Adult-Child Negotiations of Environmental Encounters: Mediating a Future of Hope

In their seminal text The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm argue that the environment is the "most pressing contemporary issue of all" (xv), particularly because "man's relationship with Nature is non-negotiable" (39). While issues such as gender and class have become important areas of study within literary criticism, Laurence Coupe suggests that no other issue is of similar importance than is the environment in today's scholarly landscape. In response to the current environmental crisis, the last few decades have similarly seen a surge in environmental criticism of children's literature¹ in addition to an increase in the number of environmental texts for young readers. While the intersections between nature and childhood have historically underpinned the genre of children's literature (Lesnik-Oberstein; Sigler), the pervasiveness of these texts on contemporary bookshelves reinforces this long-held correlation. Current environmental texts for young people suggest that the child's relationship with nature is non-negotiable, and that the environment continues to be the most contemporary issue they will face.

In Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocriticism, Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth Kidd remind us that the child's relationship with nature, broadly speaking, can be categorized in two separate ways, which both link back to eighteenth-century Romantic traditions. Firstly, children are "presumed to have a privileged relationship to nature" (6), echoing Jean-Jacques Rousseau's belief that children are inherently innocent and virtuous. Secondly, in line with the philosophies of John Locke, children are blank vessels devoid of content, and thus have no intrinsic connection with or understanding of the natural world (6). It is thus the adult's role to "educate young people into nature appreciation and analysis" (7). While drawing attention to texts that fall into these two schools of thought, Dobrin and Kidd conclude: "both that children are naturally close to nature and that nature education, even intervention, is in order . . . even if the child has a privileged relationship with nature, he or she must be educated into a deeper—or at least different—awareness" (7).

In this essay I review six picture books published in the last two years by Canadian presses: Deborah Hodge and Karen Reczuch's West Coast Wild: A Nature Alphabet; Jon-Erik Lappano and Kellen Hatanaka's Tokyo Digs a Garden; Andrew Larsen and Jacqueline Hudon-Verrelli's Charlie's Dirt Day; Chris Wahl and Luc Melanson's Rosario's Fig Tree; Phoebe Wahl's Sonya's Chickens; and Ian Wallace's The Slippers' Keeper. These texts represent a mix of the two Romantic traditions outlined by Dobrin and Kidd. Through the interplay of word and image, the child protagonists in these picture books are depicted as being devoid of content and in need, therefore, of an education about the natural world. Yet they are also represented as virtuous and inherently connected to the natural world. The implication of this dual construction is that the child's success hinges on being connected to the natural world, while also depending on adults for the transfer of environmental awareness. Children, rather than adults, are perceived as carrying a sense of hope as well as the burden of responsibility for future generations.

In this review essay, I explore the variety of ways in which adults are positioned within these texts and conclude that they are most often the mediators of children's environmental encounters and experiences. Adults are presented as having a responsibility for ensuring...