ads. Currently, we don’t have anyone dedicated to this, and that’s why we haven’t had many, if any, ads this year. We need you to be a graphic designer/page designer via InDesign to desperately help and relieve our two- to three-person layout staff.

And if there’s something you can do that we didn’t mention and you want to do it for The Fine Print, such as produce videos, play in a band, etc. let us know! We’re open to your ideas and input.

If you have any questions, would like to “get involved” and/or come to a meeting, e-mail editors@thefineprintuf.org and let us know what you’re interested in and we’ll let you know where you can help.

Thanks for all your support in the past and in the future.

– Chelsea Hetelson

Biomass plant
The completion of the proposed biomass plant in Gainesville has been in legal limbo due to three appeals pending in the 1st District Court of Appeals and the Florida Supreme Court. These lawsuits were recently settled in return for American Renewable making the contract fully open to the public. The most important thing the contract holds are the terms of a buy-out. If for some reason, the biomass plant becomes unprofitable or the city wishes to terminate its contract, we will soon know what it will cost.

Fl. teachers’ pay now tied to student performance
Florida Governor Rick Scott has recently approved a bill tying teacher pay to student performance.  Aside from decreasing job security for teachers, the bill inadvertently encourages the best teachers to leave under-performing schools.  With the disproportionate number of under-performing schools in low-income and minority neighborhoods, the bill only serves to reduce opportunities for underprivileged students and therefore widen the achievement gap.

UF tuition set to increase by 30% next year
UF President Bernie Machen is looking to increase tuition by 30% next year. This requires special approval since state universities are only allowed to increase tuition by 15% a year.  As tuition rates go up, proposed federal budget cuts will mean $10 million less in Pell Grants, which aid lower-income families. With Florida Bright Futures not covering the tuition increases, higher education may become less attainable for working-class students.

Creationism in schools
In 2009, Florida state Senator Stephen Wise (R-Jacksonville) said, “Why do we still have apes if we came from them?” Two years later, he was appointed chairman of Florida’s Senate Education Committee. Recently, he introduced a bill that would require science educators to “teach a thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution.” A thorough presentation is already part of the science curriculum in Florida’s schools. Is Wise trying to push schools to “teach the controversy” between scientifically established evolution and unscientific creationism?

Immigration enforcement
UF Professor and Senate President Mike Haridopolos (R-Merritt Island) wants Secure Communities to come to all of Florida. Secure Communities is a technology-based initiative designed to identify undocumented immigrants using biometrics. No conviction is needed for deportation, only a match in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database. The proposals would grant state and local police a level of authority formerly reserved for ICE officials. This shift in authority may be dangerous, discouraging undocumented people from reporting crimes or cooperating with local and state officers due to the threat of deportation.

Fashion shows in the first three cities are known for their grandiose and exorbitant price tags. In Gainesville, the scene is a bit different.

Local boutique owner Elizabeth Schmidt, who owns downtown store Calzatura, wants to keep the attention on the clothes.

“If it’s a fashion show, that is what it should be about,” Schmidt said.

Albert Coronel, producer of Gainesville Fashion Week and owner of neutral7, a signs and graphic design group, desires the glitz and glamour.

“We want it to be a high-end event,” Coronel said.

The difference of opinion has caused many business owners to question the focus of Gainesville Fashion Week 2011. This year’s GFW is slated to be the biggest show yet and “way more glamorous” than previous shows, according to model coordinator Flavia Cervantes.

Every year since its debut in 2008, the show has steadily expanded. This year’s addition to the event line up is a black tie event benefiting Rocket for the Arts, a nonprofit that promotes art education in elementary schools.

However, for some of the the local boutiques, the glam vibe of GFW’s fourth season is not what they are looking for in a fashion week.

The event has come a long way from the original grassroots effort. This year, only two Gainesville boutiques, Three Thirty Couture and Jacquelyn Brooks, will participate. Only half of the designers in the show will be local.

“It’s not what it used to be,” Matthew Turner, owner of local boutique Wolfgang, said. “It’s more razzle dazzle.”

Turner and Wolfgang have been fixtures of GFW since its origins. This will be the first year that they will not be a part of GFW.

After three years of participation in GFW, Calzatura will also not be showing a collection. Owner Elizabeth Schmidt fears that this year’s show is more about the “stuff” than substance.

“Keep the focal point: style,” Schmidt said. “If that is lost, people won’t get what they came for.”

This year’s show is “gossip” themed. Bright pink “HOT” cards were passed out to potential models, which accompanied the promotional “OMG” cardboard signs. The “HOT” cards were distributed around Gainesville, focusing heavily on UF and Santa Fe campuses.

Coronel attributes the successful model turnout to the ubiquitous fuchsia cards. Over the course of two casting calls, over 200 models showed up, packing neutral7. A final 70 were chosen to walk in the show.

“We want everyone to be a star,” Cervantes said. “These are the hottest models we’ve had yet.”

In order to strut their stuff for the judges, models had to pay an application fee.

Both Turner and Schmidt oppose the application charge on principle.

For a boutique to have a show in GFW, they must pay a $500 sponsorship fee. The money is used to put on the event. In return, the boutiques receive the publicity and their time on the runway.

However, the cost wasn’t worth the benefits for Calzatura.

“The $500 is just a baseline,” Schmidt said. “I don’t want to pay for a headache.”

As the producer and business mind of the operation, Coronel believes that the publicity that they would receive by walking at GFW is well worth it.

“We have to raise revenue to put the show together,” Coronel said. “I think the amount for a boutique is decent because of all of the publicity.”

Instead of using GFW, Schmidt turned to Groupon.com and LivingSocial.com to generate new clients. She sees the local daily deal websites as a more reliable promotional method.

Ideally, Turner and Schmidt would like to see more of a focus on Gainesville’s own stores.

“The bottom line,” Turner said. “is that the local boutiques are the heart of what fashion is in Gainesville.”

Originally, GFW was an event that brought together small businesses in the community to showcase local talent. The first GFW was born as a celebration of Wolfgang’s one year anniversary in conjuncture with Sharab Lounge’s grand opening.

“It was more down-to-earth,” Turner said. “It had good intentions.”

The event was well-received, and Gainesville Fashion Week became an annual event on the Gainesville calendar.

Cervantes cites GFW as a way for the community to embrace fashion as a lifestyle and means of self-expression.

“Initially, there was no official fashion presence,” Cervantes said. “But I knew it was there.”

While the boutiques miss the local feel, Coronel is proud of the strides GFW has taken. He describes the operation as a business that continues to grow.

“The first year, it was a bunch of friends with an idea,” Coronel said. “Every year, we have learned new things.”

Coronel is already taking this year’s lessons and planning for next season’s fashion week. In order to regain the support of the local stores, he is considering creating a boutique showcase night. He admits that is has been difficult to balance GFW’s expansion and maintaining a connection with the grassroots community.

Despite any discrepancies of opinion, boutique owners and members of the GFW staff agree that any event that brings people together for the sake of fashion is vital for the Gainesville community.

Even though Calzatura won’t be showing any clothes, Schmidt still plans on attending some of the fashion shows.

“Any event that exposes people or businesses in Gainesville is fantastic,” Turner said.

The group meets once a month with the short-term aim of supporting each other, and with the long-term vision of fostering a new worldview in which “issues” aren’t synonymous with “illnesses,” and where psychosis is seen as a societal problem and not a personal one.

Folks in the group see the greed of capitalism, the exclusivity of gender-roles, and the moral stigmas of religiosity— to name a few things— as true madness. The Gainesville Icarus Project is a much-needed sidestream offering hope to those struggling against the current of the mainstream.

The Icarus Project is a wide-spread network that was conceived of and born in 2002 near California’s Bay Area, where it is still based. The original project was the formation of a website intended to unite those who are living with and/or affected by depression, anxiety, anger, mutiple-personalities or other experiences that are commonly labeled as psychiatric conditions, yet who want to approach such experiences from a different angle. It didn’t take long for this small project to turn into a nation-wide movement.

Local groups have been popping up around the country independently, without any sort of push from the Bay Area. The Icarus Project website, and the original Bay Area group, now act as a resource and toolbox for the various groups around the country. Though these groups share the uniquenvision of shifting the paradigm of mental health, they remain autonomous and each exhibit unique identities.

The Gainesville Icarus Project is still in the process of forging its own identity. The group was formed in Oct. 2010 in the wake of Free University’s DIY Fest during a workshop on radical mental health. The conversation made it clear that our community could greatly benefit from an Icarus-style group.

So far the turnout has averaged 6-10 people, and the group has done well to create a safe and welcoming space for support and encouragement. There are no leaders. Interested folks have simply come together with the common goal of supporting each other. I’ve watched folks who don’t know each other openly share their struggles and offer advice, all with a spirit of compassion and understanding.

The Icarus Project acknowledges that issues are serious and can be extremely difficult to navigate, and that professional care is sometimes necessary. We encourage individuals to make their own decisions about the care they receive.

Some of us pay a professional counselor, and some of us don’t trust authority, or lack the funds for “professional advice.” Some of us are on meds, and some of us are adamantly opposed to them. What we have in common is a desire to support each other as friends, and a deep suspicion of this pathological society that has enough disregard to label us the crazy ones.

We hold meetings on the third Thursday of each month at 7pm in the back courtyard of the Civic Media Center (433 S. Main Street). All are welcome. We sit around a bonfire, sharing snacks and stories, conspiring the creation of a new world where friends are our counselors, community is our hospital, and conversation is our medicine.

As we venture down the sidestreams, and as our wings of imperfection fly us dangerously close to the sun, we discover things only seen by a crazy few.

To learn more, check out The Icarus Project online.

This piece was printed as our Monthly Manifesto for Feb. 2010. The Monthly Manifesto is an outlet for local organizations to share their vision with the rest of Gainesville. If you’re part of an organization that may be interested, email us at alt.publication@gmail.com.

The concept of Open Access is simple but revolutionary: Anyone with Internet access can immediately read any article published. With the majority of research done at the University of Florida being paid for by tax dollars, why should the tax payers have to pay again in subscription fees for access to their results?

Dr. Isabel Silver, head of Academic and Scholarly outreach at the UF, believes open access is the future of scholarly publishing.

“Traditional publishing is an unsustainable economic model,” she said. “The public pays for the research, and then the researcher turns around and gives it to private sector proprietary journal publishers that the public has to pay to read.”

Making information freely and readily available is at the heart of UF’s new Open-Access Publishing Fund Pilot Project (UFOAP). The project is providing up to $3,000 a year per author to publish in open access journals in the hope that more will adopt this system.

“The public wins by having access to the information and the authors win because they want more people to read their work,” Silver said. “The only potential losers are the pay-for-subscription journals.”

And they have a lot to lose. Currently, UF has an $11 million budget for acquisitions with $9 million of that going to electronic resources, which include pay-for-access traditional journals.

“They have a chokehold on publishing and they’re getting big profits through their monopolies,” Silver said.

UF has no plans of phasing out their subscriptions to these costly journals anytime soon. It’s still part of the prevailing mentality that scholars should strive to get their work in big-name journals like Nature and Science. This is how they can charge upwards of $50,000 for a yearly subscription. Nature’s journal package alone costs UF $100,000 annually.

This is changing rapidly. There’s been a rise over the past decade in authors publishing their work in open access journals, which now represent roughly 20% of all publications in the US.

Under the premise of “publish or perish,” scientists must publish their research or risk having a harder time finding future funding. However, not all journals are equal. The most widely-used source to determine the quality of a journal is its “impact factor” which calculates how often a journal is cited as a source. Authors that choose to publish in OA journals are cited more often then those in traditional ones.

Open access has the added benefit of allowing access to smaller institutions and poorer counties who cannot afford the fees of traditional journals. Medical patients and science enthusiasts also see the benefit as they are able to read the latest research without having to rely on the often erroneous and sensationalized news from the media.

A recent grant from UFOAP went to help publish an article about the environmental toxicology of Queen Conch in the Caribbean Sea. This is a very niche subject that very few people in a handful of small countries are interested in. By publishing in PLoS ONE, an open access journal, the information became available to everyone who holds a vested interest in these sea snails or the health of the Caribbean Sea.

“If this wasn’t published in open access it would have been the powers that be that would have controlled the information on a species in these people’s own waters,” Silver said.

There is something profound about having access to information. The information on the current state of Queen Conchs may seem trivial, but it is vital to the creation of a compressive public policy that includes their well being. Without access to this information, any environmental policy on the Caribbean Sea will either be faulty or would have to come from the outside of these countries where it is available.

The last and most important step of the scientific method is communication. Without an open interchange of ideas, research would stagnate. Open access increases this interchange, but it also redefines who this information is meant for.

Public knowledge of science has gone down as the rise of anti-science has increased.  Will this help the general public grasp these scientific concepts? No one can be certain, but opening up the gates to scientific knowledge is the first step.

Creationism is not science.

I wish I could leave it at that, but this anti-science has reared its head again, this time in the recent election of creationist April Griffin to the Alachua County school board. The problem with creationism comes from a deep-seated misunderstanding of evolution and its relationship with religion.

Evolution is the glue that holds biology together. Without it, the life sciences make no sense. The basis of evolution is simple: Genetic variations with selective pressures given long periods of time will produce speciation. Put more plainly, if there is a trait that helps you survive and reproduce, you will have an advantage over your competition. Given enough time, the prevalence of that trait will grow until it becomes common.

There are numerous claims that creationists make against science. The majority are based on pointing out holes in current scientific understanding, a kind of “God in the gaps” approach. As science progresses and fills in the gaps, creationists have to continuously step up their anti-science (see Kirk Cameron trying to explain how a banana fitting into a human hand disproves evolution) — a sort of who-can-close-their-eyes-the-hardest contest. Here are some of the most common talking points creationists use.

1) No one has seen evolution in action. This theory is based on speculation.

As a microbiologist, I find this offensive. I witness evolution all the time when bacteria gain antibiotic resistance. This is small but very easy to see if you look at Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bug that arose due to evolution and the overuse of antibiotics selecting for specific traits.

2) There are no transitional fossils (intermedeary fossils that show evolutionary transition).

There are. A lot of them actually. My favorites are whales. The Fossils we have have put their evolution as so: the land mammal Indohyus, returns to the water and transitions into Ambulocetus, then after two more known transitions (Protocetid and Basilosaurus), finally ends as Cetaceans – modern whales. Besides, evolution itself is a fluid transitional process. All living species are currently in a state of “transition”.

3) Evolution can’t explain how life started.

Well, it’s not supposed to. The process in which life started that so many creationists talk about is something else all together called “abiogenesis.” This branch of science has many theories (I’m particular to the RNA world hypothesis) but has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution explains how species change over time through natural selection.

Having creationism (or its dressed-up inbred cousin, “intelligent design”) taught in any science class is detrimental to children’s cognitive development. If we teach kids that the earth is 6,000 years old, we’re teaching them that it’s okay to ignore empirical evidence. Being able to shape your beliefs on things that are testable and falsifiable is one of the most important skills anyone can learn.

The majority of creationist B.S. science comes from an unfounded fear of empiricalism, as a challenging of God. This false dichotomy has done nothing but embarrass religion by demonizing science. The danger of Griffin’s recent election is that she is in a position of authority. A position in which she can push for a religious agenda over a scientific one.

A recent study published in Science found that only 28% of high school biology teachers teach evolution, 13% teach creationism, and around 60% either skip the subject altogether or teach both. The most disturbing part of this statistic is the 60% that choose to mention creationism despite every major court case coming down against its teaching in public schools. While the vanguards of science were fighting the creationist in the classroom, these crafty bunch launched the “teach the controversy” campaign — a brilliant strategy that has led to the majority of high school biology teachers being too scared to do their jobs.

Despite what the Tea Party claims, this country was founded on secularism. The founding fathers felt so strongly that religion should be separate from public policy that they mentioned it in the First Amendment. Teaching creationism in public schools would give affirmation to a specific branch of fundamentalist Christianity — a direct contradiction to the Constitution.

Believe what you want, but remember: Reality is what exists in spite of your personal beliefs. And reality is what we need to teach our kids in school.

As you’ve no doubt heard from every other news outlet, this past Wednesday marked the first anniversary of Haiti’s unexpected earthquake. Once again, you’ve been bombarded by images of malnourished children, wailing mothers, and a devastated Port-au-Prince. Now, one year later, we have the added privilege of watching an outbreak of Cholera devastate those trapped in tent cities.

What you see far less of are the causes and policies which left Haiti so ill-equipped to handle the quake. Only a handful were willing to question why the Chilean quake (an 8.8 magnitude disaster, compared to Haiti’s 7) caused significantly less damage. Natural disasters are difficult to rationalize, especially for its victims. The 2010 quake in Haiti is no exception, but, as we mark the quake’s one year anniversary, we cannot forget that there are reasons why the damage was so severe. Sorry Pat Robertson, it has nothing to do with the devil — and everything to do with how the “developed world” views Haiti.

Immediately following the quake, an overwhelming percentage of the coverage sought to answer the following questions: How did you survive? Where did you go? Has the government done enough? Were you able to find your family? Direct and emotionally saturated, these questions only address the present and near future. One year later, much of the coverage centers around either the mismanagement of aid or the mounting health concerns. There’s one question we don’t hear too often though – How did things get this bad?

Why is food listed as a major import in a country once prized for its Edenic soil? Why must a tropical island fear mudslides and flooding due to deforestation? Why are tourists served fine imported food, at exclusive resorts, only miles away from some of the worst slums this side of Mumbai?

Sadly, the answers to these and many more important questions tend to be found only in a more academic setting. To fully answer them would require a mound of books and historical articles higher than Mount Sella. Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect every journalist and news anchor to become a sudden expert on a region following a natural disaster. Unfortunately, any coverage of Haiti becomes skewed and dangerous without this crucial understanding.

Combine this with the endless images of nameless victims, in addition to the constant reports of corruption and political scandal, and audiences are left with the impression that the fault somehow rests with the Haitian people themselves. We forget that, after their rebellion, Haiti was forced to pay France remittances for their lost property (i.e. the slaves and the profit they reaped). We ignore the following history of predatory loans introduced by the IMF, US AID and the World Bank. We don’t realize the damage done to local farming due to the heavy imports of highly subsidized products (such as rice and powdered milk) from the United States. We don’t imagine that pesky building codes scare away foreign corporations looking to build cheap, exploitative textile factories. Instead, we discuss whether or not to vacation in Haiti and debate the best ways to call, text or purchase our donations.

I hate to break it to you all, but nothing with the label “a percentage of the profit will benefit the relief effort in Haiti” will actually help. At best, it will ease that nagging guilt we experience whenever we see the aftermath. Haiti’s problems run much deeper than the fault lines left by the 2010 quake, and Haitians deserve to solve them alone. It’s heartening to hear Charles Ries, vice president of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, refer to Haiti’s 10 million residents as the country’s “most valuable resource,” and admit that “aid-dependent support is not sustainable.” I worry though, when I read about plans for new textile parks and reconstruction contracts being sold to foreign corporations, that the world has once again sought a short-sighted future.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on economics or foreign policy, and certainly have no catch-all solution to the problems briefly sketched above. What I have instead is an overactive empathy gland. If you really want to contribute to Haiti, your best bet is to educate yourself. That way, you’ll be fit to hold your representatives accountable for their policies enacted abroad, as well as avoid repeating harmful stereotypes and misconceptions.

Below, I’ve included links to videos, articles and reference material that give a more comprehensive view of the challenges facing Haiti. None of them are terribly long, but they’re all quite interesting. So, take some time and familiarize yourself with the people of Haiti. As we remember the earthquake that shook the world one year ago, I can think of no better way to honor the dead than by learning their history.

Unfortunately, at the start of 2010, a severe freeze swept over the state, threatening Florida’s crops. Farmers fought for their right to use water in excess of regulated limits so they could spray their crops and protect them. The Southwest Florida Water Management District allowed strawberry farmers in Plant City to pump an extra 1 billion gallons of groundwater from the Floridan Aquifer each day for 11 days. As a result of the rapid water draw-down, 760 residential wells went dry and 140 sinkholes were created.

A few months later, all the crops became ready to harvest and hit the market at once. Strawberry prices plummeted. Farmers chose to destroy the recently saved crops instead of harvesting them at a monetary loss.

As clean supplies of potable water dwindle across the globe, the debate over who owns the water and has rights to it has intensified.

The United Nations claims that water is fundamental to life and a precondition for the realization of human rights, yet more than 800 million people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, 2.6 billion have no access to basic sanitation and an average 1.5 million children under the age of five die every year from waterborne diseases.

Even in developed countries, water is becoming scarce. The St. John’s River Water Management District currently estimates that by the year 2030, the Northeastern part of Florida will need an extra 91 million gallons of water per day than can feasibly be pumped from groundwater sources without damaging the environment.

To make matters worse, the bottled water industry has been purchasing rights to extract water from spring and underground sources across the country for the last 20 years. By 2009, 22 bottling companies had established operations along Florida’s waterways, pumping anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million gallons per day. Bottle and brand label producers in the area utilize even more fresh water for their operations. In fact, producing the average bottle of water takes about five times the amount of water contained in the bottle.

Bottled water reports yearly profits of 50% to 200%, which are understandably high. The industry is able to buy cheap extraction permits from local water management districts and only needs to comply with voluntary water treatment standards, which lowers their capital costs.

In 2005 and 2009, The Florida Senate and Governor Charlie Crist, respectively, proposed a state extraction tax on bottling companies, which would have netted about $56 million a year in state revenues. Industry representatives argued that they were being singled out and proposed a state sales tax instead. However, a large portion of the water bottled in Florida is shipped and sold outside the state’s borders, including the Dasani water that Coca Cola bottles nearby from Ginnie Springs. The extraction tax law never passed.

Water is a limited resource. Its proper allocation needs to be enforced or Florida’s world-renowned springs will run dry.

In future editions of The Fine Print, the effects of lax water protection laws, rapid urbanization and the trend to buy bottled water will be explored. Claims from the industry, as well as community activist groups, will be analyzed. Hold your breath.

DOD grants at universities pose a moral dilemma to researchers as they try to weigh the negative and positive implications of their work. There is a lot at stake for the university community as its institutions take on expanding roles to produce the knowledge that has materialized the technology age.

“University research accounts for half of the new technology in the world,” said Dr. Win Phillips, vice president of research at the University of Florida.

University research yields knowledge and technology worth billions of dollars to the U.S. military each year.

DOD has more than doubled the funding at UF over the last decade to $32 million, adjusting for inflation. This, compared to a 32 percent increase in overall research at UF, highlights an increasing acceptance of military research on university campuses.

“All research is important,” Phillips said, adding that more funding from DOD is welcome. “[Research] is a knowledge issue and not a social issue.”

The swell of military funding for research is reminiscent of the Cold War era, when universities were used as breeding grounds for missile guidance systems and chemical and biological weapons like Agent Orange and Coxiella.

Although almost no defense research at universities is this hostile today, it is still used in both military and commercial applications. The ever-increasing defense budget for the U.S. is a strong and consistent source for research money on most college campuses.

“Part of what the military is doing is investing in scientific manpower,” said Dr. Stephen Senturia, a retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology research professor in electrical engineering. “There is always a cynical side to this.”

With limited resources available, some professors will take any research money, even if the research seems loutish or lacks altruism.

Dr. Bhavani Sankar, a professor of 24 years in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UF, said a growing problem in the national university system is professors taking on research solely based on the pressure to do so; some professors write grant after grant without looking too far into what the research entails.

Senturia added that research money can be very competitive, and professors can “buy out of teaching by getting research.” He also said that much of the money in technological development today is in the military.

Senturia was a young researcher at MIT in 1969 and 1970 when students and professors, including Noam Chomsky, protested the university’s involvement in classified military research on the campus. Though Senturia did not partake in the protests or questionable research, he said it was a scary time for all at the university.

The protests, a mix of formal intellectual debate and organized campus marches, eventually caused the MIT administration to submit to many of the student demands. Most groups that performed classified research on military projects, including nuclear weapon improvements, were prohibited from continuing on campus.

“In times like those, you cannot pretend like things are normal, because they are not,” Senturia said.

Today, some research at universities is restricted to foreign graduate students, Senturia said. This conflicts with the belief that the “first and primary mission of a university is the dissemination and the assimilation of knowledge … and once you are in a university, you should be an equal,” he said.

UF currently has more than 5,000 international students from 130 countries, according to David Sammons, dean of the International Center. Most of these students are in graduate school and make up roughly 6 to 7 percent of the student body.

The International Traffic in Arms Regulations places restrictions on foreign nationals at public and private universities across the country. These restrictions include not being allowed to use certain equipment, enter particular rooms or use computers that hold “sensitive” information. They are allowed, however, to have an American use the equipment for them in order to obtain data vital to their research.

The restricted technologies and information are often dual-use and developed by the military for both commercial and defense pursuits. Because the technology could be used as weaponry, it is restricted to only qualified nations, companies and researchers.

“Most faculty would like to do their research in a manner that they didn’t have to worry about export control,” said Dr. David Norton, associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Engineering at UF.

Professors have the option to walk away from any research and to limit who they receive funding from, Norton said. Some professors even refuse money from DOD for “reasons of conscience” and “their own personal convictions.”

Much of UF’s military funding and certain government research funding are dependent on following the ITAR.

Professors can lose their jobs over this issue, and graduate students can be expelled. The university can be fined millions of dollars, and research contracts can be lost. Following these regulations requires a lot of energy and a conscious marginalizing of foreigners by the researchers who use these technologies.

“ITAR regulations are a pain in the ass,” said electrical engineering Ph.D. student Justin Zito. “You have to go through a bunch of red tape that slows down the research process.”

For researchers, ITAR ordinances seem to be more of a hassle than a conflict with the university’s mission, which includes creating “the broadly diverse environment necessary to foster multicultural skills and perspectives in its teaching and research.”

Many researchers agree that ITAR rules derive from the presence of military research on campuses. This research gets to universities by a coupling of government initiatives and the willingness of researchers to take defense ardor.

Universities with diverse student bodies can think toward many goals, both positive and negative. The broader struggle for researchers can be more pressing issues, such as the polluted Koppers Inc. industrial plant site here in Gainesville and the growing demand for food, clean water, land and energy across the world.

“It is important for [students] to grow up in a community that has a wider point of view,” Phillips said.

Whether this means accepting military research is the professor’s decision. For a foreign national, there is not much of a choice.

HOPE-less

We were in desperate need of a change.

This Charming Man
We first noticed him back in 2004. The speech he gave at the Democratic National Convention gave us serious butterflies, and ever since, our curiosity for this tall, dark and handsome beau only grew. Barack’s poise, his charm and his ability to speak eloquently without butchering the English language was beyond refreshing.
After the breakup with George, we thought we’d never get over our trust issues, but the man with the GQ smile and an IQ to match came seemingly out of nowhere to pick us up, dust us off, and invite us to ride into the sunset. “Is this real life?” we kept asking ourselves. But questioning what felt like true love was inconceivable at this point. It seemed like we had finally found THE ONE!

Love is Blind, Change is Hard
(Audible Sigh)
He promised to restore all that is righteous and pure, to put a puppy in every home and to generate enough green jobs for us to quit our foreign oil binge. He promised we would no longer have to pretend we’re Canadian while traveling Europe, and that he’d never hang around shady, war-loving assholes like Dick Cheney. We were head over heels, the ballots were cast, and two years later, the old adage stands: Love is blind.

OK, fine. Maybe our expectations were a little unrealistic. We wanted overnight peace and prosperity, but were met with the sobering fact that change ain’t easy. Barack’s attempt to heal our broken health was countered by the unrelenting power of the insurance lobby. Before he had a chance to bring up immigration reform, crazy Aunt Arizona proposed to SB 1070 all brown people out of the state, and only 18 months into our relationship half of America decided to go on an elephant ride, cheating us out of future chances for any semblance of progress.
It’s hard to admit, but Mother Common Sense was right, we can’t expect for one man to save us.

What Now?
America, honey, it’s been a tough decade. We were so damn ready to celebrate the end of the war(s), LGBT equality and universal health care that we put on our most fabulous dress and brightest lipstick. But two years later we were still sitting by the phone, waiting to hear that at least one of our hopes had been fulfilled. The faithful among us called for patience, they asked for us to praise the baby steps and forget the terrible compromises. The disappointed were inflicted by the awful disease of apathy and stopped dating altogether, while many felt the catastrophic urge to run back to our ex-lovers. Worst of all, a few of us gave up sanity and Tea-partied all the way to Glenn Beck rallies in a desperate search for someone to believe in.

In the end, admitting the obvious is empowering: No one is going to take care of us if we don’t take care of ourselves. It’s time to take off the sweatpants, put away the Ben & Jerry’s and stand on our own two feet. Continuing to wait for Mr. (or Ms.!) Right while our world crumbles is not what history prescribes in times of crises. And we should know, nothing has been handed to us by any of the men we’ve dated, whether liberal or conservative.

Remember, our grandmothers campaigned, organized and fought the good fight for decades before the good ol’ boys decided that a woman’s right to vote was worthy of a constitutional amendment. Our mothers sat at segregated lunch counters and marched in Washington to attain guaranteed civil rights for our brothers and sisters. Now it is our turn. We have plenty of worthy challenges ahead of us, and we are not waiting around for Obama, or anyone else, to hold our hands through the fire. We’re America the beautiful, damn it! And God knows we look our best when we invest in ourselves. So, dump the unrealistic hope of pretty boys with pretty promises, and don’t fall for the baseless fear of double-chinned foxes or mama grizzlies. It’s up to We, the people, to practice the democracy we preach.

“In a Democracy, the people get the government they deserve” – Alexis de Tocqueville.

Many UF students are not aware of the power Student Government has to shape their campus experience. This isn’t high school, where they simply plan cute parties. UF’s SG is modeled off the state constitution and controls a $14 million budget. (For a complete list of SG’s powers, visit www.thefineprintuf.org/sg.)

Such a large sum of money could have some serious impact. SG is in a position to provide a voice for the students, to challenge the administration, improve the campus life and to provide a forum for vibrant debate about the inner workings of the school’s activities and potential platforms.

In reality, however, it seldom works that way. Most students don’t ever get a glimpse of, much less a say in, the endeavors of SG. The reason? They think it doesn’t matter. They opt not to get involved. Most of them don’t even vote.

In the last 10 years, the turnout rate in SG elections has barely ever reached more than 20 percent. In the fall of 2009, only 17 percent of students voted, and in 2002, the number was as low as 6.4 percent. Not even one-fifth of the student population gets out and votes. That’s roughly 40,000 voices unaccounted for.

When no one pays attention, nothing changes. Because nothing changes, no one sees any reason to pay attention. The result is the stagnation of the representative body for students.

When turnout is that low, winning elections is easy. A large enough group of people who’ve sworn loyalty oaths to one another, can quickly cobble together the few thousand votes necessary to win. There is a common perception that the Greeks control SG, and this is why.

Other cliques have come to play the game, too. And so fraternities and sororities, along with a handful of other groups, including many of the ethnic-student organizations, have come to dominate campus politics and activities. They’re used to winning elections, and divvying up the spoils. Their members swap cabinet positions for homecoming pairings and Student Senate seats for spots on the committee that plans Gator Growl.

Back scratching and back-room deals make it difficult to break through the corrupt politics and bring about fresh ideas. SG’s “legacy positions-” campus leadership roles traditionally controlled by a certain Greek house or other organization – are one clear example of how this system works. According to the Independent Student Foundation (a group working to end this system of patronage), these traditions are hard to break. “For example, a huge number (over 80 percent) of ACCENT Chairs over the last 20 years have been members of Alpha Epsilon Pi.”

Behind the scenes, this system revolves around Florida Blue Key, a leadership honorary society with lots of members in influential positions in big-time Florida politics (though its grip on state government has been receding recently). People in SG seek FBK honors, which they believe will help them launch their political careers. As a result, they spend lots of energy trying to build support among a network of good-ole-boys (which in recent decades has come to include a few girls).

That makes them unlikely to challenge the status quo. It also explains why they don’t support policies like online voting, which would loosen the grip of the political machine by making it easier for students who aren’t being dragged to the polls by their brothers, sisters or organization leaders to participate.

In recent years, students have helped challenge the university to become a better place. Student government helped the university to partner with the City of Gainesville to expand bus service on campus and pushed a ballot initiative in which students voted to help fund the program. As a result, students can take advantage of local public transportation for free.

Student Government does fund and can fund other valuable services such as Student Legal Services, RecSports, Gator Nights, free bike repair, ACCENT speakers, the bus transportation services and SNAP.

In the Spring of 2010, student government declined to support students who were pushing UF to join the Worker Rights Consortium. Instead, the students challenged the administration on their own, and UF ultimately supported the initiative as part of its push for social sustainability. In the past year, companies like Nike and Russel Athletic, feeling the heat from college campuses around the country, have been forced to improve their treatment of workers who make university athletic apparel. The lesson? When students speak up, there’s always a chance the administration will listen and that good will come of it.

But if student leaders are too busy trying to catch the eye of a powerful alumni network instead of listening to the student body as a whole, they’re often reluctant to challenge the people in charge – even when the university stands to benefit in the long run. By getting involved – or simply by showing up to vote – you force them to listen.

Don’t stay clueless about the capabilities of SG, realize that it is something worth taking part in. What would you do with $14 million? We all can – and should – have a say.

Think of all of the awesome things we could do with $14 million. Here are some ideas. What are yours? Submit them at www.thefineprintuf.org/sg.

• There should be an open forum for students to discuss ideas and see what goes on with the money. Set up a website for online discussions and brainstorming, and let students track where their money is going in real time.
• Provide more scrutiny of Aramark’s campus food service monopoly, instead of relying on toothless advisory committees with a handful of student members. Research ways we could model a campus food service pilot program on something like the Yale Sustainable Food Project. See page 22 (print edition) for more info.
• Create an official working group of students to connect UF to the Worker Rights Consortium. FSU joined the consortium before UF did but has since left the organization after students didn’t hold up their end of the bargain with the administration. To help ensure that Gator apparel isn’t made in sweat shops, the student body will have to remain engaged.
• Join other universities and bring a farmer’s market on campus.
• Support a successful alternative radio station to highlight local bands and political issues. See page 25 (print edition) for more info.
• Get the students involved in nominating Accent speakers, so we don’t wind up offering $85,000 to Jeremy Piven (the star of HBO’s Entourage, who fortunately canceled). Also, let professors voice their input to bring people who have a focus on academic or intellectual discussion. Try soliciting donors to fund an endowment, so we can have a permanent source of funding for big-ticket speakers, instead of throwing away $500,000 each year.
• Improve the SG website and actually update it regularly, with meeting notices and other events. Some people don’t get the memos about what’s going on.

*For more ideas, or to submit your own, visit www.thefineprint.org/sg.

More than 6,000 Gainesville residents ride a bicycle, and the city was rated the 16th most bike friendly city by Bicycling Magazine in 2010.

Bicycle commuters make a powerful statement about the world in which they wish to live. As stewards of this movement, we have a responsibility to commute in a way that is not just safe, but considerate of fellow community members.

Bike commuters who disregard the rights of other road users will foster driver distrust, make the roadways more dangerous and hinder progress toward a more bike-friendly city. To play a part in building a more bikeable Gainesville, follow these guidelines for safe, sensible and sustainable bike commuting:

1. Know the rights-of-way. In most cases, Florida law requires that bicyclists who use the road abide by the same rules and regulations as motorists, but bicyclists who ride on the sidewalk are considered pedestrians. Cyclists should recall what they learned in Driver’s Ed about the rules of the road, since most of the same rules apply. Signals and signs dictate the right of way in most situations, and pedestrians have priority at all crosswalks and intersections. If in doubt, consult the Official Florida Driver’s Handbook.

2. Ride on the road. As motorists pull out into the road from a parking lot or side street, they often fail to notice bicyclists that are approaching on the sidewalk. Riding on the road ensures that you are in the field of vision of drivers who are looking out for oncoming vehicles before pulling into the roadway. Although it is legal for cyclists to ride on the sidewalk, doing so may risk not only your safety but the safety of pedestrians. Use your best judgment as to when riding on the sidewalk is safer than riding on the road.

3. Ride on the right-hand side. Whether riding on the road or on the sidewalk, it is always safer to ride on the right-hand side, along with traffic. If you are moving with the flow of traffic, it is more likely that motorists and other bicyclists will see you.

4. Make eye contact. Always make eye contact with motorists before crossing in front of them. Failing to do so could land you on the windshield of an unsuspecting driver’s car. If you are not sure a driver has seen you, yield or stop until they clarify their intentions.

5. Ride a safe distance away from parallel parked cars. Street-parked cars pose a safety hazard to bicyclists riding on the road, since car doors can open unexpectedly. Prevent car-door collisions by riding far enough to the left of the lane to avoid open doors.

6. Signal. Few bicyclists signal when approaching intersections, but making your intentions known can go a long way to easing tensions with motorists who often view cyclists as unpredictable. To signal, simply point left or right when you are within 100 feet of a turn.

7. Take bike-friendly roads when possible. Some streets are safer to bike on than others. For example, SW 2nd Avenue features spacious bike lanes, good visibility and large roundabouts that make collisions unlikely. Gainesville’s Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Board is currently working to convert more streets in the Northwest part of town into “Bicycle Boulevards” that are optimized for safer cycling.

8. Say thank you. When a motorist yields the right of way to you, show that you appreciate their patience by putting up your hand and thanking them. This is a simple way to establish a more friendly relationship between bicyclists and motorists in Gainesville.

9. Visit local bike shops. If you can, avoid the temptation to snag a cheap bike at Wal-Mart and make an investment in a reliable bicycle from one of Gainesville’s many local bike shops. Make it a point to find a bike that suits you well, both physically and spiritually. Check the local Craigslist or visit a bike shop around campus, whether Chain Reaction, Mr. Goodbike, Spin Cycle, Recycled Bicycles or the Schwinn Shop.

10. Enjoy the trails. Other than transportation, the bicycle offers opportunities for exercise and enjoyment, especially in Gainesville, which is home to several trails converted from train tracks through the Rails-to-Trails program. Trails include the Waldo Road Greenway, the Depot Avenue Trail and the Hawthorne Trail.

11. Stop at Stop signs. Running a Stop sign is a ticketable offense in Florida, where a motorist and a bicyclist face equal fines for failing to stop completely. Nevertheless, repetitive stops are draining for cyclists who lose balance and momentum, and the energy required to regain them. Many cyclists treat stop signs as yield signs if only to preserve the small amount of forward motion required to maintain efficiency. The Gainesville city commission is considering a proposal for a “Bike Stop Ordinance,” which I am working on, that would make it legal for a bicyclist to approach sign-regulated intersections by slowing down, looking both ways and proceeding if there are no cars or pedestrians. Failure to yield would remain a ticketable offense under the ordinance. A similar “Stop Law” has been in effect in Idaho for 27 years with no increase in cycling accidents.

12.  Don’t drink and bike. Though it may be tempting to ride a bike instead of drive home from a late-night party, be aware that drunk biking is considered drunk driving under Florida law, and either offense could get you arrested and charged with a DUI.

From Tim Tebow to “Don’t Taze me Bro!” to its adoption of America’s first solar feed-in tariff program, Gainesville is no stranger to the national spotlight. But nothing in this town has set off a worldwide media firestorm like a local eBay furniture business with a congregation of about two dozen.

That outfit goes by the name Dove World Outreach Center and prefers that we call it a church, although most churches don’t fill their sanctuaries with lamp shades and shrink-wrapped sofas, or have their preachers castigate their congregations for failing to load trucks properly.

Then again, most churches don’t get denounced by the American Association of Evangelicals or scoped out by the FBI. But most churches also don’t have “outreach” programs that get featured on CNN and the Daily Show, or garner headlines from England to Indonesia.

In case you haven’t heard, Dove World has designated Sept. 11 “International Burn a Qur’an Day,” the latest in a long string of hate-filled publicity stunts that have driven away members of its congregation faster than its members can ship off antique end-tables.

Before this, Dove World had its “No Homo Mayor” campaign (targeting Craige Lowe, who was eventually elected Gainesville’s first openly gay mayor in a tight race in which students were the deciding factor).

Before that, it was “Islam is of the Devil” T-shirts (which got some of the congregation’s children sent home from their elementary schools).

Last year on 9/11, while many of the town’s Muslims were busy handing out food to homeless people on the Downtown Community Plaza, Dove World targeted them with another hateful protest. No holy books were burned, and the hatemongers got the attention they deserved. Everyone pretty much ignored them.

This year, Dove World’s congregation is shrinking. Former members have handed over damning documents to the Gainesville Sun. The bank has called in its mortgage, and Pastor Terry Jones has warned his flock that Dove World’s insurance policy may soon be canceled.

Meanwhile, the shock value of their T-shirts and sign-waving has worn away. Whenever they launch into protest near businesses owned by people who look Middle Eastern, only the TV news vans pay them any heed.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and what remains of Dove World’s membership has discovered that its salvation can only come at the hands of the news media.

So this year, on the ninth anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, they’re planning their most outrageous spectacle yet. So far the results have been, in the words of Dove World Pastor Terry Jones, “a blessing.” Headlines in many US papers, plus the UK’s Guardian and Daily Mail. Hits by the hundreds of thousands across the international blogosphere. Even a smattering of cable news segments.

Unfortunately, with all this attention, the jig may be up. Now film crews are coming from Turkey and Cyprus, and at least one plans to be rolling during an upcoming Sunday service. As Jones himself put it, it’s a shame that they’ll soon realize how few people support what he’s doing.

The flames of religious hatred can be fueled by so few only with the help of people like us. If you’re looking to do your part to extinguish intolerance, consider joining members of Gainesville’s Muslim community for the fasts, feasts and charity work they’ve planned for this September.

Leave the book-burners where they belong: alone, on a miserable plot of land sliding toward foreclosure, beneath the cold glow of the TV cameras.

This year on 9/11, I hope to see you downtown.

Jessica Newman: What is Grow Radio, and where did you get the idea?

Bill Bryson: Well, going way back, I was involved in college radio in North Carolina and got my taste in radio from that. Music has always been my passion, so it was just a natural outlet for me. Then I moved to Gainesville to open up a live music club. Then over the years, being in concert promotion and publishing a magazine, I kind of evolved into radio as the next wave of what I’m doing here. I moved here in ’92, and between ’92 and 2008 or 2009, there wasn’t a lot of success with alternative radio in town. There had been pirate radio even long before I was here, coming and going. You kind of had to be in the know to get them. Then I helped the Civic Media Center get their low-power FM license, which has its limitations, as well. Then Kiss 105 let Wayne Erwin run their AM signal as an alternative community radio in the mid-’90s, as well. It was successful enough to indicate to me that there was demand for it in the community. Over the years, there have been a few attempts to get a student-run station going, but it’s never really gone anywhere. Then Classic 89 has always been an option, I thought, that could have really taken advantage of community resources to create more locally generated programming because they had a couple of shows like that. But it was limited in terms of the air time they were getting. They could have dedicated a lot more energy and effort to that for minimal input expense-wise and probably maximum output.
Grow Radio has evolved out of a combination of all those things. I want to make it into a hybrid in terms of the model of the station between community radio and student-run college radio. I’m going to try and fill the daytime shifts with college kids and give them as much of an educational, as well as an enjoyable, experience with it. We’ve also gotten started just by me tapping some of my immediate resources as far as people in the music community. We’ll have a good balance of community members who aren’t necessarily affiliated with the university and students that are affiliated with the university. Commercial radio now is very automated; program selection is very much determined from the top down. There’s very little DJ input in terms of what you’re hearing on the air, if there’s any DJ at all. Sometimes it’s all just computer-generated. So my point with this is to get human beings back behind the media. With that in mind, even though we’re using the Internet as our medium, we are operating as a local radio station. I think we can have a small but relatively significant impact as a local station, just in a different medium as opposed to FM. I believe in the power of radio; I believe radio can really reach people, even without visuals. Having a real person talking to you, especially someone that’s from Gainesville, presenting a very Gainesville perspective on what they’re broadcasting, creates the locality of it and creates the uniqueness of it that hopefully people will embrace here.

JN: Why did you decide to do Grow Radio online?

BB: Over time, the benefits of being on the web are just going to expand in terms of: if people are listening to this radio station while they’re living in Gainesville, and they move someone else in the world, they can still tune into their Gainesville station. And you talk about the Gator Nation; it’s all over the world. So eventually Grow Radio could have an expansive audience all over the world. It’s not our primary focus, but I think that’s just, down the road, what’s probably going to happen. The technology of podcasting just creates lots of options for the listener in terms of how they want to receive their radio, as well. So I think all those things combined are kind of what is creating Grow Radio. It’s still very much embryonic right now, and it’s going to evolve based on who gets involved, what kind of community support comes forward and so on.

JN: What kind of a business model are you using?

BB: We’re setting it up as a 501(c)3, so we’ll operate on the same model as public radio. We’ll be reliant upon listener donations for support, as well as grants and any other kind of sponsorship money we can get.

JN: When did Grow Radio go live online?

BB: We went live about a year ago. This past year has been kind of an experiment to see with very little promotion whether this idea would get legs or not, and it seems like it has.

JN: What kind of success have you guys had so far?

BB: I’m very encouraged. We’ve noticed a lot of people listening from work. And I think, once students become more aware and interested, that we’ll see a lot more listeners coming from UF.

JN: What kind of programming is there on Grow Radio, and what kind of people are on the air?

BB: Right now it’s mostly music, but we’ve got a couple of monthly shows that are not musical right now. I think they’re kind of figuring out what they’re doing as they go along, and that’s great. That’s sort of what this is about — teaching people who have an interest in creating something within the community. They can learn something from it, as well as get some reward by contributing something to the community. A few people have been on the radio before. But for the most part, it’s starting from scratch. So our production side of things is a little bit clunky and pretty loose. But personally, I find that charming. It keeps it fairly organic and grassroots because we’re letting people do this regardless of their experience. If they have the passion and the interest to do something like this, then here’s the platform for it.

JN: Why does Grow Radio need to exist, and why is it important to Gainesville?

BB: It’s real personal for me. Music has always been a really important part of my life, through both my personal and my business life. I think through both of those avenues I’ve learned that I’m not the only one. It can help a community flourish, not just by adding to the musical culture, but also creating a platform like I’ve been describing where the community can actually get involved with this and give people the opportunity to create a creative culture within their own community without having to be a performer or a filmmaker or a writer.

At least that’s how I imagine it. Like every other night here. Seamless, sticky hours of loose tongues and rowdy sidewalks. Christmas lights in the banyan trees. Long legs, bleached hair and teeth, and the collared boys who love them. This island is a hideout. The beginning and the end. Mile 0. Time passes only as a series of classic rock covers and vague impressions.

Duval is just like any other Spring Break street, with the doors flung open and the tanned shoulders spilling from their halter tops. The girl on the bar is too young to know the songs she’s dancing to. Hungry faces slouch at her feet, suck down pints and slide dollar bills beneath her garter. Outside, the pedicabs and taxis hustle by. The cops grope their belt buckles and lean in the alleys to spit.

Everyone is on vacation, even the locals. They carry their drinks from corner to corner, scream and lust and vomit, and no one notices. The spiky-haired hippy chicks with the homemade tattoos and the banjos on their backs, the Navy boys on their scooters, the bikers and sailors and fishermen all struggling to hold their liquor and let everything else go. They’re escaping something, searching for a way to lose themselves in this tropic limbo and linger like another grain of sand, another buoy tangled in the mangroves.

No one wants the story to end. They drink enough to forget what they have read or tear out the pages and tuck them away. Paradise, after all, is a matter of perspective. It lasts only so long as there is ice for the rum.

The notorious UF budget cuts have brought opportunity to another institution.
While the cuts have affected every college in the university in some way – some more than others – they’ve had a particularly interesting effect on UF’s award-winning Documentary Institute, which will permanently close its doors at the end of the spring semester and move to Wake Forest University.
Among the long list of accolades for the Institute are five documentaries aired nationally by PBS, as well as multiple Student Emmy and Student Academy Award nominations and wins.
“They were an excellent program,” said John W. Wright, dean of the College of Journalism and Communications at UF. “[But] we had to make a choice.”

The $250,000 a year that was allocated to the Institute accounted for 48 percent of the total available “expense” (or non-salary) budget for the entire college, Wright said, which was distributed by the state in the amount of approximately $525,000 before the budget cuts in public education. When the college lost this money as a result of statewide cuts, according to information received in an e-mail from Wright, it included the $250,000 allocated to the documentary program.
The department had several meetings with the program representatives to make a decision that was best for the college, he said. Every possible solution was considered, but in the end, everyone agreed that the decision to cut the Institute was the best one.

“Documentary programs are wonderful. They are essential, but they are expensive,” Wright said. “If the college still had funds, it would still have the Documentary Institute.”
But many of the Institute’s 20 students weren’t very supportive of the decision.
“The kind of administration we have doesn’t put much emphasis on the arts, and for me, that’s unfortunate,” said Jon Bougher, a graduate student in the Institute. “Obviously there was a recession countrywide, but people were looking at the recession as a cover to make cuts they wanted to make for a while.”

Bougher said that the documentary is crucial in the world of media, and by losing the program, the college will be losing something essential.
“How much do people really get from interviews?” he said. “Documentaries cover all different shades of gray that journalism doesn’t cover.”
But it is not only students who have protested against the closure of the Institute. Professors agree with the students that this was a bad choice for the college to make.
“I think it was not a good decision; this was a nationally ranked program,” said Sandra Dickson, co-director of the Institute who has joined the Wake Forest documentary program. “Anytime you eliminate a nationally ranked program, I think you lose something. It was not a popular decision, and I think people around the country were shocked.”

Dickson is not alone in her opinion. Churchill Roberts, a UF professor and co-director of the Institute, expressed similar thoughts.
“Another person once told me that really good universities protect their best programs,” Roberts said. “They would never get rid of them.”
While UF Institute students and professors seem upset, the professors at Wake Forest are thrilled to have the UF documentary program join their team. Professor Mary Dalton explained how grateful she is for having “the opportunity to take one of the top 10 programs.”
The UF program had a tremendous track record, Dalton said. She said the opportunity to bring a program of that caliber to Wake Forest was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“I’m happy that the program has found a new home and will continue to produce important work,” she said.

The documentary program at UF was a nationally known program, and any college that is looking to expand its reputation might be interested in it, Bougher said.
“Wake Forest was interested in making a mark for themselves, and they made a great choice,” he said.

When asked how Wake Forest acquired the documentary program, Wright responded by e-mail: “There was no auction or anything of the sort. The truth is that I don’t know any of the details of how the program landed at Wake Forest. I’m just delighted that they found a new home!”
Wake Forest is offering UF students a tuition deal that is hard to beat, Roberts said. They will only have to pay about $5,000 for tuition, rather than the $30,000 regular students have to pay.
“Looking back, it would have been better if the documentary program had been in a different college,” Roberts said. “I don’t think the new dean really understood documentary, and that’s unfortunate.”

And in a dramatic turn of events, the social rejects learned: no matter how much they cry and scream about Greeks, the rest of campus just doesn’t care

For most people, this was never about Greeks. Though the the scandal has revealed the suspicion some Greeks and so-called “independents” seem to have for each other, that’s not the real story. We’ve received plenty of comments and e-mails suggesting that people want to know more about the campus political machine and the role of Florida Blue Key, an honorary society for UF student leaders.

The fight between the political machine and those who vow to destroy it, like the feud between Greeks and non-Greeks, has long been a non-issue for everyone except a few obsessive extremists on both sides. But every so often, some scandal brings the matter to a head.

SG’s $14 million budget and access to the coveted resume lines conferred by campus leadership positions are controlled by a system of back-room deals. Perhaps more people would care if they could see how that system works. Thanks to court documents stored in the vault of the Alachua County Courthouse, we can.

In the mid-nineties, Charlie Grapski, by most accounts an anti-Florida Blue Key zealot, launched a campaign for president of the student body. FBK members working on behalf of the FOCUS party (the Unite Party circa 1995, its name an acronym for Fuck Off Charlie, U Suck), published fliers on campus with a falsified version of Grapski’s criminal record suggesting he was a child molester.

FBK has long sought to dispell the notion that it plays any role student government elections. Grapski sued the group, along with several of its members, for defamation. For the honorary society to be held liable, Grapski had to prove that FBK was materially involved in supporting the FOCUS Party. The ensuing sworn depositions and testimony lifted the veil of the campus political machine.

In one deposition, former Student Body President Howard Christopher Thompkins explained the way representatives of Greek houses and other organizations, such as the Black Student Union, banded together into groups. House representatives, group leaders would divvy up various leadership positions – including student government positions, but also roles in organizing Homecoming, Gator Growl and other functions, based on who was able to “get out the vote” in SG elections. This is where the “I Voted” stickers discussed during the Unite Party meeting come into play.

Like the leadership positions themselves, admission into FBK depends on an applicant’s support of the system, because the organization admits mostly students who hold leadership positions, and as Thompkins put it, “people obviously support the people who support them.”

Thompkins Deposition, Part 1

Thompkins’ description is now a little out of date. Houses and other organizations no longer form “super-groups” like Pi-Tau or Alpha-Delt. The four groups he mentioned have, in effect, united.

During cross-examination, Thompkins went into greater detail about the group and house system:

Thompkins Deposition Part 2`

Thompkins said he had been a member of the SUN (Students Unite Now) party, and explained that the party names are routinely changed and recycled from year to year. Hence in recent years, the Swamp Party became the Gator Party, which became the Unite Party.

So-called “House Reps” coordinated the negotiations between different groups, according to testimony by Jackelyn Lee Speer, herself a former house rep for Alpha Delta Pi sorority:

Speer Testimony

In the recordings of the Unite Party meeting, people disperse after Part 1. Parts 2 and 3 record discussions between house reps.

Caroline Montanus of Kappa Kappa Gamma corroborated the descriptions of Speer and Thompkins:

KKG Testimony

As the Grapski case progressed, the honorary society’s involvement in SG politics was asserted many times over, as in this affidavit by disaffected former FBK member Clay Martin:

Clay Martin Affidavit

Ultimately, the judge in the case issued the following notice, which remains controversial to this day, in which he ruled that FBK had historically been involved in student government elections, and declared that it was up to the jury to decide whether the honorary had supported the FOCUS Party in particular:

Judicial Notice

In its verdict, the jury found FBK guilty of both defamation and conspiracy to defame, which would indicate that the honorary did materially support the FOCUS party:

Verdict

However, FBK appealed the decision, arguing the judge was biased and, by issuing the notice posted above, had effectively decided the crucial matter of FBK’s involvement himself, instead of leaving it up to the jury. The honorary’s president-elect, J. Ryan Chandler, stated the case in an open letter posted on campus. He wrote that he was confident FBK would win on appeal, and warned “those who would tear Florida Blue Key Down, YOU WILL NEVER WIN.”

FBK Letter to Student Body

In a sense, Chandler was correct. No jury ever ruled on the appeal. Grapski settled for $85,000 and went on to press his case against the individuals who made the defamatory flier. As a result of the settlement, the case against FBK was dismissed:

Dismissal

We’ll never know how the case would have been decided if it had not been settled. For his part, Grapski had successfully generated a trove of sworn testimony supporting his contention that FBK actively manipulated student government elections, while the honorary society ended a multi-year legal battle that, according this letter to its members, had begun to deplete its coffers:

FBK Letter Seeking Funds

To this day, Chandler’s assertion holds true. The system has been reformed, to become more open and democratic and also more unified. The specific role of FBK in campus elections may not have been definitively established in court, but the organization’s involvement was beside the point. The Grapski case made the workings of the campus political machine a matter of public record, available from the Alachua County Clerk of the Court under case no. 95-4412-CA.

The real significance of the Unite Party recordings has nothing to do with a supposed feud between Greeks and non-Greeks. The recordings show that the political machine, run by Greek houses along with other groups, remains intact to this day.

Note: Follow The Fine Print’s complete coverage of the festival, which runs March 19 through March 24, here.

Environmental journalist Trish Riley has lived in Gainesville for three years. The one thing that bothered her was what seemed like a lack of environmental news, especially regarding local issues. In the summer of 2008, while signing books at Goering’s Book Store, she asked the audience, “How green is Gainesville, anyway?”

Everyone in the audience, which included UF students and Gainesville residents, had a story to tell about some kind of grassroots project they were working on, but not a single person knew about anyone else’s project. What the community needed, she realized, was the opportunity to get together and combine their efforts. Without widespread awareness, this could not happen.

“I realized there’s not much environmental news that makes its way through this town,” Riley said.

She started a web site called GoGreenNation.org, a resource for environmental awareness, and a Gainesville chapter of Green Drinks, an international organization for people interested in living sustainable lives. Her goal was to post information on every environmental project in the community so concerned citizens could gather and collaborate.

Green Drinks started meeting on the first Wednesday of every month. At first, there were only three members. By December 2009, there were 60 people at the organization’s first anniversary. This is where she met Shirley Lasseter, the cinema director of the Hippodrome State Theatre.

“I told her we need to have an environmental film fest,” Riley said. “There are so many cool movies that don’t show up in Gainesville, you know, because they’re not Avatar.”

Lasseter had been thinking the same thing. She enjoyed showing documentaries, but they were a hard sell. She and Riley worked together to create something new in order to open people’s eyes.

On March 19, their creation will come to life: The First Annual Gainesville Environmental Film and Arts Festival. It’s a 10-day celebration of the earth and its resources – a chance to learn about the problems the earth is facing and how to build a better future.

“It’s all about positive personal action,” Lasseter said. “We were careful to choose films that give you a way out, that give you an idea, that provide light at the end of the tunnel.”

The festival will be more than just a series of films. Everyone will have the opportunity to speak with local experts in the lobby of the Hippodrome about what can be done in Gainesville to make a difference. There will be long feature films, as well as short ones. Topics include environmental history, overfishing, green building construction, plastic, soil, lawn fertilization, the importance of organic farming and organic foods, herbal medicine, phosphate mining (a huge issue in southwest Florida), water contamination, vegetarianism, and alternative energy, among others.

“We’re planning to have special organic treats and goodies on certain movie nights from local farmers and local restaurants,” Lasseter said.

On March 27, there will be an Eco Fair at the Sun Center with vendors, community organizations, musicians, artists and eco-dancers. The Heart of Florida Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, as part of a Haiti relief project, will demonstrate how to build an “earth bag home,” a sustainable, earthquake-resistant shack. The materials required to build an entire shack can fit neatly into a rain barrel. The goal of the project, known as Barrels of Hope, is to send rain barrels filled with supplies to Haiti, thereby providing people with a means of shelter and water collection.

The Alachua Department of Environmental Protection will sell rain barrels at the fair. A rain barrel is a 55-gallon drum that can be put underneath agutter system. It captures rainwater, which can then be used instead of sprinklers to irrigate a lawn.

“Fresh water is a finite resource, and to pour half of it on the ground, as we do in Florida, is crazy,” Riley said.

On March 28, there will be nature outings with local professional tour guides. Throughout the festival, all of Gainesville’s most prominent galleries (basically, everyone who participates in Art Walk), will showcase art with a focus on ecology and sustainability. Lorelei Esser, a self-taught sustainability artist, and Chris Fillie, a co-manager of the South Main Community Arts Center, have been working together to rally local artists behind the festival.

The gallery at the Hippodrome will feature work by local eco-artists, like John Moran, as well as work by Dom Martino, a renowned Gainesville photographer who recently passed away, leaving a legacy of beautiful pictures that highlight the plants and wildlife of Paine’s Prairie.

The films and art will come together to serve a unified purpose.

“My goal is to spread environmental education to the community,” Riley said. “This festival is an extension of that work for me.”

The Fine Print has learned that Reitz Union officials are actively involved in funding and supporting the Renew Your Reitz campaign – the one with all those green banners and T-Shirts seen all over campus. They want us to “Vote Yes and Yes” for a Reitz Union expansion and new student fees that won’t be covered by Bright Futures or the Florida Prepaid Scholarship Fund.

It makes sense they would support a ballot initiative that benefits their organization. The problem is that they are a public agency, and Florida election law states:

106.113 Expenditures by local governments.–

(1) As used in this section, the term:

(a) “Local government” means:

1. A county, municipality, school district, or other political subdivision in this state; and

2. Any department, agency, board, bureau, district, commission, authority, or similar body of a county, municipality, school district, or other political subdivision of this state.

The Reitz Union and its board of managers appear to meet this definition.

(b) “Public funds” means all moneys under the jurisdiction or control of the local government.

(2) A local government or a person acting on behalf of local government may not expend or authorize the expenditure of, and a person or group may not accept, public funds for a political advertisement or electioneering communication concerning an issue, referendum, or amendment, including any state question, that is subject to a vote of the electors. This subsection does not apply to an electioneering communication from a local government or a person acting on behalf of a local government which is limited to factual information.

Members of the Student Alliance have filed an injunction claiming the campaign violates the law. They have asked the 8th Circuit Court to compell the UF administration and the Reitz Union Board of Managers to stop distributing campaign materials and to disclose how much public money they’ve spent to persuade students to vote for higher fees. “We’re not out to punish UF,” said Jonathan Ossip, a Student Alliance leader who helped submit the injunction.

Update: The 8th Circuit Court denied the Student Alliance’s motion to halt the Renew Your Reitz campaign. The case will continue after the election.

A recent e-mail from Jaleesa Joseph, the Student Chair of the Reitz Union Board of Managers to leaders of student groups in support of the same campaign raises questions about another Florida election law:

104.31 Political activities of state, county, and municipal officers and employees.–

(1) No officer or employee of the state, or of any county or municipality thereof, except as hereinafter exempted from provisions hereof, shall:

(a) Use his or her official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with an election or a nomination of office or coercing or influencing another person’s vote or affecting the result thereof.

Here is Joseph’s e-mail in its entirety:

From: “Center for Student Activities & Involvement”
Date: February 19, 2010 8:53:13 AM EST
Subject: IMPORTANT MESSAGE from the Chair of the Board of Managers

As the Chair of the J. Wayne Reitz Union Board of Managers, I am reaching out to you – students that are familiar with the concept of service – for your help and support for the upcoming Reitz Union referendum. The Reitz Union was built in 1967, and since that time, it has become outdated and deficient to the current students needs. Consequently, the Reitz Union now requires $42.5 million dollars in structural and mechanical repairs. Without this capital investment, it’s very realistic that the Reitz Union will not be able to keep the doors open. Thus, we need your help and support to repair and rebuild the home of the students – J. Wayne Reitz Union. In the next week, we have organized a marketing campaign focused on educating the student body on not only the deficiencies of the current Union, but also the future benefits of tomorrow’s Union. Tomorrow’s Union will truly be the tangible result of today’s students’ dreams. Some of the future benefits that student organizations specifically can expect in tomorrow’s Union include:

• An Entire Floor Dedicated to Individual Organizational Suites
including lounge space and conference Rooms
• Individual Storage Space for all Student Organizations
• New Multipurpose Meeting Rooms
including Performance and Dance Spaces
• 24-Hour Access to your Organizational Suite
• An Expanded Free Printing Lab
Including oversized banners and glossy flyers
• A 1,500 Seat Auditorium
• More Restaurant Selections
including More Ethnic Options and a Sports Bar & Grill
• A New Parking Garage (750 Spaces)
including 75 free 30 min. Parking Spaces

However, none of this is possible without your help. As leaders of your respective organizations, we need your support and feedback. We have an opportunity to come together as a student body, build our dream Student Union, and leave a lasting legacy.

I would like to encourage you and the members of your organization to visit our website at www.RenewYourReitz.com, where you can get more information on the Union and also sign up to volunteer. Most importantly, I would like to encourage you and your members to go out and vote “Yes and Yes” for the Reitz Union referendum questions on Tuesday, February 23rd and Wednesday, February 24th.

Leave a legacy and Vote “Yes and Yes” for a better student experience.

Go Gators!

Jaleesa Joseph

Never mind that neither Joseph nor anyone else is in a position to promise the “ethnic” restaurants or 1,500-seat auditoriums, since specific plans for the expansion have not been released yet. The real problem is that Joseph is acting in her official capacity to influence the outcome of a referendum.

The Fine Print is awaiting replies from Reitz officials (Executive Director Eddie Daniels was not in the office today). The Office of Student Affairs, whose name is attached to the following video promoting the fee, did not respond to two phone calls seeking comment and said a reply would come on Monday.

Update: As you can see, the video has been taken down.

Imagine Your Union Main from UF Student Affairs on Vimeo.

Here’s copy of the injunction filed by members of the Student Alliance:

SAinjuction

Check back for updates, and follow the Fine Print’s complete coverage of the Reitz Union expansion.

In January, UF’s Office of the Provost awarded the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, SPOHP, with a $150,000 grant for a three-year research project that involves conducting and transcribing interviews in Alachua County and surrounding areas with black Americans who came of age during legal segregation. Most of the interviews will be conducted by UF students and put into a database accessible to students all over the world.

“There’s a real need to document black history in this part of the country,” said Paul Ortiz, 45, director of SPOHP. “The people who can tell us what life was like back then are rapidly passing away.”

With Florida’s long history of segregation, it is critical to make a subjective record of the time before it is too late, Ortiz said.

“The bottom line is that people who came of age during Brown v. Board are starting to pass away, and only they can tell us what it was like to live back then,” he said. “It is a tremendous civics lesson that we can learn from them.”

The idea of the project came about from a collective need for the material.

“It definitely is not an idea that we came up with ourselves,” Ortiz said. “Teachers call us all the time to demand documents on African-American history.”

Even though there is no shortage of books on black history, there is no written record of people who experienced segregation first-hand. Participants in the program believe that preserving the memories of these individuals would be a good investment for the future needs of scholars, as well as a good wake-up call for those who take their civil rights for granted.

Sherry DuPree, one of the program’s interviewees and current professor at Santa Fe College, described her first voting experience in the days of segregation as a time filled with fear and intimidation.

“We drove our senior citizens to the polls,” DuPree said. “Many were afraid and would not go. They had been told that they would find their children, homes and land destroyed if they wrote their names on the ballot.”

But even long after segregation laws had been lifted, Florida was no easy state for minorities to reside in.

DuPree was the first African-American librarian hired and tenured at UF. She even got the approval vote from the library department staff, yet the university refused to give her this honor.

It’s the personal stories like DuPree’s that the oral history program aims to conserve not only for the benefit of future students, but also for the interviewers themselves.?“Students tell me that by doing these interviews they learn more about African-American history than they have learned in their whole lives from textbooks,” Ortiz said. “Students come back to us three to four years later and tell us that doing the oral histories interviews gave them a greater appreciation for the society that they live in.”? Douglas Malenfant, 25, a UF history senior and transcriber for the program, describes his experiences with SPOHP as “extremely rewarding.”

“Being part of this African-American history project has changed my perception of Gainesville’s importance in the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. “[It] has most significantly changed the way I look at the landscape of Gainesville. It is difficult to imagine that 40 years ago African-Americans in Gainesville were prohibited from patronizing many restaurants, bars and grocery stores, but that is the truth.”

“[SPOHP] offers history majors a rich diversity of testimonies that they can use to draw out the realities of segregation,” Malenfant said. “Political science majors can [also] benefit from contextualizing the importance of civil rights legislation and learn from the community organizers who fought some of this nation’s toughest battles for equality.”

As beneficial as these oral history records may prove to be, getting the information to the people is always a challenge.

“We do the interviews, but we also want to get the material out there,” Ortiz said. “We don’t want it to just sit on the shelf.”

The oral history program is having a series of seminars starting this month to get the word out. The series is themed “The History and Future of Community Organizing in America” and will run from Feb. 17 through April 14.

The seminars should raise awareness of the importance of the program among students, Ortiz said.

“We want to document the black history in Alachua County, and we want to make sure that it is preserved.”

The High Springs Farmers Market springs up from the black pavement of an empty parking lot each week to provide a space for locals to buy and sell food grown in North Central Florida. It brings consumers to the source of their food the way McDonald’s severs them from the source. Money flows from house to farm and from farm to store, circulating through the local economy, instead of skipping town buried in the pockets of corporate giants.

Gainesville citizens have their own farmers markets throughout the week, but unlike High Springs, where everyone has access to healthy, local food regardless of income level, the Gainesville markets aren’t available to everyone yet.

The High Springs Farmers Market is the only market in Florida that accepts federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps. So everyone in High Springs has the opportunity to eat Florida-grown produce that’s washed in in water, not pesticides, and bought from fellow citizens instead of a Super Wal-Mart. Although this isn’t the case in Gainesville now, Florida Organic Growers (FOG) and its partners in the city and county have a plan to change this and join High Springs in setting the precedent for other Florida cities.

Last May, FOG received a one-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate food security for low-income residents of the county and how it can be increased. The organization worked through the year to assemble ideas and potential plans to present to the USDA and the city of Gainesville this spring.

The goal of all their ideas is to increase access for people who have trouble getting fresh foods, said Melissa Desa, the FOG project coordinator.

“SNAP at the farmers market is a win-win because it’s federal dollars being spent in the community and kept locally. So it’s kind of the best of all scenarios,” Desa said.

About $4 million of federal money comes to the county each month through SNAP beneficiaries, according to the Department of Children and Families. As it is now, about six or seven of the 29,449 people who receive benefits go to the High Springs’ market each week, but the majority live in other towns in the county, like Gainesville, where their benefits are only accepted at corporate stores with national economies. There’s been a steady rise in the last year and a half with more than 7,000 additional people receiving benefits since December 2008. And that’s only one-third of the people in the county who qualify, according to John Skelly, the director of Poverty Reduction for Alachua County.

Christine Hale, the director of education and outreach at FOG said that “because there are so many people added to the [SNAP] list every month, this is a great opportunity to bring those federal dollars back to farmers.”

Desa and Hale are looking at how other cities have structured their programs for guidance while formulating the plan for Gainesville.

Most markets get a hand-held, card-reading machine where customers can scan their cards, whether it’s a debit, credit or Electronic Benefits Transfer card, which draws from a SNAP funds account. In exchange, customers get tokens worth certain amounts to purchase food and plants from individual booths.

The plan can’t stop at just setting up the infrastructure for the program though.

“It’s not like all of a sudden people will flock to the farmers market,” Hale said. “Education and outreach is needed to get people eating from the middle of the store – the processed food isle – to the market.”

Cities throughout the country that are home to the 753 farmers markets authorized by the USDA to accept SNAP benefits have tried different programs to increase the ease, access and awareness of the SNAP benefits at farmers markets.

One program, which Desa and Hale are optimistic about, relies on the sponsorship of outside companies. A business can sign up to provide incentive coupons to SNAP beneficiaries that double their benefits. So a $10 token can earn a $10 coupon, and the beneficiary then gets $20 worth of food at the market.

Autry Ellison displays the size of his shrimp, "as big as your hand," that he brings down from Jacksonville weekly for the High Springs and Gainesville farmers markets. Photo by Jessica Newman.

“The coupon program is really key to making this happen,” Hale said. “We can easily obtain [Electronic Benefits Transfer] machines for relatively little cost, but getting the people to the market might not be successful. If they know their value is going to be doubled, they’re more likely to do it.”

The coupon program, along with paying someone to run the Electronic Benefits Transfer machines and distribute money from federal funds to local farmers, is the biggest cost obstacles to bringing SNAP to Gainesville farmers markets.

A lack of funding to set up and run the program and the amount of cooperation needed between federal, state and local organizations are what have prevented Gainesville from trying this before now. But since the USDA grant spurred FOG to look into the program, “everyone is seeing the connections [of those who can benefit], and the wheels are turning and we’ve got the ears of city and county people,” Hale said.

Farmers markets in Gainesville could begin accepting SNAP benefits as early as this summer or fall if people step up to fund it. Desa and Hale hope eventually to make the program self-sustainable so that it won’t have to rely on outside money. Until then though, FOG is applying for grants and working toward forging partnerships with local businesses.

“We need funding to make this happen,” Desa said. “We know there are companies out there to support projects like this and help the hungry in our community, help farmers, our local economy and help the people. I think they’ll see the rewards trickle up from the low-income people and benefit the entire community as a whole.”

]]> http://www.thefineprintuf.org/2010/02/11/no-cash-no-problem-bringing-local-healthy-food-to-everyone-in-gainesville/feed/ 1 http://www.thefineprintuf.org/2010/01/30/who-is-she-annie-leibovitz-life-through-a-lens/ http://www.thefineprintuf.org/2010/01/30/who-is-she-annie-leibovitz-life-through-a-lens/#comments Sat, 30 Jan 2010 03:33:20 +0000 Britt Perkins http://www.thefineprintuf.org/?p=1298 She’s a photographer, but has stepped from behind her equipment to become an icon. Written, directed and filmed by her sister Barbara as a gift to their mother, the film intersperses Leibovitz’s childhood and early career with behind-the-scenes footage of some of her latest work for Vanity Fair.

The photographer started her career in 1967 and shortly after started working for the fledling Rolling Stone. Her creative process is documented and is clearly transformed as Annie grows up in the music scene of the 70s, on tour with the Rolling Stones and melting into their lifestyle.

Almost everyone (Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Whoopi Goldberg, Demi Moore, etc.) who speaks about Leibovitz is in awe of her talent and body of work.

They did, however, include comments from one photography critic who seemed decidedly unimpressed with the photos. With a gray bob and conservative books shadowing her face, she contended the idea that people thought Anni Leibovitz had “captured them” was an illusion.

Funnily enough, Leibovitz seemed to echo this sentiment.

Life is complex, she explains. A photograph is just one moment.

This humility may be why she is so great.

But again. She does capture something more than just a body.

People believe she sees them, and she does see them. She doesn’t try to be seen.

Scientists have courageously begun drawing attention to the devastation caused by mountaintop removal.The mostly poor residents of Appalachia face lung, kidney and liver damage as well as some of the highest cancer rates in the nation thanks to the damage reckless mining causes to the air they breathe and the water they drink (never mind the impact on wildlife). Interviews with these people, coupled with jarring footage of leveled mountains, would make for compelling TV, and probably stir the nation’s outrage. Instead, we get boring, industry-friendly drivel about the promise of “clean coal” from MSNBC – you know, America’s progressive news channel.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, sociologist Neil Postman warned about the poisonous effects television has on politics, education and the news. Anything that appears on TV is, ipso facto, entertainment. It can be nothing else; that’s the nature of the medium. Serious television, then, is especially insidious, because it masquerades as something meaningful. Enough has already been said about the cultural significance of Colbert and his colleagues at the Daily Show. Suffice to say that he seems to take Postman’s argument to heart – and turn it on its head.

Fox News doesn’t acknowledge environmental harm is a bad thing. CNN can only cover celebrities and politics-as-a-spectator sport. NBC is owned by GE, the world’s largest producer of coal-burning power plants. Nobody in “serious television” is in a position to give an issue like mountaintop removal the attention it deserves. Enter Colbert, who starts with the premise that his show is entertainment, and then brings in someone like Margaret Palmer, lead author of a recent study published in the journal Science that calls for an end to the harmful practice. The result makes for excellent television:

Without a doubt, that’s the most informative treatment the issue has received on American television, and perhaps the best discussion it’s gotten in our entire mainstream media, where objective journalism ensures the coal industry gets ample opportunity to air its views, no matter how baseless. They even mention the fact that more responsible mining practices would help create jobs in one of our country’s poorest regions, without dramatically increasing energy costs for consumers.

Through it all, Colbert remains wonderfully in character, accusing Palmer of “playing the ‘children and women’ card” and questioning whether the mountains deserve our sympathy, since they would surely blow us up too, given the chance. Not only are serious newscasters failing as journalists; they’ve forgotten how to play the part on TV.

“Listen, don’t rush on boats to leave the country…If you do that, we’ll all have even worse problems. Because, I’ll be honest with you: If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.”

The Department of Homeland Security is making room in the Krome Service Processing Center, a federal jail for people waiting deportation from the U.S., in preparation for an influx of Haitians that the U.S. plans to send back to a demolished city with few supplies and inability to care for the millions of internally displaced citizens. The State Department is denying visas for people to come to the U.S. for medical care, and the Coast Guard is patrolling the waters around Florida ready to send boats back to Haiti or to Guantánamo Bay.

In a time of crisis, if we have the ability to help our fellow human beings, we should. This current situation draws attention to issues of immigration and international relations among the U.S. and other countries. Although there are many factors to take into account when deciding immigration policy, these are not people who would stay in the U.S. forever (at least not most of them). These are people who need a temporary haven, a place that is not destroyed and has the infrastructure to support them while Port-au-Prince is rebuilt. With Florida only 700 miles from Haiti and a secure infrastructure of hospitals, food, clean living spaces and ample people who want to help but have not been given the opportunity because they are stuck 700 miles from Haiti, we have a responsibility not to turn these people away. In fact, if Florida and the U.S. were to open boarders temporarily to provide shelter, the U.S. could actually write this in the history books as a human rights success.

Florida has its own problems: dwindling funding, a failing educational system, struggles with healthcare, illegal servitude on South Florida farms (another immigration issue), but sometimes we have to put aside our long-term problems for an unexpected crisis. And this is one of those times. True, we don’t have the ability to support the millions of displaced in Haiti, but we do have the resources to help some. If you don’t think so, remember Hurricane Katrina and the thousands of Florida families who welcomed New Orleans families into their homes and students into our schools. We can save lives, and so we should.

What do you think? If you were given the opportunity to offer temporary solace to a Haitian family, would you?

I heard about the restaurant first through word of mouth. It wasn’t even open yet, but some of my friends were getting involved. It was opening where 2nd Street Bakery used to be. I heard I should look into getting a job there. I also heard about some kind of “buy-in”. What’s up with that, I wondered.

It was explained that the restaurant is a co-op, a business owned by the workers. The workers purchase shares of the company, and when the business profits, everyone profits. If at some point I must move on beyond the restaurant (or am asked to leave), the money returns to me.

To get involved in this new entity, Civilization, I would have to buy a $1,000 share of the company, one of many equal shares. I didn’t have to pay it all at once; I could put portions of my earnings towards the buy-in or contribute hours working around the restaurant doing landscaping, for example, or generally making things better or creating artwork for the sculpture garden.

The idea of having to pay money in order to get paid kind of bummed me out. I had no idea what it would be like working at a place like this, and I would be invested in this business, meaning it was a commitment. I was also hesitant to get a job in the food service industry, having had bad experiences in the past.

I worked at a Panera before and spent most of my pay-earning hours changing trash bags, bussing tables, being “nice” to customers, hosing off the dishes and spoons, sweeping, mopping, and cleaning restrooms. Over three months, they let me make about five sandwiches for customers, and I paid half-price for maybe 50 sandwiches. It seemed like they had an endless stream of new workers to do the less palatable jobs, and those people would either eventually quit or move up the line if a spot opened up. No one wanted to do what I was doing. I felt no attachment to the place and there was no pride in my work, but I always got paid on time. I got a nice apron and a hat, some flimsy name tags, dishpan hands, and a reason to never eat at one of those places again.

A few months later, I was making sushi at a place called Voodoo Lounge. It was all dead fish, sharp knives and buckets of pink ginger. I could have cut off a finger. At first I loved the job because, to me, I was being trained in this esoteric art form — edible sculpture. I felt I was doing something productive. As for the ambiance, it was all low-watt bulbs and black paint. And around 10:30, when the sushi bar packed up, the bartenders came in, the lasers turned on, the club music fired up, and in came everybody looking to get liquored up. These were not peaceful times for plastic-wrapping fish, nor for wiping down with bleach water. It was never explained to me how things were run there. There was a boss, one manager, and one cook, and I don’t think they knew what was going on either. I did not always get paid on time. After a few months, I wasn’t learning anything new, and our discriminating “clients” just wanted their rolls deep fried or with beef or chicken instead of fish.

Despite my hesitation, I was at a point in my life where having a job was more important than having a good job. I rather like the idea of getting paid, and I like to be learning skills while working; I like food, and I’m willing to clean all kinds of crap. Joining Civilization started to seem like my best possible option.

The restaurant was a particularly promising prospect because as a co-operative it possessed something fundamentally different than the other places I had worked. I eventually slapped together an up-to-date resume and made an appearance.

The grounds were serene. The artwork was tasteful. Everything was well put together. It all made me start doubting that I had what they needed. Thankfully, by the end of the week, I got a call from Chef Maschafino. I came back in to talk to him, and he gently explained the whole co-operative thing to me again. I started the next day.

I wowed them with my dishwashing dexterity, and the restaurant impressed me as well. Everyone was genuinely friendly, the cooks made sure I ate something, I was free to take breaks as I needed them, and at the end of the day, I was even offered a glass of wine. Everyone kept thanking me for what I was doing. That night I left a little damp, but in high spirits. I was completely happy with the situation I had gotten myself into — a boss-free workplace. or something to that effect, John thought it more accurate

This new work was liberating. I was immediately open to meeting all the denizens of Civilization — they all just seemed so independent and personable. I used to avoid talking to co-workers, as I didn’t want to talk about work at work, or outside of work for that matter. I was under the impression that hearing complaints more often than hello or goodbye was normal.

At Civilization, if I have a complaint, letting other people know is actually productive. It’s the same if I have suggestions for improvement. I can bring up the matter at the weekly meeting, and it can be voted on democratically. As it turns out, every place is unique, and there are many ways a business can be structured and particular interpersonal dynamics for each.

It seems like everyone at my sweet new job wants to be there; we have invested ourselves, and we trust the organization. Civilization works for us.

Co-operatives cannot incorporate in Florida, so they have to either operate as corporations or limited liability companies. Other states allow employees, or combination of employees and other people, like customers, to form nonprofit mutual benefit corporations or similar entities to do things like run a restaurant or a farm.

Civilization is located at 1511 NW 2nd Street, and is now serving morning coffee, lunch and dinner.