Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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 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.

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!

Haunted by environmental guilt, I really wasn't sure I wanted a book that might remind me of my environmental sins. But this book isn't like that. When I read this book I feel there is hope. We can come up with reasonable environmentally sound solutions. I love especially the story about the man who is growing food in the city and teaching the city dwellers to grow the food. He has tilapia tanks whose water with fish dropping fertilizes the plant and the plants filter the water which returns to the tilapia tanks. And I love the story teenage girl that figured out how to develop a system to remove a polluting chemical from her town's water supply and the story of the man that created jobs by preventing stuff from going into landfills. My favorite (I'm about 2/3rd through) is the man that turns sewer sludge into drinkable water by using plants and animals. There are also success stories of fighting companies doing damage, but the most hopeful ones are the ones that find alternative solutions. Not only is this a great book for inspiring environmental action, I feel this book would be excellent as a career resource for children because its inspiring both for science and business. When you read a book like this science becomes exciting and it is exciting that businesses can make money solving environmental problems.

A portion of the proceeds of the sale of the book go to Natural Resources Defense Council. 30% post-consumer waste paper with vegetable-based inks were used in making the book.

I only have one negative thing to say about the book. It appears that some (or all?) of the pages of the book are actually two sheets somehow adhering back to back. In my copy one of the pages appears to be splitting apart. I hope they do another printing on more stable paper.

Heroes of the Environment is a wonderful small book that offers much to both lovers of the environment and young children. The text tells twelve stories of individual people whose actions made a constructive difference in our environment and their communities.

Harriet Rohmer's book is easy to read and enjoy. Because the stories are very short, Harriet only develops the characters sufficiently to trumpet their identity and accomplishments. The details of the problem each hero encounters and the solution are clear and detailed. The steps each hero takes are easy to follow and understand. The problems the heroes tackle are not petty, they are major public challenges.

Heroes of the Environment is a perfect tool to teach children community commitment. Parents can use this book to edify their children. Teachers can use the stories to lead classroom discussions, or as inspirational readings to guide students in civic responsibility.

This little book can be a real inspiration to young adults. It may inspire young children to identify with heroes who are teenagers, females, Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans, or Arab Americans. The stories can be motivating since several people as young as the reader actually made a difference.

Heroes of the Environment may stimulate an optimistic attitude when readers see normal people encounter a problem, assess the situation and work to solve the problem. The stories may inspire readers when they hear about average people who recruit and lead others to help conquer difficulties.

Harriet Rohmer's book is not great literature. Her book, however, is a superior presentation of impressive examples of everyday citizens caring about their community. I highly recommend the book and rate it five stars.

Heroes of the Environment is written in approximately the tone I remember from fifth-grade textbooks. That said, there's plenty of information of interest for adults here too. The stories genuinely inspired me and made me want to take more eco-friendly action myself. I didn't really realize that the coal industry was still intimidating people and using appalling environmental practices in the Appalachians, and when I read about that I wanted to help--nobody should be blowing up irreplaceable mountaintops!

A lot of the projects mentioned in the 12 chapters are just brilliant. I hope lots of people read them and start wondering what they can do to make the planet a better place.

According to the jacket, this book is "printed on FSC-certified, 30% post-consumer waste paper with vegetable-based inks."

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 chose this book from the Amazon Vine program because I care about this topic. It does the job of reminding you that ordinary people are making an impact every day. However, I didn't enjoy reading it. The layout was hard to follow and especially challenging for my 11 year old, even though he's a reasonably advanced reader. So, good stories, but the book itself suffers from targeting too young an audience and its layout. Had they made the pages less dense and more clear and clean, I'd have enjoyed learning about the topics more.

In this politically correct book, the cover misleads the reader in that it is intended for very young audiences. On page thirty eight--and this is only one example--the author explains how solar panels work:

"When sunlight strikes solar cells, the energy causes electrons in the cells' atoms to

break free from the nuclei they orbit. These free electrons then flow into an electric

current..."

The prose, conversely, sounds as if the author is addressing small children.

I find this incongruity to be confusing to the buyer and frustrating to the reader.