The Ecology of Youthful Minds

In their concern for the environment, parents and publishers, like tardy teachers on the way to class, are hurriedly unpacking instructive lesson books and serviceable charts in the hallowed cause of making the next generation responsible keepers of the Earth.

Perhaps in this context the ecology of children’s minds should be just as valid and hallowed an issue, if only as ground to be prepared for the future. Since the time when Hilaire Belloc danced, trod and trampled on the cautionary tale, the moralizing approach that used to strip-mine the children’s book vein has ceased, and this is no time to resurrect it.

As it stands, the only firm rule of the game, intended never to be broken, is to root out and abolish preaching--because if adults don’t, children will. When it comes to The Issues, all the classroom interrogations, bandwagon slogans, “don’ts,” “ought to’s” and various other smarmy messages that kids love to hate may be lost on their intended audience faster than bumper stickers on cars speeding down billboard-studded highways.

The best so-called ecology books, then, don’t offer children “Keep Off the Grass” signs but foster a regard for fragile, budding nature and tender shoots of information. If this regard is tended, it may grow with the child, not as a list of rigid moral imperatives but as a code of mutual coexistence with all and sundry in our one dwelling place.

Maybe it’s asking too much of a book to replicate a child’s experience of listening to the sobering cry of a loon rising off a lake, or viewing a male emperor penguin peering at his newly hatched young. But even if only within the span of a few illustrated pages, there is no substitute for the precognitive, nonverbal communication that takes place when a child gazes back at a creature of the wild. Such pictures cultivate in children neither pity nor fear toward the environment and its inhabitants, but give them the chance to see in nature’s survival or destruction their own destiny. The next generation may yet find out that man is not, after all, the measure of all things.

All the books in this survey, ennobled by their sincerity, aim to communicate to the best of their abilities. Some are imperfect, beleaguered by their missions. Others use the ever-welcome gentle touch and circumspection; these (happily, a majority) do not see in children another frontier for willful conditioning and are not anxious to endow them with the imprint of civilized man.

Despite its awkward message, Hey! Get Off Our Train (Crown: $14.95; unpaginated) shows that John Burningham, at least as an illustrator, is at his peak. His familiar landscapes, comical and loose-lined, give way to coal-country, soot-colored skies and impressionistic vistas of a sojourn by train. But Burningham’s usual rebelliousness, so enticing to his regular readers, in this book turns to pedantry. A boy commandeers a train through a lesson-filled dream time. One by one, endangered animals expound on why their days are numbered as they seek passage on the train.

A similar burden of soap-box oratory undermines the unmistakable worth of The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $14.95; unpaginated), whose other illustrations (including those in books for the World Wildlife Fund series on endangered animals) have been moral-free. Splendid paintings in tropical colors accompany the story of a young man sent into the rain forest to chop down a Kapok tree. After a carefully choreographed pelting of pleas by various animals, the man’s eyes are opened: He tosses down his ax--perhaps to the detriment of the carpenters’ guilds, but environmental concerns take precedence over all here--and walks away.

In Barbara Juster Esbensen’s Great Northern Diver: The Loon, illustrated by Mary Barrett Brown (Little, Brown: $14.95; 32 pp.), readers meet a graceful bird, clumsy only on takeoff, who hits airborne speeds of 60 m.p.h. The author sets forth a straightforward rendering of facts and refers to the need for loons’ solitude in one slim sentence: “On a hidden lake there is little chance of being disturbed by motorboats coming close to the nest.” After the loons migrate, the sky darkens and the nest fills with snow. It’s a sorrowful sight, that empty home, similar to the hollow cabins that line frozen lakes through winter.

Jan Thornhill’s The Wildlife ABC (Simon & Schuster: $14.95; unpaginated) never preaches an ecological cause but tantalizes children first with light verse accompanying an ABC listing of animals (similar to the author’s “The Wildlife l-2-3”) and then with a section of “Nature Notes” full of intriguing facts: “A is for Auk/who lives by the sea” is later shored up by a poignant description of the last of the Great Auks. The woodcut-like portraits abound with humorous, human touches; Thornhill includes people in her pictures, taking wildlife out of a remote realm and depicting it as close as a housefly dive-bombing the refrigerator.

By creating an environment in which readers come to care for emperor and Adelie penguins and Weddell seals, Helen Cowcher’s Antarctica (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $13.95; unpaginated) conveys an affecting, subtle message about the disturbance of habitat. With their inherent sense of justice, children will be shattered by the forced, sudden flight of the Adelies at the sounds of helicopters; their eggs are thus exposed to predators. The antarctic inhabitants are strikingly stylized solid shapes living among a grayed blue-white wilderness; concepts of “home” and “family” are a tacit part of the story, as is the unsentimentalized nurturing found in the wilderness.

In Weather by Howard E. Smith, illustrated by Jeffrey Bedrick (Doubleday: $10.95; 45 pp.), it’s not fear but awe that hurls children into direct communion with nature. Information about the theory of global warming is incorporated into a simple but encompassing discussion. The data is offset by haunting portraits of nature at work--tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards--and includes storm safety rules. A clean presentation of information neither cloaks the facts nor makes them lessons.

What children know about the natural world is as close as their own beds, dinner plates and front doors--they know that animals, too, sleep, eat, and have homes. The books that succeed best are those which--without blatant anthropomorphism--show children the parallels between their sheltered world and the wild, and make the issues at once familiar and personal. And, just maybe, young readers will grow to disregard man’s itch to tame and urbanize the Earth, and will abandon his romantic quest--on horseback, scythe in hand--to conquer the wild forces of nature.