From mega humans to talking trees: Vicky Allan on climate-conscious children's books

Times have moved on. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C jolted many into awareness and there are now multiple campaigns, some of them driven by the kids, for proper climate education in schools. Meanwhile, some of the most enlightening books I’ve read about climate in recent times have been pitched at children.

Picture books often present us with highly original ways of looking at an issue. In The Biggest Footprint: Eight Billion Humans. One Clumsy Giant by Rob and Tom Sears (Canongate, £14.99) all the humans in the world are put through what’s called a smoosher to create one single giant, “the mega human”. When the same is done for various other species or even the food we eat, the relative sizes are poignantly enlightening. A tiger no bigger than our mega thumbnail. A beef burger as wide as Table Mountain. But big could be useful. What if we put the mega human’s whole enormous brain and “galumphing body” behind solving the problem, the book asks.

There are books out there that provide inspiration for multiple conversations. Many raise issues of consumerism and waste. In The Whale Who Wanted More by Rachel Bright and Jim Field (Hachette, £6.99), Humphrey the whale cruises around the ocean looking for the perfect item that will make him feel complete, but – picking up so much stuff, from shiny things to flotsam and jetsam – he starts to struggle.

In The Bongles series of books by Oscar Van Heek and Dean Queazy (The Bongles, £6.99), the waste of human civilisation washes up on a tiny island occupied by monsters, who, like Wombles, put it to good reuse or upcycle.

Somebody Swallowed Stanley by Sarah Roberts and Hannah Peck (Scholastic, £6.99) provides a glimpse into the impact of waste plastic on ocean life by telling the story of Stanley, a carrier bag who is successively swallowed by a variety of marine creatures.

Knowledge is power for this generation as for all of us and there are also books that provide good science as well as tales. James Croll And His Adventures In Time by Jo Woolf (RSGS, £12.99), for instance, tells the story of the 19th-century Scot who was one of the first climate scientists, while also providing scientific explanations of the ice ages.

Many children’s environmental books contain tales of hope and empowerment. Again and again, they tell us about how small voices, small people, can create – or be part of creating – necessary change in a big and terrifying world. The message that small voices can ring loud is there, for instance, in Karine Polwart and Kate Leiper’s riotous version of the traditional folk tale, The King Of The Birds, now retitled The Queen Of The Birds (BC Books, £6.99), which tells about the wit and ingenuity of a small creature, the little wren.

It’s also there, for older readers, in Piers Torday’s The Wild Before (Quercus, £12.99), the prequel to his dystopian trilogy The Last Wild, which describes an Earth in which almost no animals still exist. In The Wild Before, Little-Hare’s world has been encroached on by sinister farming methods and when he sees a calf’s mother die, it sets him off on a heroic quest. Bull tells him, “A little one must save the mooncalf to avoid what follows”, which is, according to legend, “a great Terribleness”.

There’s a notable abundance of girl heroes. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that the most famous young climate voice of our time is a girl. But even before Greta Thunberg came into the public consciousness, some people were telling stories about girls fighting to save the planet. Among them was climate scientist Michael E Mann, whose 2018 ebook, The Tantrum That Changed The World (published as hardcover next year) featured a young girl taking on the powerful grownups. That we find these eco-hero girls in books as well as in real life suggests to me that this is a story that resonates with our time – not just with children, but with adults.

Plenty of books, of course, exist about Thunberg herself – for instance, Greta And The Giants by Zoe Tucker (Frances Lincoln, £7.99). But there are also fictional tales of great emotional power centred on girl heroes. Two outstanding books for 8-12-year-olds that tell of the connections between young girls and wild animals are Hannah Gold’s The Last Bear (HarperCollins, £12.99) and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s Julia And The Shark (Orion, £12.99).

Bear Island, a remote spot in the Arctic Ocean, is the setting of Hannah Gold’s powerful debut tale of mourning and call to protect the planet, The Last Bear. April, who’s 11, and her meteorologist father are the only two on the island, where he is studying climate change at its remote weather station. In this wild place, based on a real Bear Island which sadly no longer has a bear population due to melting of the Arctic ice, April unexpectedly comes across a stranded bear, a last bear, and befriends him. The book is dramatically illustrated in sombre monotone by Levi Pinfold.

Julia And The Shark works a similar magic. It is a breath-taking tale, rich with facts and figures, again of a young girl and her scientist parents who move to an island, a lighthouse on Unst, where her mother hopes to spot her favourite animal, the Greenland shark. The book’s beauty is in the way it thrums with an awareness of the connectivity of all life and an expression of its wonders – from murmurations of starlings to shoals of fish and the story of the slow growth of a 400-year-old shark. This isn’t just a wildlife tale, though – it’s also one about family, mental health, the interior meteorology of the human body and why both facts and stories matter.

One recent study, published in People and Nature, analysed the entire online Project Gutenberg archive and found that since 1835, animal mentions in fiction – other than of domestic animals like horses and dogs, or “threat” animals like bears and lions – had dwindled dramatically. This reduction in the diversity of wildlife featured in literature runs parallel to biodiversity loss in the world. Such vanishings, alongside the dwindling of knowledge of the natural world, have triggered a wave of books about nature – including instant classics The Lost Words and The Lost Spells (Penguin, £14.99), by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.

But some books take readers beyond that nature connection – they are about how we change the world, incitements to some kind of action. Among those in this territory is William Sutcliffe’s entertaining and comic tale of generational difference, The Summer We Turned Green (Bloomsbury, £7.99), which follows what happens when some Extinction Rebellion types move in across the street from a family.

Some well-known authors of environmental books for adults have also realised the importance of communicating these messages to the generation of upcoming change-makers. Ten years ago, Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod, teamed up with graphic novelist Frank Stockton, to create children’s book World Without Fish (Workman Publishing, £8.99), an urgent and alarming description of how climate change and overfishing are driving fish to extinction. Last year, the tree-advocate Peter Wohlleben published Can You Hear The Trees Talking? (Greystone, £14.99), covering the scientific marvels of trees.

Many of the children’s books I’ve loved best are the ones that have helped me broach the difficult issues with my kids. These books are just the type that can achieve that. They also send out a message of hope, which is not false or misguided. Scientists, after all, are telling us it’s still possible to avert the worst of climate crisis. The worst we can do for our children is let go of that hope.