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    Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who Are Helping to Protect Our Planet
    Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who Are Helping to Protect Our Planet
    Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who Are Helping to Protect Our Planet
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who Are Helping to Protect Our Planet

    By Harriet Rohmer and Julie McLaughlin

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This inspiring book presents the true stories of 12 people from across North America who have done great things for the environment. Heroes include a teenage girl who figured out how to remove an industrial pollutant from the Ohio River, a Mexican superstar wrestler who works to protect turtles and whales, and a teenage boy from Rhode Island who helped his community and his state develop effective e-waste recycling programs. Plenty of photographs and illustrations bring each compelling story vividly to life.

    Editor's Note

    Environmental heroes…

    It can be tough to talk about climate change with kids. Put a positive spin on it by introducing them to the real-life heroes who have made saving the planet their mission.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChronicle Books Digital
    Release dateJul 1, 2010
    ISBN9780811879712
    Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who Are Helping to Protect Our Planet
    Author

    Harriet Rohmer

    Harriet Rohmer is the founder and former publisher/executive director of Children's Book Press, the award-winning publisher of bilingual and multicultural picture books. Her books have won over 100 major awards and many have become classics, including artist Carmen Lomas Garza's Family Pictures/Cuadros de familia. She lives in San Francisco.

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    Reviews for Heroes of the Environment

    4.5/5

    12 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      True profiles of everyday people who are making a difference. Will Allen, the Milwaukee farmer is one I've met before, but I was startled to hear about Kalydra Welcker from Parkersburg, WV, who developed a method to remove APFO contaminant from water (think C-8) But the one who really made me smile is Debby Tewa, a solar electrician on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona. She has a small solar array on a trailer for people to borrow and try. The book calls her "light-bringer."
    • 5/5
      This book tells the true stories of 12 different "heroes" who have made a difference by improving the environment in their community. The stories are well written and easy to read. They could be read individually to a class,or students could read on their own. The people featured are interesting, but also totally human, meaning that they make what they did seem possible and inspiring to other people. Some of the stories made me want to try what they did myself!
    • 5/5
      I was positively inspired by the stories in this book! A great book to exemplify how one person can make a difference, not just for the environment but for any cause that's important to you. I am planning to get this book for each of the third-fifth classrooms for my daughter's school. And I'm also buying a copy to have in my house!
    • 4/5
      This book features people of all ages and backgrounds and their efforts to help the environment from establishing ways for city-dwellers to grow vegetables to installing solar panels on rural dwellings to starting a program for proper disposal of e-waste. This may not be a first choice for browsing material, but it would certainly make a good addition to classroom units on the environment and may inspire kids to look for ways in which they, too, can help the environment.

    Book preview

    Heroes of the Environment - Harriet Rohmer

    Credits

    Introduction

    On a beach in Southern California, a teenage girl from Mexico becomes a leader in the fight to protect her town from a dangerous polluter.

    In the far north of Alaska, a woman sets out to save a herd of 110,000 caribou.

    A young man from New York City finds ways to reuse trash from construction sites so it stays out of landfills—and brings money and jobs to his community.

    Here are the true stories of twelve amazing people from across North America who are dedicating their lives to helping the environment. Some of them work to preserve wild places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Others work to make cities like Milwaukee and Chicago better places to live. Some protect the habitats of animals, and others protect communities where people live.

    In every story, you’re right alongside the heroes as they take on the problems, overcome obstacles, and find success. In the mountains of West Virginia, you’ll travel with a coal miner’s daughter as her grandson inspires her to join the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining—and to start to build a wind farm to make energy from windmills.

    You’ll follow along, step by step, as a teenage boy and his classmates in a small Rhode Island town develop a recycling program for computers and other forms of electronic waste (e-waste), and advise state officials who pass one of the first e-waste disposal laws in the United States.

    These twelve heroes represent just a few of the many people who are working today to protect the earth and all its residents. Their stories will inspire you, and you’ll learn how you can support, join—and even lead—efforts to heal our environment, and keep it clean and healthy for generations to come.

    One

    Raising Food in the City

    Growing food is powerful. It can change the world!

    WILL ALLEN

    Founder, Growing Power Community Food Center Milwaukee, Wisconsin

    At 6 feet, 7 inches, Will Allen was a natural at basketball, and that’s where he saw his future. An All-American player in high school, he received scholarship offers from more than a hundred colleges. He finally chose the University of Miami, and in 1967, he became the school’s first African American athlete.

    Going away to college meant leaving the family farm outside Washington, D.C., where he had grown up. He remembered how hard that life had been—selling vegetables door to door at age six, working long days as a teenager when his friends were out having fun. Now that his life was full of possibilities, he swore he would never go back to farming.

    After college, Will turned pro. He married, had children, joined a European basketball team, and traveled to Brussels, Belgium, with his family. With time on his hands between practice sessions and games, he found himself visiting the Belgian countryside and hanging out with Belgian farmers. They farmed the way his parents had back home, caring for the land without using chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

    When I told my team manager I wanted to grow food again, Will remembers, he got me a place in the country. Before I knew it, I had a big garden and twenty-five chickens.

    A few seasons later, Will brought his family back to the United States. He took a sales job with a big household product company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After work and on weekends, he started growing food on land owned by his wife’s family in Oak Creek, outside the city. Some of the food went straight to his dinner table, and the rest he sold.

    Will Allen at Growing Power Community Food Center, in Milwaukee

    Then one day in 1993, while he was driving home from work, Will spotted a For Sale sign on the last remaining farm in the city of Milwaukee. The place was small, only two acres, just a few greenhouses on a plot of land in a partly residential, partly industrial neighborhood. Ideas flashed through Will’s head. He could grow food here. He could build a training center for kids. He could farm full-time. He saw an opportunity, and he grabbed it.

    But he didn’t start farming right away. To farm inside the city, the first key piece is to be anchored into the city. You have to get to know people. They get to know you. Will started learning about his new community and becoming a part of it.

    Most people in the neighborhood were not eating well. The supermarkets had moved away to richer neighborhoods where they could make more money. The little stores left behind sold mostly cigarettes and alcohol and food with lots of preservatives that wouldn’t go bad on the shelves. The only way to get fresh fruits and vegetables was to take a long trip to the supermarket across town. Folks were living in what I call a food desert, Will says. "I knew I had to do something, because you can’t have

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