Roger Horne is the founder and executive director of Urban Greenworks, a nonprofit wellness farm in Miami, Kenya and on environmental justice platforms everywhere. His work centers his BIPOC neighbors in Liberty City at NW 54th St. and 17th Avenue where Cerasee Farm offers environmental healing, horticultural therapy, food justice education workshops and the most profound hugs.
After a group of caucasian academics and restauranteurs left a leafy table where Roger sat, I approached him with a profound embarrassment. My body heated up and began to sweat as I overheard the end of their meeting. The men left with a “to do list” for Roger. My sweat threatened to transform into tears when he told me he was not being paid for this project. A masked hug leveed the horrific scene and even warded off the prolonged isolation that over a year of quarantine surged. Roger’s squeeze broke the social codes and 6′ distance in the wake of the awkward stench the men left, in dust clouds of white pete rock or concrete glowing in the design district mall courtyard. Toasting white paper water cups, we celebrated a our first meeting at Earth n Us Farm over a decade ago, when a full moon party intersected with my Art Basel trip from NYC. We broke pandemic bread and discussed ways to strengthen our social infrastructure sustainably through community justice work. In anticipation of future visualization efforts, I offer a window into our various encounters at farmer’s markets, formal meetings and informal wisdom transfer. Roger is the official plant partner of the Mama Spa Botanica.
Roger is a Caribbean native but grew up in NYC, and after several years studying and practicing public health, sociology, nutrition and landscaping; he transplanted to Miami after the turn of the century. Roger discovered the urban blight and food deserts for people, plants and animals that manifest as a heat crisis in our city. Seen by birds during migration as continuous concrete stretches with no trees, and felt by humans weekly in deadly heat waves or hurricane devastation; the tree canopy problem has been so well documented, even google joined the wheelbarrow. Roger has efficiently compacted a lifetime of his own work and his family’s labor into a decade of work on the front lines of the environmental justice crisis.
While white papers/scientists deny the existence of embedded community leaders like Roger, those same political leaders cry “crisis” at COP summit mountaintops. Corporations whose bodies are their own countries meanwhile, fly cock rockets deflecting more climate change denial into the white atmosphere. Back on ant’s eye view, political leaders and granting institutions strangle resources to tree canopy multipliers like Cerasee Farm.
Built on the backs of forced labor and leaking through it’s porous veil of Oolite, Miami’s foundation is a model of colonial toxicity swelling with the moon and blooming with the red tide. When model citizens like Roger and his family are endangered species, Miami’s race card is a brown bag test for plants, people and animals. ¡Plastic siempre trumps paper! Miami’s government and “nonprofit” corruption asserts.
Nonprofits and NGO’s here are historically and presently white, as it’s police force who recently pushed out it’s Latino leader- whose white card was rejected and corruption busting efforts were deported. Despite it’s majority Latinx population identifying as white in the US census, a jaunt through any neighborhood within bus distance of downtown- reveals the poisonous Castas roots of tropical gentrification class passing (Florida man wrote the book on it). Despite private equity developers threatening his farm’s survival, national organizations are beginning to see Roger.
Local nonprofits remain ignorant to his efforts and his neighborhood whose complexion is darkest and burns brightest in the over-paved heat zones where Urban Greenworks is located. Roger’s Heat Resistance Urban Farming, Farmers Markets, Farm Stands, CSA’s and Legislative change initiatives are tools he carries from maternal traditions his family celebrated. Roger’s social work as a community vector wages war on the stigmas, as well as the deadly pulses of climate change denial impacting his Miami family. While the covid relocation population surges in wealth from primary cities (NY,LA, SF) whose work from home salaries, their pockets burn high heat indexes in the housing market. Miami’s developers equally devour 10 block bites of its legacy neighborhoods such as Little Haiti and Liberty City where Cerasee Farm is located. Carte blanche welfare checks in the form of klepto currency, filter funds through corporate bedrock and into temporary cities like Art Basel where developers leisurely launder it through real estate and art. Despite advertising their climate change concern, art institutions, art storage warehouses and art tent cities displace the people their social media feeds threaten to celebrate. Perhaps if the whitewalls and nonprofit CEOs rode a bus instead of a luxury electric car, they would acknowledge their data burning and see Roger: his farm, his family and him as human?
White clouds parted this Spring at Cerasee, as the pandemic drew more participants to his urban gardening hive. Celebrating his contributions to nutrition and public health, the Center for Nutrition Studies NY awarded Roger a Community Grant in August 2021 for his groundbreaking and transformative work. Roger shares his wisdom on digital platforms and in leafy ones, while digging into Miami’s dirtiest work. Cerasee Farm’s various projects ranging from de-carceration models to beekeeping and whole community health approaches to nutrition are direct action initiatives to making Miami whole. Roger restores political dignity and resources to BIPOC families whose legacy of environmental, social and economic justice are being buried by developmental corruption. Roger IS A MAN with maternal roots, whose interdependence network is deeply enriching environmental ethics, the survival of people, plants, animals and the return of hugs during the pandemic.
Lambastic 