by Panagioti Tsolkas / Earth First! Newswire
“…I guess it’s sort of an
anti-technology backlash, anti-globalization. I don’t think that’s a
prevalent attitude in this county.” –Bevin Beaudet, Scripps Program Manager for Palm Beach County, USA Today, January 2005
Twelve years ago, when I joined the effort to stop the planned biotech
city in the county where I lived, I didn’t anticipate that we could
outlast—in some cases even outlive—our
opponents. But that may be the case for our rag-tag group of grassroots
activists in a decade-plus fight against the industry’s plans in South
Florida.
In 2004, then-Governor Jeb Bush called biotech an “unstoppable train”
while unveiling his plans to plow through 6,000 acres of swamp, forest
and farm for a biotech city.
Two years, several lawsuits and a couple dozen headline-making protests
later, his plan lay near-dead in the swamp water of the Northeast
Everglades. Scripps, the primary company associated with the plan, did
finally drag itself up and open the doors on “Phase I” of their
laboratories on a local university campus with a mere 10, 000 square
feet of lab space; a minuscule fraction of their initial plan.
Within the last several years, Scripps, the state’s model for the speculated biotech boom, has shown deep internal cracks in its bureaucratic operations and financial stability.
With the operation in disarray and opposition still on the move, the
next few years could spell the end for what I viewed over ten years ago
as a biocentrist’s wildest nightmare...
