Into the wilds of the Palm Hammock, another semester, another October. Nineteen Eckerd College students, armed with bow saws, loppers, axes, and shovels, sweated through the hot Florida sun this morning, taking another bite out of the shrinking patch of Brazilian Pepper (
Schinus terebinthifolius) that has invaded the peninsula in our Palm Hammock Nature Area on the Eckerd College campus. This is what it looked like just before we started this morning. You can click on the photo and get much larger view.
This project has been underway since the spring of 2007 when several students from the Introduction to Environmental Studies course asked if there might be a way to battle the Brazilian Pepper in the Palm Hammock without using herbicides. I bought some tools and we set to work. In the past four years we have cleared four and one half acres by hand during three Saturday clean-ups that take place three times each semester. The project allows students to experience the work of removing these tenacious plants, to feel it in their bones.
It is part of a bigger project to rethink the way we approach environmental ethics. The work puts college students into a problem solving mode in nature. I give them a very brief description of three techniques we have developed for breaking down and removing the trees and I hand them tools. For many of them, this is the first time they have been expected to labor with saws and axes cutting into nature. Every time, though, the students very quickly fall into a rhythm and, even more striking, they being to work together, developing cooperative technique and teaching each other. By the end of three hours, their bodies are sore, but their minds are filled with ideas. They have become expert pepper removers. And something more.
This time, too, I saw friendships blossom, and conversations turn from the work in the Hammock to the schoolwork they all have to the social lives they are all building at Eckerd College, and back again to the plants, one folding into the next in interesting ways. One participant even used the experience in the plants as a metaphor to describe a friend of his. "He's like a Brazilian Pepper," he said, "Overdoing everything." The students laughed at themselves and each other and put in a solid morning of work, which I have no doubt is aching in their bodies as I write.
I am, as always, grateful for their help.
