The Fight for Trees (and Against Fascism) at New College Florida

Report on destruction of the Bayfront Uplands Preserve, which is linked to the takeover of a local university by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

by Panagioti Tsolkas

In January 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled a plan to systematically dismantle a liberal arts school in Sarasota, Florida, boasting about going after anything deemed part of a “woke” agenda — racial justice, gender diversity, unions, etc. In its place, the DeSantis administration vowed to create a supposedly-classical liberal arts university. By that he basically means promoting an educational atmosphere focused on “Western values” and, of course, sports teams.

Now he’s coming after beloved preserve lands on the New College Florida campus.

On March 25, state contractors began clearing land in an area known as the Bayfront Uplands Preserve in the Campus Master Plan (CMP), the document that enshrines its protection for the purposes of passive recreation, nature study and flood control. But most people on campus just call it the Uplands, a name it shares with the adjacent neighborhood.

“It is an environmental disaster,” said Andrea Zucker, a New College alumna and Uplands resident. “We have osprey living here, we have eagles that were in a nest in these trees, all kinds of woodpeckers, so much natural habitat they are destroying right now.”

Clearing this land is a step towards severing the strong student, faculty and community ties to campus nature, strengthened by decades of stewardship at a school where ecology was a prominent theme. The Environmental Studies Program there, founded in 1972, was the first of its type in the United States.

The reason the new administration gave for clearing the mature native trees and mangroves on the coastal campus: a soccer field. Now, I love a good soccer game — anarchist or otherwise — but there are some important questions here.

Why clear preserved land when there’s already existing cleared and sodded areas on campus? Why put a soccer field where balls will be flying into the Bay? Why blatantly violate a CMP that’s gone through years of public input by stakeholders for approval?

Some residents and alumni suspect, for good reason, that this CMP violation is a first step in a drastic overhaul of the campus grounds, which the administration anticipates $400 million in tax dollars to pull off. Of that, DeSantis-appointed President Richard Corcoran is asking $2 million for a “Freedom Institute,” which DeSantis-appointed far-right Trustee Chris Rufo says will focus on combating cancel culture.

The scale of plans has left residents worried that the development will soon cut into their neighborhood as well as the preserve land — including fears of eminent domain to acquire properties and tear down homes for the campus expansion.

A deeper look into the takeover trustees’ plans can be found here in a CMP-rewrite process that’s currently underway.

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I didn’t go to school at New College, Florida (or anywhere else for that matter) but I learned a lot there. Generations of hippies, anarchists, activists — students or not — will tell you the same, all the way back to the folks who kicked off the Lorax Rebellion that fought for a grove near campus in the ‘80s. This spirit carried on, as evident by the more recent All Power to the Imagination gatherings that ran annually from from 2007 to 2018 as the largest radical leftist conference in the South, and longest standing in the United States.

When DeSantis claims he didn’t know what New College was prior to being asked by other right wing officials to destroy it, it’s an obvious attempt to downplay the small school’s significance in the state, particularly in shaping progressive social movements in the state and beyond. The school has a legacy of innovative, anti-authoritarian educational policy development that far-right officials have wanted undone for years.

Sounds bad, right? But is it a step towards fascism? A scholar of Benito Mousolini’s educational policy developments in 1920s Italy says, well, unfortunately yeah. DeSantis and his earth-destroying Freedom Institute and its anti-woke Western values are on a track towards totalitarianism.

The silver-lining is that these sort of struggles, where anti-system, antifascist organizing overlaps with nature defense, make for a very powerful social force.

Take for examples the ongoing Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest, the 10-year Briger Forest fight that tanked much of the Scripps Biotech plans for vivisection labs in South Florida, or the 2013 uprisings across Turkey kicked off by tree protectors in Istanbul’s Gezi Park.

An alliance of students, alums and neighbors are already talking about a Lorax Rebellion 2.0.

See you in Sarasota.

Panagioti Tsolkas is a former writer/editor of the Earth First! Journal and Prison Legal News. He’s currently organizing with NCF alums to fight the takeover.