Black History in Chicago: The Lesson of Invasive Species in the Florida Everglades

Invasive Species Threaten the ecosystem of the Everglades -- How does this Parallel Black History in Chicago and Detroit?

I've been reading Sudhir Venkatesh's recent book Gang Leader For a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. It's the story of a graduate student at the University of Chicago who spends a decade embedded in the Chicago projects under the protection of a gang leader named JT.

While reading this book, I came across this story [Fla. 'python challenge' draws about 800 hunters, Atlanta Journal Constitution, 1-13-13]:

An armed mob set out into the Florida Everglades on Saturday to flush out a scaly invader.

It sounds like the second act of a sci-fi horror flick but, really, it's pretty much Florida's plan for dealing with an infestation of Burmese pythons that are eating their way through a fragile ecosystem.

Nearly 800 people signed up for the month-long "Python Challenge" that started Saturday afternoon. The vast majority — 749 — are members of the general public who lack the permits usually required to harvest pythons on public lands.

"We feel like anybody can get out in the Everglades and figure out how to try and find these things," said Nick Wiley, executive director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "It's very safe, getting out in the Everglades. People do it all the time."

Twenty-eight python permit holders also joined the hunt at various locations in the Everglades. The state is offering cash prizes to whoever brings in the longest python and whoever bags the most pythons by the time the competition ends at midnight Feb. 10.

Dozens of would-be python hunters showed up for some last-minute training in snake handling Saturday morning at the University of Florida Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center in Davie. 

Many of the onlookers dressed in camouflage, though they probably didn't have to worry about spooking the snakes. They would have a much harder time spotting the splotchy, tan pythons in the long green grasses and woody brush of the Everglades.

The recommended method for killing pythons is the same for killing zombies: a gunshot to the brain, or decapitation to reduce the threat. (The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals doesn't approve of the latter method, though.)

Pythons are kind of the zombies of the Everglades, though their infestation is less deadly to humans. The snakes have no natural predators, they can eat anything in their way, they can reproduce in large numbers and they don't belong here.

Florida currently prohibits possession or sale of the pythons for use as pets, and federal law bans the importation and interstate sale of the species.

Wildlife experts say pythons are just the tip of the invasive species iceberg. Florida is home to more exotic species of amphibians and reptiles than anywhere else in the world, said John Hayes, dean of research for the University of Florida's Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Invasive species, eh? So is that what happened to Detroit?

A community, a neighborhood, a city is nothing more than a fragile ecosystem that can be changed overnight by merely driving away the people responsible for creating the conditions where prosperity, innovation, and peace flourished (the very conditions that attract individuals to the community, neighborhood, or city to begin with).

Why bring this up today? Well, it is after all Black History Month. Why not a quick trip through Venkatesh's  book Gang Leader For a Day where we can learn about the black history in Chicago?:

I decided to use that time to do some research on housing projects in general and the Robert Taylor Homes in particular. 

I learned that the Chicago housing Authority had built the project between 1958 and 1962, naming it after the agency's first African-American chairman. it was the size of a small city, with forty-four hundred apartments housing about 30,000 people. Poor blacks had arrived in Chicago en masse from the South during the great migrations of the 1930s and 1940s, which left a pressing need for the city to accommodate them. 

In the beginning, the project was greeted with considerable optimism, but is soon soured. Black activist were angry that Chicago politicians put the project squarely in the middle of an already crowded black ghetto, thereby sparing the city's white ethnic neighborhoods. Urban planners complained that the 28 buildings occupied only 7 percent of the 96 acre plot, leaving huge swaths of vacant land that isolated the project for the wider community. Architects declared the building unwelcoming and practically uninhabitable from the onset, even though the design was based upon celebrated French urban-planning principles. 

And, most remarkably, law-enforcement officials deemed Robert Taylor too dangerous to patrol. The police were unwilling to provide protection until tenants curbed their criminality - and stopped hurling bottles or shooting guns out the windows whenever the police showed up. 

In newspaper headlines, Robert Taylor was variously called "Congo Hilton," "Hellhole," and "Fatherless World" - and this was when it was still relatively new. By the end of the 1970s, it had gotten worse. As the more stable working families took advantage of civil-rights victories by moving into previously segregated areas of Chicago, the people left behind lived almost uniformly below the poverty line. A staggering 90 percent of the adults in Robert Taylor reported welfare - cash disbursements, food stamps, and Medicaid - as their sole form of support, and even into the 1990s that percentage would never get lower. There were just two social-service centers for nearly 20,000 children. The buildings themselves began to fall part, with at least a half dozen deaths caused by plunging elevators.

 Nature can teach us many lessons. You can attempt to throw nature out with a pitch-fork, but she'll always return.  Black people have turned large-swaths of Chicago into, well, the type of conditions normally reserved for a sci-fi horror flick.

Tomorrow, we will discuss the solution to the black violence in Chicago, threatening to turn one of America's still great major cities (a world-class city still) into just another 2013 Detroit -- that 90 percent black city, a fact which can never be mentioned when discussing the city's demise.

After all, like Chicago, Detroit was 85 percent white in the 1950s...