My younger brother was apparently really into manatees in the early 90s. That was his explanation for my discovery of the 1992 coloring book Florida’s Vanishing Wildlife at our parents’ house in Ohio, published by an imprint of a larger publisher based in Minnesota. As far as I can tell, Great Outdoors Publishing (a subsidiary of Finney Company) still exists, and still publishes Florida-related nature books. It’s hard to say for certain, because they don’t seem to have a website and I could only find traces of their existence on sites like Open Library and Book Depository. Finney Company was acquired by Rowman and Littlefield in 2019, and that company’s CEO, Jeff Lyons, stated in Publisher’s Weekly that “The Finney Company under Al Krysan developed a gold mine of evergreen titles in small niche areas ignored by larger publishers. Great Outdoors Publishing Company has been a leading publisher of books on Florida since 1913.” I offer the previous information for anyone whose curiosity is piqued by Florida’s Vanishing Wildlife and might think, “Hm! Where can I get more books like this?”
Anyway, somewhat unexpectedly, Florida’s Vanishing Wildlife (by Peter Bramley) evinces a level of ecological awareness (and calls to action!) I found startling for its time, and in a coloring book no less. It almost makes you mad to read through it in 2021 and reflect on how little progress has been made on wildlife conservation in the last 30 years. We can’t say “we didn’t know any better back then” because clearly we did. This coloring book proves it!
I mean, the intro alone. After extolling Florida’s natural beauty, the author states: “But so many of us have come to live in Florida that our homes, stores, and roads are crowding out the paradise we wanted to be near in the first place. . . . We don’t always see the harm we do when we clear land for a building, or fill in a pond, or throw trash where we shouldn’t.” That’s gold. (There’s also a picture of a Florida bog frog at the bottom of the page waiting to be colored in.)
“You can be one of those people who help to preserve Florida’s paradise. . . . If you see someone doing something that you know is bad for the environment, tell them not to do it, and tell them why.” I guess it’s not that surprising that such sentiments would abound in a book titled Florida’s Vanishing Wildlife, and it’s never too early to learn about conservation and ecological activism, but still, a pleasant discovery.
The coloring pages themselves feature all the usual suspects: black bears, Florida panthers, snakes, alligators, gopher tortoises, various birds, etc. There’s also a lot of flora – cypresses, lantana, sea oats, mangroves, and so on – which I appreciated, since “wildlife” connotes animals for most people. There’s a focus on species that are threatened or endangered, and predictably, most of those species are still threatened or endangered in 2021.
Only two pages were colored in: the pine barrens tree frog, Keys rat snake, Florida ribbon snake, Florida sand skink, eastern indigo snake, and bluetail mole skink were graced with magic marker strokes. Apparently the pro-conservation messages of the book did not resonate with my brother in his youth. But no worries. My daughter will doubtlessly enjoy coloring the remaining pages, and she’s already, like a lot of young people, well-versed in the importance of environmental awareness. That’s something, at least, that I can say has changed for the better since 1992.
