Environmental Heroism and the Power of Storytelling in the Novels and Papers of Brian Doyle: “The Infinite Family of Organisms”1

Brian Doyle’s much-noted emphasis on environment provides a rich entry-point into his multi-award-winning corpus. Young protagonists’ bonds with nature resonate throughout Doyle’s work, especially as they mature into community leaders exploring eco-social justice. This paper maps Doyle’s developing engagement with environmental and ecosocial justice themes through research in the Brian Doyle Fonds and Groundwood Books Fonds, archives that provide invaluable but as-of-yet underutilized resources for scholars of Canadian children’s literature. It argues that Doyle’s novels develop a vision of interpenetrated social and environmental justice rooted in children’s empowerment as artistic creators and community leaders.