Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Saving Florida
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.lesliekemppoole.com/
CITY: Winter Park
STATE: FL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.lesliekemppoole.com/bio * http://www.rollins.edu/environmental-studies/faculty-staff-listing/index.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2010035380
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2010035380
HEADING: Poole, Leslie Kemp
000 00436nz a2200121n 450
001 8299359
005 20100602173751.0
008 100602n| acannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2010035380
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC
100 1_ |a Poole, Leslie Kemp
670 __ |a Poole, Leslie Kemp. Maitland, c2009: |b t.p. (Leslie Kemp Poole) p. 4 of cover (prof. at Rollins College in Winter Park and a Ph.D. student in American his. at the Univ. of Fla.)
953 __ |a rf05
PERSONAL
Born in FL; married; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:University of FLorida, B.S. 1978; University of Florida, Ph.D., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, assistant professor. Former reporter, Orlando Sentinel.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Leslie Kemp Poole is a journalist turned professor and historian, and she earned her bachelor’s degree in journalist at the University of Florida in 1978. Poole then went on to work as a reporter, and she was part of a team on the Orlando Sentinel that was later nominated for a Pulitzer prize. As both a journalist and historian, Poole’s work focuses on Florida and its culture, and she is also the author of the 2009 nonfiction volume, Maitland.
After publishing Matiland, Poole returned to academia to complete her doctorate at the University of Florida in 2012. She next joined the faculty at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and she serves there as assistant professor of environmental studies. Three years later, Poole released her second nonfiction effort, Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century. The book explores how women participated in the state’s environmental movement, and how they played an important role in shaping environmental policy (even before they were granted the right to vote). Poole explains that women in Florida worked tirelessly to preserve and protect Florida’s natural beauty, and she explains how they worked with state and local officials and eventually became those officials as well. They were responsible for forming the state’s first state park and it’s national park. As the author details the history of Florida’s environmental movement, she profiles several pivotal members. Indeed, Poole comments on Marjorie Harris Carr’s successful campaign to prevent the building of the Cross Florida Barge Canal. Poole also shows how the novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote about Florida’s beauty and popularized preservationist sentiments. The work of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who worked to preserve the Everglades, is also discussed.
Poole shared her inspiration for the book in a St.Augustine.com interview, asserting: “For many years, it has been clear to me—a writer and environmental educator—that women have been important players in the state’s environmental movement. As I dug into their stories, dating back to 1900, I realized that their roles were far greater than I realized and largely untold until recent years.” The author added: “I also admire [the women’s] motivations. Women worked for environmental improvements because it was the right thing to do—the right thing for their families, the community and the state. They weren’t swayed by arguments from male-dominated business and political interests that put profits ahead of aesthetics and biology.”
Praising Saving Florida in the Ledger Online, Tom Palmer announced that “this book was based on a mixture of historical documents and interviews with some of the women mentioned in the book and includes extensive end notes. . . . It is a worthwhile addition to the discussion of Florida’s environmental history.” Keith Woodhouse, writing in the Journal of Southern History, however, felt that “the implication that women were somehow inherently more concerned with nature risks the sort of gender essentialism that has historically been used to restrict women’s freedoms.” Still, Woodhouse remarked, “Saving Florida is a welcome addition to the growing literature on environmentalism. Poole rescues from obscurity many women who fought tirelessly to protect and conserve Florida’s natural resources, and she reminds historians that many similar stories remain untold.”
Offering more strident applause in Choice, C.S. McCoy announced that the book “is a good resource for those interested in Florida history, politics, and environmental issues.” According to a Networked Social Movements reviewer, “the book is very academic in nature, including endnotes, a bibliography and index at the back of the book. That said, the book is written for a popular audience; the text is accessible to readers with little background and the language is engaging. Poole includes plenty of quotes in her text, not solely from academics, but also quotes contemporary to her subject. She situates the events in the book with brief consideration of national events, such as pertinent national policy decisions and the activities of national organizations like the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.” The reviewer then went on to comment that “the focus of the book is on women and the environmental movement, as such, much discussion of the role of men is limited and lacks strong discussion of the African American community, whose goals were oriented at improving quality of life rather than protecting the environment. These missing viewpoints are acknowledged by Poole in the introduction, as well as those of the state’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indian perspectives. The missing points of view reflect not just a lack of current literature on the subject, but also the deficiency with which state and local entities interacted and discoursed with those populations during the 20th century.” Thus, “Saving Florida is certainly worth the read for understanding the efficacy of grassroots organizing and the role women played at shaping society in the 20th century.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, November, 2015, C.S. McCoy, review of Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century.
Journal of Southern History, November, 2016, Keith Woodhouse, review of Saving Florida.
ONLINE
Ledger Online, http://www.theledger.com/(July 25, 2017), Tom Palmer, review of Saving Florida.
Leslie Kemp Poole Website, http://www.lesliekemppoole.com (July 25, 2017).
Networked Social Movements, https://networkmovements.wordpress.com/ (July 24, 2017), review of Saving Florida.
St.Augustine.com, http://staugustine.com/ (August 15, 2015), author interview and review of Saving Florida.*
BIOGRAPHY
Leslie Kemp Poole is an award-winning writer and historian. A fourth-generation Floridian, Poole has long been interested in the role of women in the state’s environmental movement and how they were saving the state’s important natural resources even before they were able to vote.
Poole is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. She received her PhD in History from the University of Florida in 2012. Her articles have been published in a number of academic journals and she regularly presents papers about her research at history conferences. In 2008 she appeared in the PBS documentary In Marjorie's Wake which retraced a 1933 trip on the St. Johns River taken by noted author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Poole also has worked as a freelance author for a number of magazines and publications.
Prior to working in academia, Poole was a reporter for several newspapers, including the Orlando Sentinel, where she helped pen a series of articles about Florida's lack of growth management that won awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
She lives in Winter Park, Florida, where she and her husband raised two sons and now frequently walk their dog.
Leslie Kemp Poole, PhD
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies
Beal Maltbie Center - Room 109
407-691-1679
lpoole@rollins.edu
Visit Website
Ph.D. University of Florida, 2012
MLS Rollins College, 1991
B.S Journalism, University of FLorida, 1978
MLS Rollins College 1991
Professional interests and specializations include the history of the environmental movement, particularly the grassroots organizers that, in Florida and across the country, included many women. Author of "Saving Florida: Women's Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century."
In her spare time, she likes to hike and kayak around the state.
Saving Florida: Women's Fight for the Environment in the
Twentieth Century
Keith Woodhouse
Journal of Southern History.
82.4 (Nov. 2016): p964.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Saving Florida: Women's Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century. By Leslie Kemp Poole. (Gainesville and other cities: University
Press of Florida, 2015. Pp. x, 274. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6081-1.)
Among the most regrettable missing elements in the historiography of environmentalism is the role of women. Leslie Kemp Poole has gone some
way toward addressing that serious shortcoming. In Saving Florida: Women's Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century, Poole tells the
little-known story of women's leadership on environmental issues in the Sunshine State. In women's groups, in the broader environmental
movement, and in notable individual careers, Florida women played leading roles in protecting their state's natural heritage.
Poole's study does not stop at the state line, however. She focuses on efforts in Florida but always connects them to the environmental movement
as a whole. As the conservation movement gained support across the country early in the twentieth century, Laura Norcross Marrs led the Florida
Audubon Society's efforts against plume hunters, and May Mann Jennings helped the Florida Forestry Association protect the state's trees. In the
1910s, while John Muir struggled to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley from being drowned by a reservoir for San Francisco, Jennings and Mary Barr
Munroe championed the creation of Royal Palm State Park, the first step toward designating Everglades National Park decades later. So central
were women's efforts to conservation that Muir's own opponents drew him in a skirt to suggest that he fought for a woman's cause. In the 1960s
Marjorie Harris Carr took on the Cross Florida Barge Canal because of its potential ecological impact, years before the National Environmental
Policy Act of 1969 made such impact a subject of law. In the 1970s, as the environmental movement battled pollution, Florida state representative
Mary Grizzle crafted legislation to protect Tampa Bay from municipal waste.
Saving Florida keeps track of women's rights nationally and shows how those shifting rights shaped environmental activism. Lacking the vote in
the 1900s and 1910s, women in Florida organized grassroots groups and used moral authority to pressure legislators. Starting in the 1960s,
7/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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second-wave feminism combined with women's growing presence in the workplace to produce more assertive and pointed campaigns to protect
the environment. By the 1970s, women in Florida were not only leveraging their votes through groups like the League of Women Voters but also
assuming office themselves and passing legislation to clean up Florida's cities, waterways, and countryside.
While gender defines the subject of Poole's interest, it is never entirely clear how she wants historians to think about it or even how she thinks
about it herself. Again and again, Saving Florida associates economic growth with men and concern for the natural world with women. At times
Poole suggests this division is simply a matter of men dominating industry and politics; at times she seems to suggest something more. Grizzle's
election to the state legislature "signaled the end of long-held male views in which nature was sacrificed to the god of economics" (p. 142).
Whether in the 1910s or the 1970s, "men and male-dominated interests that revolved around income and profits were ruining the state's natural
systems then and now" (p. 119). By the end of the century, women were in a position to correct men's many mistakes: "The men had made a real
mess of things. Now it was up to women to make a difference" (p. 153). Poole never makes clear whether "male views" were a product of culture,
power, or biology, and the implication that women were somehow inherently more concerned with nature risks the sort of gender essentialism
that has historically been used to restrict women's freedoms.
Generally, though, Saving Florida is a welcome addition to the growing literature on environmentalism. Poole rescues from obscurity many
women who fought tirelessly to protect and conserve Florida's natural resources, and she reminds historians that many similar stories remain
untold.
KEITH WOODHOUSE
Northwestern University
Woodhouse, Keith
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Woodhouse, Keith. "Saving Florida: Women's Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4,
2016, p. 964+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867713&it=r&asid=ae72ccb27a9711e50727f375960d97c6. Accessed 8 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470867713
---
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Poole, Leslie Kemp. Saving Florida: women's fight for the
environment in the twentieth century
C.S. McCoy
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.3 (Nov. 2015): p444.
COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Poole, Leslie Kemp. Saving Florida: women's fight for the environment in the twentieth century. University Press of Florida, 2015. 274p bibl
index afp ISBN 9780813060811 cloth, $34.95
(CC) 53-1269
QH76
2014-43923 CIP
Poole (environmental studies and history, Rollins College) chronicles the history of Florida's environmental movement, which sprang from the
work of women's groups motivated by their love of Florida's natural beauty and diverse wildlife. As they became more involved in environmental
issues, women began partnering with local and state officials and gradually moved into leadership roles. Poole discusses several well-known early
environmentalists who made lasting changes to Florida's current environmental landscape: novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who wrote about
Florida's beauty; Marjorie Harris Carr, who successfully fought the building of the potentially devastating Cross Florida Barge Canal; and
Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whose work focused attention on the importance of the Everglades. But Poole also shines the spotlight on less
familiar figures, women who fought tirelessly for clean air and clean water, who led efforts to beautify the cities and conserve the native forests,
and who pushed for and were instrumental in establishing the first state park and the first national wildlife refuge. From the beginning, this book
draws readers in. It is a good resource for those interested in Florida history, politics, and environmental issues, particularly the history of the
environmental movement and women's role in it. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All readers.--C. S. McCoy, University of South Florida
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
McCoy, C.S. "Poole, Leslie Kemp. Saving Florida: women's fight for the environment in the twentieth century." CHOICE: Current Reviews for
Academic Libraries, Nov. 2015, p. 444. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA434319605&it=r&asid=b571a48add6e75facc7e5c805983891a. Accessed 8 July
2017.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A434319605
Posted August 15, 2015 11:40 pm - Updated August 16, 2015 12:08 am
Book review: 'Saving Florida: Women's Fight for the Environment in the Twentieth Century'
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This book is a serious academic study dealing with women’s role in preserving Florida’s natural assets, but it also contains the elements of a horror story.
In the not too distant past, Florida with all its natural beauty, its unique flora and its abundance of wildlife was treated as a treasure house to be plundered. The Everglades? — dredge it and plow it under for farmland. Virgin pine forests? — cut them down until only 13 percent of the original remain. Pristine beaches? — allow developers to hide them behind high-rise hotels and condos. Amazing rookeries? — go in with guns, kill the birds, strip the feathers for the millinery trade in New York, London or Paris, leave dead carcasses on the ground and hatchlings dying in the nests.
It was all there for the taking, and takers were plentiful and greedy.
With such widespread decimation, it is truly a miracle that any of Florida’s natural environments has survived into the 21st century.
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Until the late 1800s, few voices were raised in defense of conservation. When that movement did come, it was women’s voices that were most loudly heard. By that time, Florida, or at least parts of it, had become more easily accessible, and many wealthy and middle-class northern women found winter homes here. Many of these women were well-educated and had the leisure to concern themselves with issues such as preserving Florida’s land, water and other resources.
Also by that time, women’s organizations such as the Federated Women’s Clubs and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) were becoming a vocal and compelling force, allowing women to garner support for their causes.
For instance, in 1900, Clara Dommerich helped organize the Florida Audubon Society in her living room. If the women’s names sound quaintly old-fashioned — Myrtice McCaskill, Veola Ezell, Madira Bickell — and their styles appear a bit dowdy and dated, they were a force to be reckoned with. They did not obtain the vote until the 1920s, but that did not stop them from petitioning the legislators (all male) time and time again until they achieved their goals.
Prominent among this class of women were the three Marjories — Marjorie Harris Carr who campaigned to halt the cross-Florida Barge Canal; Marjorie Stoneman Douglas to whom a huge debt is owed for her efforts to preserve the Everglades; and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings whom St. Augustine can claim as a one-time resident and whose writings opened knowledge of Florida’s people and its natural beauty to the entire world.
Author Leslie Kemp Poole deserves praise for her copious research and for creating a highly readable account of the role of women in preserving Florida’s unique natural resources. The book includes photographs, an index and a comprehensive bibliography.
Q&A WITH LESLIE KEMP POOLE
What inspired you to write about the role of women in preserving Florida’s environment?
For many years, it has been clear to me — a writer and environmental educator — that women have been important players in the state’s environmental movement. As I dug into their stories, dating back to 1900, I realized that their roles were far greater than I realized and largely untold until recent years.
I also admire [the women’s] motivations. Women worked for environmental improvements because it was the right thing to do — the right thing for their families, the community and the state. They weren’t swayed by arguments from male-dominated business and political interests that put profits ahead of aesthetics and biology. As one woman said, “You don’t mess with a “mama bear” when she believes her health and that of her family is threatened.”
Are there women today who are taking leadership roles in saving Florida’s natural assets?
There are many women still in the environmental trenches, leading battles and organizing grassroots efforts. Mary Barley, of Key Largo, is a leader in the fight to get the Everglades restored. Maggy Hurchalla, of Martin County, remains an important voice for sane, managed growth and environmental protection. Jeannie Economos has been a strong voice in helping Apopka-area farmworkers whose health was damaged by agricultural chemicals. Victoria Tschinkel, once a leader in the state’s environmental bureaucracy, today is vice chairperson of 1000 Friends of Florida, an important nonprofit advocacy group that promotes sustainable development in the state.
Since this review will appear in The St. Augustine Record, are there any women from our area who made specific contributions to this cause?
Many activists hail from northeast Florida. Marjorie Harris Carr, a scientist and resolute activist (despite being labeled a “Micanopy housewife”), led successful efforts to halt the Cross Florida Barge Canal, which would have destroyed the Ocklawaha River. Jacksonville women pressed for city planning, clean air and beautification. May Mann Jennings, of Jacksonville, particularly stands out as a powerful activist who could get things accomplished in Tallahassee even before women could vote — better forestry practices, bird protection laws and the first state park. Her experience gained as the wife of a governor and her “old-girls’ network” of women’s groups and connections made her one of the most politically powerful figures in Florida history.
What do you see as continuing threats to Florida’s natural environment?
There are two major threats to Florida’s natural environment today — climate change and diminishing water resources. If our country and the rest of the world continue to drag their feet to address climate change, Florida will be ground zero for some of the most devastating damage caused by sea level rises, and many coastal areas will be inundated. Urban areas located on coastlines will have difficulty dealing with the consequences.
Water is another immediate issue. We have been using underground water resources for decades, knowing that the supply is limited and threatened, however, the state has done very little to address it. We continue to allow large-scale pumping of these resources without instituting serious water-saving regulations or promoting lifestyles and landscapes that reduce water usage.
Was there one particular woman among those you wrote about who stood out in your estimation?
Joy Towles Ezell, of Perry, has worked for more than two decades to remove dangerous industrial waste from the Fenholloway River in her community. The state legislature in 1947 allowed a large paper mill operation to use and abuse this river. It was in a rural area that was desperate for economic development. Ezell, realizing that the river had been contaminated with dioxin, a cancer-causing chemical, organized community members to save the river. She continues today, despite threats and criticism, and deserves great credit for her perseverance and grace under pressure.
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