Steck-Vaughn Stories of America: Student Reader Save the Everglades, Story Book

by Judith Bauer Stamper

Book Overview

Describes the successful efforts of concerned citizens to stop construction of a jetport that would have destroyed the Florida Everglades. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811480593
• ISBN13: 9780811480598
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Steck-Vaughn
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 9 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 4 to 7

Customer Reviews

River of grass

This 54-page 5-chapter book tells the story of Joe Browder's successful 1969 effort to defeat the planned construction of a major airport 50 miles from Miami in the Big Cypress Swamp. As head of the Miami chapter of the U.S. National Audubon Society, Browder felt that his only chance to stop the destructive development in the swamp would be to gain support from others. He convinced both old-time alligator hunter Gator Bill and Miccosukee chief Buffalo Tiger to join his fight. Next Browder drafted Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Douglas had written her legendary book, River of Grass, in 1947. He drove her to the site of the jetport, where some trees had already been cut and the swamp drained. She decided then and there to help. The people of Florida could have a jetport or the Everglades, but they couldn't have both. The former, if constructed, would destroy the latter. Douglas formed the Friends of the Everglades and took the fight to Washington D.C. and then Interior Secretary Walter Hickel and Secretary of Transportation John Volpe. They ordered an environmental study, which found that the jetport would so pollute the Glades' water, its lifeblood, that all wildlife there would be threatened. At last, Joe Browder too made it to Washington, where he met with President Richard Nixon. Transportation Secretary Volpe supported the jetport, while Interior Secretary Hickel opposed it. Nixon sent his daughter Julie to Florida to see the Everglades. When she returned to Washington, she told her the President that the Everglades were a national treasure. Nixon called a press conference and opposed the jetport. This is a great book for children, which shows what can one person can accomplish if only he tries. And of course, it extols the virtues of one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Alyssa A. Lappen

True story of people working together to save the Everglades

While written as a social studies textbook for young children, Save the Everglades is the most accurate account ever published about the time so many years ago when environmentalists, Native Americans and the people who lived and hunted in the Everglades joined together to protect America's most endangered National Park.Save the Everglades is part of a series of 28 books edited by the late historian Alex Haley (of Roots fame), written to help children understand how change in America is made by real people. Haley placed this book about a conflict between protecting nature and building an aiport in the same category with the series' book about the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott -- books about people working together, making choices about what kind of communities they want to have.Save the Everglades tells how very different people who all shared a love of nature fought to stop political leaders and real estate developers in Miami, Florida from building what would have been the world's largest airport, just a few miles from Everglades National Park and within the Big Cypress Swamp, the wildest and richest part of the Everglades. Hunters, alligator poachers, Miccosukee Indians, school children and environmental leaders started a national campaign that convinced the President of the United States to withdraw federal money and permits for the airport project, and then to buy the Big Cypress and make it part of the Everglades protected by the National Parks System.This book is about one of the campaigns that helped bring together the national environmental movement of the 1960s, but the book is also important for people who care about today's environmental issues, because Everglades National Park is, in the year 2000, once more threatened by another airport project sponsored by Miami political leaders and real estate developers. So people in Florida and across America are once more appealing to the President of the United States to Save the Everglades.To make the publisher's first draft more suitable for children, the author added some false drama (fear of flying) and eliminated some true drama (death plots by real estate promoters, oddly enough referenced inaccurately in a more recent book about Florida, Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief). The writer of this review is also the principal subject of Save the Everglades, and so can personally confirm that with those exceptions, the story is accurate.