Toronto Conference Studies Ways to Cultivate Environmental Imaginations
By Leigh Anne Williams
Mar 11, 2010

Speakers included renowned Harvard professor Lawrence Buell, who literally wrote the book on the matter of how literature represents the natural environment in his 1996 work The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture, but this was the first time he had focused on children's literature specifically, he said. He and the other panelists—authors M.T. Anderson, David Almond, Susan Cooper, Sarah Ellis, Tim Wynne-Jones, and environmental journalist Marguerite Holloway—seemed to generally agree that while no one book is likely to change the world, children's literature can have a significant impact.

Looking at children's early connections to the natural world, British author David Almond pointed to the fact that some of the first words almost all parents teach their children are animal sounds. " 'What does a dog say?'.... We all do it, don't we? The world is full of kids running around pretending to be animals, encouraged by their parents." He suggested that while we are teaching children to use speech and language and be part of society, "We're also training them and encouraging them to celebrate and express the communion with the world of beasts."

M.T. Anderson's view of the impact of animals in board books was more darkly comic. "It's somewhat peculiar that we choose livestock as a good first image of man's relationship to the natural world," he said. He recounted the way his younger sister, when she was about five years old, made a joke about chicken at the dinner table one night, never imagining that the chicken served for dinner could be the same as the chickens she read about in her story books. "She became a vegetarian by age six," he said. Anderson wittily wove such personal stories about growing up in Stow, Mass., with a look at the way children's books from the past, such as Robert McCloskey's Homer Price and Centerburg Tales, helped define readers' ideas about nature, small-town America, industrialization, and urbanization. To witness the current potency of nostalgic images of rural America, "this brass-band Brigadoon, which may never have existed, this Norman Rockwell village," Anderson pointed to former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's wielding of those images as a weapon "to attack anything she disagrees with."



Buell said these kinds of concerns and an increasingly urban society have led to a condition that environmental journalist Richard Louv termed "nature deficit disorder: malformation of adult identity arising from curtailment of kids roaming about in the exploration of wild spaces." But Buell suggested that literature that includes a crucial bonding with nature could serve as "a kind of surrogate or prosthetic memory" that might partly offset the effects of limited outdoor experiences.


Jan Andrews, a children's author attending the conference, offered a kind of rallying cry as the conference wound up. Authors of children's literature have to be very careful not to feed into contemporary fears. "It's not a culture and climate of actually doing anything, it's just worrying about it," she said. "And worrying is not empowering. I think it is our job to create books, not in a simplistic way but in a complex way, where the heroes and heroines are shown as those people who can go out and fight the giants and come back home."