After being stranded out at the Brownfiled for what felt like eternity, disappointingly having to cancel our New Orleans gig then a nail-biting will-we-wont-we get the bus back from the shop in time for the next date.. we finally got the bus and drove into the night (with a couple of hours kip under floodlights in a mall car park) then all day to arrive at our Tallahassee gig about 5 mins before we were due to start...
What timing.. we had a great group talk after the presentation with the local folks about their campaign (including fighting coal plants,(and got to meet one of our fellow Rising Tider's great radical mum!).
Next up we headed through Gainesville and visited a fantastic community Gardens project there.
There are plans to build a new power plant in Gainesville too, which has been postponed by the amount of pubic outcry against it.. but still it looms.
The community gardens were started a few years back by the neighbourhood nutrition network, an projects supported by an organics supplier company. but then the garden lapsed.. and then it was taken up by a locals to run it themselves. It is now heading towards being an urban farm to feed the community.
We then headed south again into the warm and a great night at the Florida University in Jupiter. We tried out a few new things that evening and a great new game we developed, and the night went really well our best yet and met a diverse group of locals, students and a radical crew of high school students who were awesome!
While in south Florida went out to visit the site of FPL's proposed West County Energy Center, if it is completed, the natural gas/oil burning, would be the largest power plant in the Florida, contributing around 12 million tons of CO2 a year, and 3500 tons of other hazardous emissions. Local residents have repeatedly been told by FPL that this will be the cleanest, most efficient, burning fossil fuel plant in the country.
But there are several things that they have neglected to talk about: that the plant is located a 1000 feet from the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, home to near 30 threatened and endangered species; that it will demand 6.5 billion gallons of water a year and deep-well inject up to 21 million gallons of wastewater a day; that there are two active rock-blasting mine immediately adjacent to the proposed volatile natural gas plant and pipeline infrastructure... Not only is this fossil-fuel plant a major contributor to global warming, it is a direct threat to the world-renowned Everglades ecosystem and all the species and cultures that depend on this region for life.
Check out their youtube movies on the proposal.
FPL's River of Gas part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEVYnlTm2hY
FPL's River of Gas part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXOYRFBegAA
After we were done protesting we headed over to the wildlife refuge and saw Alligators! I was so excited.. although squatting on the riverbank taking photos suddenly gave me a flashback to 'that' scene for Crocodile Dundee and I got gaiter fear! We visited a sanctuary there and better than that.. we took out a little row boat into alligator infested water!
We all survived the perilous adventure!
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