Word: indians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SUGAR by Alec Wilkinson (Knopf; $18.95). Every winter roughly 10,000 West Indian men come to harvest sugarcane by hand in South Florida. The author, a staff writer for the New Yorker, decided to see how these migrants earn their pay and came back with a story more bitter than sweet...
Modern science, a cowboy achievement, paradoxically favors the Indian view of life. Nature is alive. The barest Antarctic rock is crawling with microbes. Viruses float on the dust. Bacteria help digest our food for us. According to modern evolutionary biology, our very cells are cities of formerly independent organisms. On the molecular level, the distinction between self and nonself disappears in a blur of semipermeable membranes. Nature goes on within and without us. It wafts through us like a breeze through a screened porch. On the biological level, the world is a seamless continuum of energy and information passing back...
...SUGAR by Alec Wilkinson (Knopf; $18.95). Every winter, roughly 10,000 West Indian men go to harvest sugarcane by hand in South Florida. The author decided to see how these migrants earn their pay and came back with a story more bitter than sweet...
This is certainly ending with a whimper. Yet such a dying fall hardly saps the considerable strengths of Big Sugar, subtitled Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida. Forget the comparative dangers of cutting sugarcane. Wonder instead why roughly 10,000 West Indian men, chiefly Jamaicans, come to South Florida each winter to do it. That is what Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker, did when he came across this information in a 1984 newspaper story. Other questions aroused Wilkinson's interest as a reporter. Among them: Is it not odd that a major domestic cash crop...
...looking for an expose -- a big U.S. business using and abusing desperate, impoverished workers -- and in large measure he found what he wanted. Florida accounts for around 40% of the sugarcane grown in the U.S., and producers there have been using West Indian cutters for more than 45 years. Mechanical harvesting would be much less expensive, but there are substantial areas in the state where the soil is too fragile to bear the ravages of machinery. So the brunt of cost consciousness falls on the cutters, who invariably take their lumps. They are routinely cheated of some time spent...