Eco-Tainment #5: Hoot (Carl Hiassen novel)

Florida is known primarily for two things. One is the fact that DisneyWorld is located there. The other is that old retirees move there. Those who pay attention to novels aimed at teenagers (now excitingly rebranded as "young adults") might notice a third--Florida is where Carl Hiassen sets the majority of his environmental fiction.
Hiassen began his career writing for adults, but in 2002 published his first novel for children, Hoot. The novel concerns a boy named Roy Eberhart, who moves to Florida from Montana and becomes involved in another boy's crusade to save a colony of Florida burrowing owls (an endangered subspecies) from having their habitat destroyed to make way for a restaurant. The boys resort to a number of unscrupulous and possibly illegal means to accomplish this, including putting snakes inside the construction workers' latrines and vandalizing their equipment.
Eventually, the construction foreman, who at first denied the existence of the owls, is forced to acknowledge that he is building on their nesting grounds, and the would-be construction site is repurposed as an owl sanctuary.
Hoot lies somewhere in the middle on the environmental spectrum of nuance that, one could say, has WALL-E on one end and Captain Planet on the other. The antagonists are very stereotypical evil money-loving CEOs of the sort that tend to populate these stories. This is in contrast with, for instance, Michael Bird-boy, in which the people causing the problems willingly confess to their faults and accept the protagonist's help in fixing the damage they have caused.
Hoot, however, is still an excellent introduction to environmentalism in fiction, and one that its target demographic of teenagers--especially teenage boys--will almost certainly enjoy.

While it may not be the most subtle environmental work in the world, Hoot still manages to be enjoyable and engaging.