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Darlene Rodriguez

Darlene Rodriguez likes to bust sterotypes. Like the ones that say teens can't be community leaders, or that girls shouldn't be taken seriously. Or the belief that minority groups don't care about the environment.

Rodriguez also likes tackling big issues. As a high school student, she became concerned about the Everglades, near her home in Florida. The Everglades are a vast and slow-moving river, a thin layer of fresh water in south Florida that once was larger than seven Rhode Islands. It's now 60 miles wide, 200 miles long, but only six inches deep. In that reduced area, an amazing array of rare animals and plants still survive, including many found nowhere else on earth.

Years ago most people though of the Everglades as a useless swamp. They drained off the water and used the land for other things. Farms, housing developments and golf courses have eaten the Everglades for decades, destroying the irreplaceable wetlands.

When she began researching "the glades," one of the things Rodriguez learned was that without them, south Florida would be a desert--evaporation from the Everglades provides 80% of the rainfall for south Florida.

The more Rodriguez learned, the more she wanted to protect the Everglades. She worked for the Friends of the Everglades environmental group and ran her school's Science Honors Society, bringing the preservation of the glades to the Society's agenda. Although friends would have preferred her company at the movies or the mall, she spent her free time on her cause.

When a severe drought hit south Florida, she knew that there would be even less water to keep the Everglades alive and that it would be essential for everyone to conserve water.

The Spanish-speaking population of south Florida is very large--in the county where Rodriguez lives 60% of the students are Latino. Rodriguez observed that many of them didn't know much about the environment, but she wouldn't accept the stereotype that they didn't care. She knew that they would want to help when they learned what was at stake. She decided to find environmental information in Spanish that she could give Spanish-speaking students and adults in the community, "I discovered that there was very little Spanish language literature on the environment, preservation, and conservation." What little did exist was often outdated.

Rather than give up, Rodriguez wrote a brochure herself, in both Spanish and English, to inform Spanish-speaking citizens and inspire them to help solve environmental problems. She spent many hours researching the brochure, and persuaded the Friends of the Everglades to pay for its production. She also got the Science Honors Society to help her do neighborhood surveys to discover which environmental topics were of greatest community interest.

Rodriguez found that being a pioneer has a price. Because of her age, some adults criticized her, saying, "You're too young. You don't know anything." She was ridiculed by some non-Latinos because she has an accent when she speaks English. Some people told her to "go back where you came from." (Rodriguez was born in Latin America and spoke Spanish as her first language.)

But Rodriguez persisted. She learned form the surveys that many Latinos were interested in the environment, but needed more information and guidance on subjects like water conservation, endangered species, and protecting the Everglades. She wrote the brochure to include thos issues and then added specific suggestions on how individuals and families could make a difference. She said, "Kids at school will use it to educate their parents, who'll then take it to their workplaces, friends, and churches."

Rodriguez also made presentations at her school emphasizing how easy it was to conserve water. She created an "ecommercial," a public service announcement that played on her school's closed circuit TV. It included a jingle she wrote called. "Every Drop Counts." Water use at the school dropped, helping Rodriguez make her point that when Latinos understood the problem, they would do the right thing.

The time Rodriguez spent on conservation was a gamble with her personal future. Coming from a low-income family, her best chance of attending a good college was getting the highest possible grades so she could win a full scholarship. Still, she gave up study time to devote endless hours to her cause. She decided that the survival of the Everglades was more important than whether or not one girl went to a prestigious college. Rodriguez recalls the book on the Everglades that she read when she was only 11, A River of Grass. The first sentence in that book is always in her mind: "There are no other Everglades in the world."

This one remarkable girl's B average and her stunning record of community service got Rodriguez into college and her championing of the Everglades earned her the friendship of her hero, fellow Giraffe Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the author of A River of Grass.

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