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Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who Are Helping to Protect Our Planet by Harriet Rohmer with illustrations by Julie McLaughlin is a terrific collection of  minibios. No big names here, at least, none I'd heard of. These are stories of people who became immersed in an environmental situation. One of the things that's so good about this book is that in writing about the people, Rohmer writes about the issues they deal with.

I was grabbed right away by the first story about Will Allen who works with city farms. There are also stories here about people who are making use of salvaged materials (I learned about deconstructing buildings instead of demolishing them), bringing solar power to a Hopi reservation, and treating sewage with plants. This is an ethnically diverse group of people, giving readers the feeling that environmental concerns are shared by everyone. As, of course, they are and should be.

I also picked up a number of little scientific/technical details from this book in a painless way, which is how I like to pick them up.

The publisher suggests this book for older elementary school students.

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I've just heard that "book pairing" is a thing.  Evidently you can pair books with all kinds of things. This business of pairing fiction and nonfiction books is interesting.

And Nancy Castaldo's pairing of fiction and eco-fiction children's books at Nerdy Book Club is particularly interesting.  Notice that she pairs Ivan: The Remarkable True Story of the Shopping Mall Gorilla by Katherine Applegate with The One and Only Ivan also by Applegate.

I don't believe I've included animals in our environmental books. Castaldo's thinking is that the animals in the books she's suggesting are endangered or, in Ivan's case, not living in its natural environment. I can certainly accept that as a reason to include those kinds of books under the "environmental" umbrella.

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I have finally found an environmental book for older readers, and it is terrific.

Sixteen-year-old Laura, the journal keeping main character in The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd, is a member of a punk band. She has an appalling older sister, and her parents are falling apart. Sounds pretty generic YA, doesn't it? What makes this book riveting is its setting and its main character.

Are Good Environmental Books All About Setting?

The 2015 Britain of The Carbon Diaries is one suffering from energy shortages and horrific climate problems, as is the rest of the world. Britain, however, is the first country to start carbon rationing. The book is Laura's account of her family and neighbors dealing with limited access to energy while suffering through an extreme winter, a drought, and torrential rain. Her older sister is appalling because she is bitter and angry about her gap year in America being cancelled. Her parents are falling apart because they're having trouble coping with the social change they're being hammered with. Dad, for instance, is the head of a travel and tourism school. With carbon restrictions, people can't travel. That pretty much puts an end to the tourist industry in Britain, and he loses his job.

The book isn't a cautionary tale, in my humble opinion. It's much more of a thriller. What's going to happen next and how will the characters survive it? Though Laura comments on the selfishness of others a couple of times and wants very much for the rest of the world to get on board with carbon rationing, this is not a "Let's save the planet!" story. There is no instructive message.

I'm sure many reviewers probably write about The Carbon Diaries' environmental themes. I always have trouble determining what an environmental theme would be. I've seen some writers calls The Carbon Diaries' theme "climate change." That seems more like a subject to me. I would say the theme of The Carbon Diaries involves a teenager struggling to find her place as an older person in her family and her place in society, one that is dramatically changing. Those are traditional YA themes, not environmental ones. It's the environmental setting that makes those traditional YA themes interesting and makes this book environmental.

Isn't climate fiction, fiction dealing with climate change, all about setting?

A Good Character Always Does Wonders For A Book

Laura is like an edgier, smarter Georgia Nicholson. The format of the book is even similar to the Georgia Nicholson books. It's a journal, of course, and there are several pages at the end translating British terms for American readers, which you find in Georgia's books. This is not a complaint. I like Georgia. I like Laura.

A Good Book Doesn't Have To Teach You Anything

Though The Carbon Diaries doesn't insist that readers do anything, the characters' struggle was so intense that it has an impact. I hadn't read much before I started obsessing about whether or not I'd turned the heat down at night. I freaked out a bit over that power outage in Washington earlier this week. And, yikes! They're rationing water in California!! 

Very few people like to be preached at or taught. If a piece of fiction is well done, it creates a response in readers without doing either of those things.

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The 2015 Green Earth Book Award shortlist was announced last month by the Nature Generation.  Winners will be announced on Earth Day, April 22.

And in other environmental booky news, I stumbled upon a review of a book called Violet Mackerel's Natural Habitat by Elanna Allen at Chapter Book Chat. I'll look for it.

By the way, I found that Chapter Book Chat post at the March Carnival of Children's Literature.

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The Jenny Evolution has a list of Best Earth Day Picture Books For Kids. I haven't read any of these, but I haven't been able to pick up any environmental books, myself, for a while, so I'm offering these. 

I do have a couple of titles in mind for future reading.

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 In What is Cli-fi? And Why I Write It in The Guardian author Sarah Golding describes climate fiction as "fiction that foregrounds climate change." Her interest in writing it appears to go beyond using it as a setting, world, or spring board for a plot. She's trying to do something specific with her cli-fi books for young readers. She hopes that her characters' concern for the environment will spread to her readers.

On a related note, you might want to take a look at The Necessary Evolution of Environmental Writing by John Yunker at the Ecolit Books blog. He writes about needing stories "that inspire lasting change and have the power to change our worldview."

So both writers are talking about using environmental fiction in a proactive way, at least, if not one that is actually instructive.

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The Scottish Book Trust posted a list entitle 8 Books About The Environment (Teens) at its site.  Included is the hardcover edition of Saving the Planet & Stuff.

One of the interesting things about these books is that the newest title, The Carbon Diaries 2015, by Saci Lloyd, was published in 2008. This is a "deep" list that doesn't just rely on scanning recent publishers' catalogs.

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No, I am not going to claim that The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats is an environmental book. Though, I suppose I could. When I'm looking for environmental books, I look for experience.  The Snowy Day is all about a child's experience of winter, of a snowy day. Peter is immersed in a winter environment.

What I'm going to do, instead, is argue that environmental children's books need a The Snowy Day.

Back in 1962, The Snowy Day broke the color barrier in mainstream children's publishing. Little Peter is African-Amercan. But nowhere in this book is there anything that says, "Oh, this is an important story I'm telling here. Here is a lesson for us all--we're all alike when it snows!" Deborah Pope of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation said in a NPR interview that Peter's ethnic background "...wasn't important. It wasn't the point." She said that Keats "wasn't necessarily trying to make a statement about race when he created Peter." He was a white illustrator who had never used a child of color in his work and decided he would. The Snowy Day is the story of a kid having a good time in the snow. He just happens to be black.

So many children's environmental books are heavy with lesson. The mini-lectures undermine whatever story is there and destroy the experience of being immersed in some natural element. I'd love to see an environmental equivalent of The Snowy Day, in which child characters simply go about their business recycling or composting or living in a solar house or living as a part of some ecosystem or another without hammering readers about the significance of what they're doing.

Maybe for the time being I'll settle for The Snowy Day as an environmental book and read and watch little Peter  surround himself with winter.

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The picture book Winston of Churchill: One Bear's Battle Against Global Warming by Jean Davies Okimoto with illustrations by Jeremiah Trammell teeters between being preachy and instructive and clever and witty.

Winston is a polar bear near a town named Churchill in Manitoba, Canada. He wears glasses and is always holding a lit cigar, much like another Winston named Churchill. Bear Winston is in a position of polar bear leadership, much like British Prime Minster Winston was in a position of human leadership. The polar bears are facing the melting of ice in Hudson Bay due to human pollution, much like the Brits were facing invasion by the Na...No, that's kind of a stretch. But when Bear Winston rallies his bears, he does sound a lot like British PM Winston rallying his people.  '"We will for fight ice," boomed Winston. "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender."'

That's what makes this book clever and witty, the whole whole bear-doing-Churchill thing. Because a polar bear isn't Winston Churchill, and the incongruity is funny.

But then you get to the lesson stuff. '"Ice is melting because it's getting too warm around here and people are doing it with their cars and smoke stacks. And cutting down trees."' I'm not saying that's not true, but instruction is awkward, to say the very least, in fiction. Winston of Churchill even includes a page from a book Winston of Churchill wrote on global warming to make sure to get the educational stuff across. Though I'm going to take a wild guess that I'm not the only person who skipped it.

But here's the clever and witty thing about that book written by Winston of Churchill--Winston Churchill wrote books, too!

The illustrations in this book are marvelous and very engaging, and I think kids will be attracted to the bears and some of the humor. Some will be left recalling that human actions are wrecking ice for those neat bears. It will probably be adults with some knowledge of a World War II historical figure who will enjoy this book the most.

Winston of Churchill won the Green Earth Book Award for Children's Fiction in 2008.

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Not every page of Earth-friendly Buildings, Bridges and More by Etta Kaner with illustrations by Stephen MacEachern contains Earth-friendly content. Nonetheless, this is quite a marvelous book about the work that goes into building a variety of structures and how many of them are being built greener.

Though this is a nonfiction work, the basic premise is that an imaginary girl has been traveling with her engineer parents, and we are reading her scrapbook. She is one enthusiastic kid. Among the things I liked about Earth-friendly B, B and M:

• While there is certainly content related to large buildings being made more green, there's also material about designing buildings to withstand earthquakes and storms. It's as if technology is working with Earth, not against it.
• It gives readers a good idea of the number of people, the variety of engineers, for instance, necessary just for the planning of a big construction project. This is important because it helps to explain why building takes so long and is so expensive.
• Technology has had a bad rap for many years now. The 1950's were filled with movies about science gone amock. I've read that The China Syndrome was a turning point in how science was perceived by the public in the '70s, that technology would lead to very bad things. First some guy is messing around with creating life, and the next thing you know, dinosaurs are coming back and eating people. But in Earth-friendly Buildings, Bridges and More, technology is portrayed as a good thing. Mom, Dad, an uncle, and a cousin are all engineers, all involved in creating or fixing things. Even if you're not a fan of tech, this is different.

The stereotype about environmental living involves natural fibers, whole grains, and funny light bulbs. But it takes technology to make real environmental progress, to find ways to heat and cool enormous buildings, for instance. Earth-friendly Buildings, Bridges and More can help young people recognize that.

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The Green Earth Book Awards were announced in September.  The Nature Generation has been sponsoring them for ten years. This year's winners:


Picture Book: The Eye of the Whale by Jennifer O'Connell

Children's Fiction: The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathi Appelt










Young Adult Fiction: Washashore by Suzanne Goldsmith





 





Children's Nonfiction: A Place for Turtles by Melissa Stewart with illustrations by Higgins Bond




     





Young Adult Nonfiction: Inside a Bald Eagle's Nest: A Photographic Journey Through the American Bald Eagle Nesting Season by Teena Ruark Gorrow and Craig A. Koppie







Honor Books:

Ellie’s Log:  Exploring the Forest Where the Great Tree Fell by Judith L. Li with  illustrations by M.L. Herring

Frog Song by Brenda Guiberson with illustrations by Gennady Spirin

Mousemobile by Prudence Breitrose with illustrations by Stephanie Yue

Parrots Over Puerto Rico by Susan L. Roth and Cindy Trombore with illustrations by Susan L. Roth

The Lord of Opium by Nancy Farmer

The Tapir Scientist:  Saving South America’s Largest Mammal by Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop

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Operation Redwood by S. Terrell French is one of the first pieces of fiction with an environmental setting/theme that I think I've read for this project. It deals with a boy from the city who learns of an endangered old growth forest of redwoods and gets involved with a child-directed initiative to save it. It's very much a city-people-with-money-bad, rural-farm-people-good story. That kind of stereotype is not a big drawback in children's publishing because child readers have not had time to become widely read. Old scenarios are new to them. In fact, Operation Redwood won the Green Earth Book Award in the children's fiction category in 2010. For this adult reader, the most interesting part of the book was the Author's Note in which French, an environmental lawyer, describes the history of redwood preservation, which also gave some idea of the inspiration for some of the events and characters in the book. The novel includes a lot of information and could easily be a reading list staple for school environmental units.

Reading this book raised lots of questions for me about environmental fiction. For one thing, what exactly is an environmental theme? In the case of Operation Redwood, I would say that it's that humans have a responsibility to act as caretaker for the Earth. But what would other themes be? Are there other themes? Is there any way for a writer to use the humans-as-caretakers theme without making it instructional instead of thematic?

And what about my desire to see environmental books that include an immersion in some kind of natural experience? Can you get that particular type of sense of place while working a plot?

How does Saving the Planet & Stuff fit in with all this? Thematically, that book is about having to decide how we'll live our lives. There's an environmental setting. There are environmentalist characters. If there's any kind of environmental theme, I'd say that it's the difficulty of living an environmental life.

Wait! Wait! Go back three paras at which point I asked for other environmental themes! I just came up with one!

Well, I look forward to reading more environmental fiction and obsessing on this further.

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How does a cookbook fit in with my interest in environmental books that provide an immersion in some kind of natural  experience? Pam McElroy, one of the editors of The Green Teen Cookbook, Recipes for all Seasons Written by Teens, for Teens, (Laurane Marchive is the other) writes that "When it comes to food, going green" is, in great part, about shopping seasonally and buying locally. That's a lifestyle, a daily experience. McElroy also says, "Our eating habits form such an important part of our daily lives that questions of what we eat are transformed into questions of who we are. We don't say, 'I eat a vegetarian diet.' We say, 'I am a vegetarian.'"

This cookbook actually includes essays. In my experience, you have to be a bit of a foodie to read essays on cooking, and I don't know how many teenagers have that much of a commitment yet. But I very much like that editors McElroy and Marchive respect their potential readers enough to include them. They also do some neat things with taking the same recipe and changing it according to the seasons and the availability of fresh ingredients.

The recipes here include basics like French toast and tuna salad, swing into your more veggie type things (fried tofu with peanut dipping sauce), and take a shot at what some of us think of as more demanding fare (risotto with arugula pesto). The Green Teen Cookbook is a classy work that takes its subject seriously while also recognizing that people need to know how to cook regular food.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher.

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I've said before that my idea of an environmental book is one that immerses readers in some kind of natural experience. I'm not sure that Lifetime, by Lola M. Schaefer with illustrations by Christopher Silas Neal,  really does that. As the Kirkus reviewer said of it, "Is this book about the natural world? Counting? Statistics? Solving math word problems?" But the natural world is in there.

I can't say I know a lot about math. But what seems to be going on in Lifetime is an introduction to the concept of counting as well as the recognition that counting things is part of life. This isn't a traditional counting book, as in "1 papery egg sac," "2 caribou," "3 alpacas." It's just about counting. You can count the number of antlers a caribou will grow and shed in a lifetime. (10) You can count the number of beads a rattlesnake will add to its rattle. (40)

There are all kinds of animals out there, and you can count things related to them.

Hmm. Maybe there is an immersive experience here, one in which we take a human created activity and apply it to the natural world that animals live in.

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I'm a season late with the post Nine Environmental Summer Reading Books for Kids. However,  I don't care a lot about reading according to a schedule. So go ahead and check out those books from SCGH, which used to be known as Sierra Club Green Home.

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The July/August issue of The Horn Book (which I believe is somewhere in this house) includes a review of  Park Scientists: Gila Monsters, Geysers, and Grizzly Bears in America’s Own Backyard by Mary Kay Carson with photographs by Tom Uhlman. The review says the book introduces readers to scientists who conduct research projects on geology, ecology, and biology at three state parks.

You may read about this one here again.

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Last year I discovered climate fiction, also known as cli-fi, a term coined by Dan Bloom. Earlier this week, Kelly Jensen at Stacked did a post called Get Genrefied: Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) on climate fiction for YAs.

Is Cli-Fi Apocalyptic?

Notice that a lot of these books appear to be apocalyptic. Is that a requirement of this genre-like category? Why does a story about climate change always involve society falling apart? We experienced a Little Ice Age as recently as the early 1800s. Did the Earth's citizens go, "Life as we know it is over?" I think not. And if someone had told them, "Hey, it's going to get a lot hotter over the next century and a half or so," would they have gone, "Well, that sucks" or would they have said, "Thank you, God!"

Why can't we have a cli-fi book that involves a snow world and a society has evolved in which everyone skates and cross-country skis and it's Christmas all the time? No, seriously, why not a winter world where a culture has simply evolved to function there? Or a desert world that has been made livable by way of technology. ("Better living through science!")

Climate As The Story Vs. Climate As The Setting

I suspect what's happening here is that, as Kelly says, cli-fi is "fiction that features climate change at the core of the story." Making the climate change some kind of negative change provides the storyline. Whereas the kind of thing I'm talking about is a situation in which the climate is the setting of the story. The story is about something else. Would that be climate fiction?

Coming Up

Though I most definitely am not a fan of apocalyptic fiction, I'll grit my teeth and try to pick one of these books from Kelly's list for a reading effort. She also refers readers to Eco-Fiction & Cli-Fi Books, which I've just started following on Twitter.  I should have more in the future on this subject.

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Firefly July, A Year of Very Short Poems, which was our Environmental Book Club selection earlier this month, has won the 2014 New England Independent Booksellers Association New England Book Award in the children's category. These awards are given for books either about New England, set in New England, or by an author living in New England.

Firefly July is an anthology compiled by Paul B. Janeczko and illustrated by Melissa Sweet.

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The Plant Hunters by Anita Silvey turned out to be as marvelous as I thought when I started it last week.

The Plant Hunters deals with the naturalists who went all over the world hunting for new plants. While Silvey brings her book up to the present day, for the most part, she's dealing with seekers from the past, particularly the nineteenth century, a period when the search for new knowledge sent lots of people out into the unknown.

What Silvey does here that's so terrific is that she doesn't just write bio per chapter after bio per chapter. I thought that might be the case, after reading Chapter One, which is about Alexander von Humboldt. Instead, she organizes her chapters around topics. Say, Chapter 2 Why Did They Do It? While explaining why these people faced danger and made tremendous efforts to bring huge numbers of plants over long distances, she uses real people to illustrate her points. Every chapter is like that. They each are on a subject and the people involved get pulled in that way.

And the nineteenth century illustrations and the black and white photographs are so perfect.

The Author's Note has a great bit on how Silvey got the idea for this book while reading The Orchard Thief by Susan Orlean.

There's also a chapter on thieving westerners robbing other cultures of the crops they depended on. Well, no, that's not how Silvey put it. That's me. Those nineteenth century scholar/adventurers had a dark side, in my humble opinion.

This is a terrific book for older grade school students. It could even function as a quick introduction to this subject for much older readers. It might encourage a few plant hunters

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I've only read the intro and first chapter of The Planet Hunters by Anita Silvey, but I have great hopes for it. I found myself getting excited while still on the first paragraph:

"One got eaten by tigers in the Philippines; one died of fever in Ecuador; one drowned in the Orinoco River; one fell to his death in Sierra Leone. Another survived rheumatism, pleurisy, and dysentery while sailing the Yangtze River in China, only to be murdered later. A few ended their days in lunatic asylums; many simply vanished into thin air."

Silvey isn't talking about the work of some kind of curse. She's talking about the consequences of  amateur scholars following their passion for...plants. The nineteenth century appears to have been full of these kinds of people. Paleontologists. Egyptologists. And now botanists. I love them all. Well, not those guys who took boat loads of men to their deaths hunting for a pole. Trying to get some place doesn't grab me. Trying to acquire knowledge about the world most definitely does.

I'll keep you informed on this selection as I make my way through it.

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Today, my little lads and lasses, I have something different for you. An adult book for our club.

Home to Woefield by Susan Juby takes a cliched memoir subject, the city person getting back to the earth by moving on to a farm, and makes it funny. And she makes it funny without making any of her characters into ridiculous jokes.

Prudence Burns is seriously into sustainability but not having good luck with it in New York. She thinks a great opportunity opens up for her when she inherits a pretty much good-for-nothing farm in Canada. Prudence isn't totally ignorant of how to make a go of it in an organic kind of way, and she's a hard worker. She also earns the good will of all around her. Her problem is that she's overly optimistic.

With the farm she also inherits an elderly hired hand, who's not a great deal of help. She soon takes in a young alcoholic recluse whose main connection with the world is through the celebrity and metal blogs he runs. The three of them also end up with a preteen and her chickens.

These characters could have ended up as cliches, especially the preteen. She could have easily fallen into the wise-beyond-her-years stereotype. Instead, she is a damaged innocent. The elderly, foul-mouthed Earl and the equally foul-mouthed young Seth are also damaged. All these characters benefit from Prudence's can do sustainability.

This is the first book I can recall coming across that I think is comparable to Saving the Planet & Stuff  in that it finds humor in the struggle to live environmentally/sustainably without degrading those who are making the effort to do it. Prudence is not the butt of any jokes here. She recognizes them.

Juby is the author of a number of books for teens or that are marketed to both teens and adults. I'm reading Getting the Girl, whose main character seems like a younger Seth (my favorite from Home to Woefield), Seth before he suffered what he believed to be a humiliation he could never recover from and hit the sauce. I expect to be trying Alice, I Think soon, too.

Home to Woefield was recommended by a friend, by the way. Word of mouth.

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You've probably noticed that I'm interested in seasonal books that embrace living with nature as it changes over the course of a year. Firefly July: A Year of Very Short Poems, selected by Paul B. JaneczkoMM and illustrated by Melissa Sweet, called to me.

The poems here definitely are short.  While they are lovely and spot on with their imagery, I think they're a little uneven in their seasonal connection. Though if used as a read aloud, that would be a good discussion point with young listeners. What, exactly, does a poem called Window about looking out at the night from a railroad car have to do with spring?

Whether or not you agree with dividing these poems up as representing the seasons of the year, this is a good collection, and a lovely looking one, for all who appreciate their poetry on the short side, whatever your age.

By the way, Connecticut author Patricia Hubbell has a poem in Firefly July.

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I've written here about liking an immersion-type thing with environmental books, books that don't wear a sign saying "It's eco-time" but just make readers part of a natural world or lifestyle. Maybe what I'm thinking of is some kind of wholistic experience.

That's what I think happens with Mouse and Mole: Fine Feathered Friends by Wong Herbert Yee. The book has a Frog and Toad vibe, which is good, though wordier. Fine Feathered Friends is all about Mouse and Mole watching birds. And drawing them. And writing poetry about them. The whole thing.

Over the course of a story about the two friends having to find a way to get close to the birds they want to draw, Mouse and Mole pass off a small amount of avian info. But what really makes this book at all environmental is that Mouse and Mole want to do this bird stuff. They want to draw them and write about them. They want to have a life that involves birds.

Listen, when I had little kids, I would have read them this book, got out their artists' journals (yeah, we all had artists' journals), and gone out with them to find us some birds. It would have worked as an environmental book for me.

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Suzy Kline wrote an interesting post for the Authors for Earth Day blog. In Love Every Living Thing, she writes about Horrible Harry's love of nature.

It's been years since I've read a Horrible Harry book, so I can't address the issue of just how great his interest in environmentalism is. But I like the idea of appreciation of nature/environmentalism being a thread within a story, as Kline describes.

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Spring Blossoms by Carole Gerber with illustrations by Leslie Evans is another one of these experiential books I'm fond of. With this one, you just sink into the experience of spring by focusing only on flowering trees.

The early part of the books involves just how some flowering trees look. After you get used to that, you move on to trees that bear both male and female blooms. Moving on, we come to pollen moving from male blooms to female blooms on balsam firs. There's a progression from less sophisticated information to more sophisticated.

I'm aware that I've been focusing a lot on picture books for this environmental book club. I'm working on that.

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