IF YOU GO
Susan Nugent will sign copies of Women Conserving the Florida Keys at a Conch Republic Independence Celebration, 4 to 7 p.m. Monday at Reef Relief Environmental Center, 631 Greene St., Key West. 305-294-3100 or www.reefrelief.org.Joyce Newman has considered what qualities she shares with more than a dozen other women who are subjects of a new book called Women Conserving the Florida Keys by Susan Nugent. She has come to this conclusion:
``I think it goes back to a very strong sense of place, of having chosen the Keys rather than having just fallen off the turnip truck here.''
Newman lives on Big Pine Key, where she was the first president of the Key Deer Protection Alliance, formed in the late 1980s to save the habitat of the diminutive white-tails. She also worked with Clean Water Action.
''When you feel so strongly about a place, and have the expectation that it will be protected by virtue of laws on the books being enforced, then your sense of outrage that follows seeing the laws abrogated or ignored is something you have to act on,'' Newman said. ``These special places become a part of our nest, our home.''
Author Nugent is now living in Gainesville, where she retired last year from Santa Fe Community College to finish the book she had been working on for several years.
She and her husband lived for a decade on Big Pine Key. While teaching English at Florida Keys Community College, Nugent asked students to write about outstanding women they knew.
''The stories were so phenomenal, and I wanted to meet these women,'' she said one morning over coffee and a bagel in a Marathon cafe.
From North Key Largo to Key West, Nugent found women who had felt passionately enough about protecting their islands that they took often-controversial stands against development, against highways cutting into endangered lands, for marine and forest protection and sustainable lifestyles.
Nugent focuses on 11 women (a few of whom died since she started writing) who were in the front lines of such work in the impassioned 1980s and '90s, when a tidal wave of development threatened to swamp the islands. She includes shorter profiles of eight younger women who are active today.
GREAT TRIUMPHS
On North Key Largo, the late, legendary Dagny Johnson worked tirelessly against developers, facing down ridicule and a lawsuit. In the 1970s and 1980s, builders envisioned 25,000 to 45,000 new residents in fragile tropical forest in the Upper Keys. Just one proposed project, Port Bougainville, would have added 80 buildings on 409 acres.
With a hand up from stories by Carl Hiaasen and Brian Duffy in The Miami Herald, Johnson and the Upper Keys Citizens Association ultimately won. The Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park triumphed over Port Bougainville and runs for 13 miles on the ocean, covering more than 8,000 acres.
Nicky Laak works in North Key Largo coordinating volunteer efforts in the 6,600-acre Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge. A transplanted Brit, Laak is a teacher who has organized everything from planting butterfly gardens to building peat mounds for crocodile nests. She began working with Friends and Volunteers of Refuges in 2001.
Among the endangered animals on North Key Largo is the Key Largo wood rat, which Laak says looks more like a mouse with its big ears and fur on its tail. In March, volunteers created 24 nests for the wood rats by turning personal watercraft upside down and covering them with rocks and sticks. In some, they hid cameras to see if the critters were using them. They are. (To watch a video of mother wood rat with two babies hiding from a rat snake, go to www.favorfloridakeys.com/).
Laak's husband Peter was a yacht captain and she a cook when they met working on a yacht. They moved to the Keys 15 years ago. ''We've brought up our two children here and they have been involved in volunteering since they were toddlers,'' said Laak, who studied civic environmentalism in college.
IN THE MIDDLE
In the middle Keys, Marathoners have witnessed the rise of Debbie Harrison from volunteer to head of the World Wildlife Fund's South Florida office. Having been a teacher and a night-shift auto line worker in Detroit, she came to the Keys from Michigan and stayed. She worked as a waitress before finding a job with the Monroe County planning department.
Harrison's first big environmental issue was a cross-island highway on Big Pine Key. It ended in tears and defeat for her, but she learned as she went. Eventually, she went to work for the Wilderness Society before taking a job in the WWF field office, and serves on the governor's committee on climate and energy.
''I've been able to be a key player in helping establish the Tortugas Marine Ecological Reserve that was put into place in 2002,'' around the Dry Tortugas National Park west of Key West, she said. ``I was invited to share the lessons of setting that up in Turkey, Mexico and to go and actually work in Alaska for three years to look at marine conservation.''
Like many of the women Nugent profiles, Harrison has found great satisfaction in educating the next generation of Middle Keys students.
''This means I can retire and someone else will do the work,'' said the 55-year-old Harrison.
Not far from Marathon on Sugarloaf, Alison Higgins, 33, is one of the new generation of conservationists. She came to the Keys on a Student Conservation Association internship nine years ago and found herself helping The Nature Conservancy manage the work of 50 13-year-old Boy Scouts on a West Summerland Key restoration project. ''The Nature Conservancy was understandably overwhelmed,'' she said. She was so good at getting the kids to work that conservancy asked her to stay on a year.
A RISING TIDE
The Nature Conservancy's work in the Keys centers on climate change, she says. ''Being so close to sea level, it makes all the other issues more heightened,'' she says. ``If your reefs are stressed because the water is getting hotter, then water quality is another nail in the coffin.''
Because of the threat of rising seas, Higgins spends her weekends and after-work hours as the president of Keys GLEE (Green Living & Energy Education), working to teach businesses, residents and policy makers about sustainable living in the islands. GLEE's next expo is May 9-11 at Marathon High School.
''Our reach has grown exponentially,'' Higgins says. ``I'm running to stay in place.''
DeeVon Quirolo, born in Coral Gables and a Key West conch by choice, started Reef Relief with her husband Craig in 1987. That organization, which is nonprofit, counts among its successes wastewater treatment for Key West and a mooring buoy field set up around the Key to protect reefs, as well as the push to stop offshore oil drilling.
Quirolo is pushing to outlaw all sewer outfall lines from Monroe to Palm Beach counties and is on the governor's task force for climate change.
''It's been interesting, and it just goes to show that regular people can seize the moment and make the change,'' she said. ''Activism is enjoying a renaissance. It's getting serious.'' Again.
