Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who Are Helping to Protect Our Planet by Harriet Rohmer (2009) Paperback

We loved this book. From the moment it arrived this afternoon, this was the first book we opened out of five books. My son kept asking whose the next person in the book and what the person did. This is very inspirational and encouraging to young people. There are other people out there aside from Greta who are helping take care of the environment in their own way.

With 12 examples of how regular everyday people are making an impact on environmental concerns, readers can see how easy it is to identify what they are passionate about and how to do something about it. Throughout the US and in Mexico, students, teachers, inventors, and masked wrestlers are finding ways to stand out and stand up for their beliefs. Whether it's getting a big oil company to relocate residents of a polluted town, saving the caribou of the Porcupine River, bringing solar power to a Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona, or protecting the turtles in San Ignacio Lagoon, these participants started with wanting to help and became the change they wanted to see in the world. With Rohmer's writing and McLaughlin's illustrations, this is a sure-win for anyone interested in environmental concerns or how to show our students and our children that the impossible has been done before. The chapter on "how to get involved" is brilliant and shows how ordinary people made an extraordinary difference. This was published by Chronicle Books in support of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book will support the council's efforts.

I would think that anyone who reads this book would be inspired by the actions of these "everyday" (many of them young) people and the way they have inspired others, and CHANGED their neighborhoods and others for the better. This book stresses the "Majority of One" concept -- where a person with an idea can bring that idea to successful fruition, no matter how little they have to begin with, in the way of resources (money, tools, authority, prestige). From a young Hopi woman comes the power of Solar electricity in her reservation -- and overseas, as she travels with her crew (some of them her fellow-students), teaching others about solar electricity and how to implement it in their own village(s). A young student (11 years old) reads about electronic trash (e-waste) and out of his concern he creates a company that recycles computers and keeps them from polluting the ground water -- and this project too, has gone international. A young lady (purloining her father's windshield wipers and using them as electrodes!!) discovers a way to clean polluted water. A woman saves her beloved mountains in West Virginia. A woman saves her community from fatally-filthy air. A man posts "Fire your Boss" signs as a prelude to hiring eager young (and old) people to create and maintain self-sustaiing gardens "City Farms". A famous wrestler in Mexico inspires his adoring fans, young kids, to go out there and keep their world clean and pollution-free. He teaches kids about flood control in their own villages and the importance of ensuring clean water for their familes and for future families in their village. People all over the world watch this huge formidable man on the news as he watches over a group of baby turtles making their way to the sea, and as he makes a plea to protect the birthing waters of endangered whales. What one person can do! There are so many other inspiring narratives about The Power of One in this book and the good it can do for ALL. This is a great book for a young student who is becoming aware of environmental issues, who is signing up for required community projects, scouting projects -- and wants to do something to make a change in her or his world. This is a great book to be read to pre-students-- little kids who are just becoming aware of their world and their place in it. This is also a great book for adults (including parents, community leaders, scout masters, teachers, church leaders, anyone who inspires kids and who in turn is inspired by them) who are concerned about environmental issues and pollution. A little book of this huge magnitude can make a positive impression all who read it and who are inspired to do likewise in their own neighborhoods, communities or villages -- no matter where they live. It tells us that nothing is impossible when you want to make a change for the betterment of all. This book should be required reading and fodder for discussion groups in schools and clubs all over the world.

Every school library and community library in the country, or even the world, should have this book. I am not gushing, I am just stating facts. This book teaches children (and adults) how to save the planet. We all hear about how the planet is going to heck, but this is a nebulous concept to most people, beyond saving gas and recycling plastic bags. This book gives a dozen examples of how real people took action to stop habitat destruction, clean polluted water, and stop innapropriate development. Some of the heroes are teens who took action to save their communities-these are particularly moving. Each story is just a few pages, short enough to read in a classroom setting or for a homework reading assignment. At our house, we are going reading one chapter a night and discussing what it must have been like for the people who were forced to move because their town's air had been poisoned by a refinery, or whose local environment was being destroyed by coal companies blasting away mountain tops. This makes the stories very real. Highly recommended. 5 stars!

There's something about hero stories that make us feel hopeful and good about ourselves. Harriet Rohmer's Heroes of the Environment goes beyond that. It's easy nowadays to pat ourselves on the back for planting a tree or two while the forests are dying. Her collection of real people going to bat for the environment shows them doing extraordinary things - like designing an "eco-machine" that could clean up entire watersheds - and yet they come from ordinary backgrounds. The profiles are written in a language accessible for young people, but she doesn't shy away from technical terms like APFO (ammonium perfluorooctanoate, used to make Teflon). Ms. Rohmer captures the courage of activists who stand up to corporations - not an easy thing to do - but stresses that it takes a community to make change happen. These heroes are committed and serious, but they also have a sense of humor. One young man started a business in salvaging and reusing construction materials, only to have his mother say, "I sacrificed so you could go to school to learn to pick up trash?" He didn't give up. And neither did the 11-year-old who kept electronic waste out of the landfill; his program has expanded to Mexico and three African countries. Ms. Rohmer's heroes inspire us with their pluckiness, and might just lead a young reader down the path to their own eco-quests.

I am very happy with the quality of this book. The stories are well written and contain excellent messages about how you can do good things for the environment and for your community at the same time. Even if you didn't necessarily care about the environment very much as a topic specifically, there's a lot to be said for the way these stories show real people who created real change in their communities and sometimes did it by standing up for what they believed in the face of others who weren't necessarily eager to listen. I actually got this book as something to read from time to time to my six-year-old nephew. I feel like he's probably a couple of years too young to grasp some of the finer points of the sections we've read so far, but he did enjoy them and it gave me openings to talk to him about things like how plants grow and how solar power works. Each story is just a few pages long, which works well with a kid's attention span. Most pages have some kind of picture to go along with the text, sometimes a photograph and sometimes a drawing. I felt like the illustration style and the pictures they chose to add fit very well with the tone and the target audience of the book. On the whole, it's well written, it includes enough detail that it explains how big the impact was in some cases without getting so tied up in numbers that it's boring, and it shows some very good examples of people who stepped up and did things to make life better. I highly recommend it for kids in elementary school.