When Judy Moody gets serious about protecting the environment, her little brother Stink thinks she is overdoing it, but she manages to inspire her third grade class to undertake an award-winning, environment-saving project.
Homeschooled by her mechanic-environmentalist father, eleven-year-old Rachel "Ratchet" Vance records her efforts to make friends, save a park, remember her mother, and find her own definition of "normal."
The students in Miss Fox's class lead their school in making choices to help keep the planet healthy, such as turning off lights when leaving a room, taking shorter showers, and using cloth bags instead of plastic ones.
A man whose private dream of establishing a sanctuary for geese interferes with the commercial development of a hunting resort runs afoul of cynical and vested interests, who in turn manipulate him and his close family for their own selfish ends. Can this end happily? Of course it can.