COLUMN ONE : Kid Books Enlist in Eco-War : Penguins, whales--even Ninja Turtles--are fighting for the environment in word and picture. Industry hates the publishing trend.

Once upon a time, children’s books were the stuff of princesses menaced by dark forests and big, bad wolves gobbling up innocents. Now, the people threaten the forests, and the wild creatures are themselves the innocents.

In a new wave of books that promote such causes as recycling, forest preservation and pesticide-free food, publishers and authors are attempting to make money and mold young minds with environmental-message books for children.

The themes have proved as popular with publishers as they are noxious to industry, which complains that the books are often manipulative and one-sided. Animal books now tend to mention endangered species. Forests are portrayed as vital, their destruction devastating.

In one such book, a penguin named Pinkie swims through an oil slick and loses his feathers. Shivering and shaking, poor Pinkie leaves his home for warmer climates.

Another picture book tells of a blue whale that befriends a young child. The hapless whale vanishes at the book’s end, leaving parents to explain that whalers may have killed the child’s friend.

Even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have entered the eco-war. In a mass-produced ABC book--”A is for acid rain”--the feisty reptiles warn about the dangers of ozone depletion, global warming and pesticides.

Some industries have swamped publishers with furious letters about their environmental books or tried, with limited success, to ban them from schools.

Though the Ninja Turtle book says “P is for pesticides,” wrote an angry chemical company executive to the publisher, “P is also for propaganda.”

Publishers and librarians tend to date the popularity of such books to the 1989 Alaska oil spill or to the consciousness-raising 20th anniversary of Earth Day a year later.

The success of the 1990 book “50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Planet,” which has sold more than 750,000 copies, also propelled publishers to try to cash in on interest in the environment.

“Everybody thought, “Hmmmmm . . . It’s time to get more of these books,” said Jane O’Connor, vice president and publisher of Grosset & Dunlap Inc. “There had always been some publishing for children done on conservation and the Earth, but all of a sudden it became a cottage industry.”

In a recent best-seller list by Publishers Weekly, two of the top 10 children’s fiction books had environmental themes. But not all environmental books sell well. Those with well-known authors and compelling illustrations may make it to the top, while others languish.

Bookstore owners say customers requesting environmental books tend most often to be teachers who want to use them in their classes. Parents buy them for multiple reasons, ranging from their illustrations to concern about a particular environmental problem. For some, it’s a matter of values: Parents consider environmental ethics, like good manners, important.

“I think parents buy them because they are scared too, and the books are beautiful,” said Barbara Edelman, an environmental activist and Pacific Palisades mother who reads them to her three children and to an elementary school class she teaches.

“They salve our conscience,” she said. “You can say, ‘See I am an environmentalist. I buy this book for my kid. I’m doing the right thing.’ ”

Though quality is improving, some store owners say many environmental kids’ books still tend to be preachy and didactic. “They’re depressing for me,” said Washington children’s bookstore owner Jewell Stoddard. “They must be depressing for kids.”

Stoddard said she recently rejected for sale a series of books narrated by the Earth about endangered species. In the book, according to Stoddard, the Earth demands to know where her animals are. They are all endangered.

“It’s a very accusatory tone for children,” she said. “Children aren’t responsible and are fairly helpless in the global picture.”

How much such books will mold young children remains to be seen. Psychologist Dennis D. Embry, president of a Tucson company that designed books to help children cope with the Gulf War, said the most effective books for changing children’s behavior or attitudes offer solutions in addition to depicting problems.

“Young children are extremely literal,” he said. “If you tell a story about some particular kind of thing that has a lot of negativity in it, sometimes children will disproportionately imitate the negative rather than the positive.”

Though some reviewers have complained of heavy-handedness in the books’ messages, Embry said young children may not get them if they are subtle.

“Think about kids’ jokes,” he said. “Are they subtle? No.”

How children will react to a book’s message is something that consumes many of the more successful children’s authors.

Children’s literature “shouldn’t become a new form of political correctness without regard to the audience,” said children’s author Frank Asch, who has published more than 50 books since 1968. “There is a danger in laying a guilt trip on kids.”

During the 1970s in Germany, some schools began offering an environmentally oriented curriculum to promote greater awareness in youngsters, Asch said. At the end of 10 years, studies were done to analyze the program’s impact.

“They found that kids exposed to their environmental program were discouraged and less motivated to get involved,” Asch said. “They were overdosed. They were more or less presented with the problem . . . and no regard was made to involving them with projects or instances where people and kids created positive effects.

“So should you hit them hard at 5 years old? No. Five-year-olds need to be given a sense of the beauty of nature . . . so they can see that animals have maternal instincts, that they have parents and babies.”

Asch started writing environmental-message books after obtaining the stature and confidence to branch out into themes that were personally important to him.

He is now working on a book for preschool children to be titled, “The Earth and I.” One picture shows a garbage-strewn lot, and the next shows a child helping to clean it. “When I am happy, she (Earth) is happy,” the text reads.

For older children, Asch recently finished a book about four sixth-grade girls who start a Save-the-Earth Club.

“I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with kids lately, but they are really angry about the planet we’re bequeathing them, and they want to know what is going on and what they can do to fix it,” Asch said.

“As a baby boomer myself, I grew up in the sixties and we had all our ideals beaten out of us to an extent. What I am trying to do is keep that natural idealism alive in this generation.”

Indeed, the personal environmental convictions of authors are partly responsible for the growing supply of children’s environmental books. Many of the nation’s most successful children’s writers and illustrators now belong to the Orion Center for Children’s Environmental Literature, a group designed to promote the publishing of environmental books for kids.

Illustrator and author Lynne Cherry, director of the New York-based group, said her widely read 1990 book, “The Great Kapok Tree,” was originally rejected by a publisher as “too controversial,” too message-oriented.

Dedicated to slain Brazilian environmentalist Chico Mendes, the book is about a man who comes to chop down a tree in a rain forest. While he sleeps, a myriad of creatures whisper in his ear, begging him to spare the tree.

Cherry refused to change it, and it became a bestseller when it was published by another firm. Other books about the rain forest by other authors quickly followed.

Although spokesmen of various industries say they like books that encourage children to recycle or pick up litter, they oppose those that imply logging is wrong or pesticides are unsafe.

Industries have retaliated by distributing free coloring books that promote their views. Some sponsor field trips for children and educators.

“We feel there is nothing more threatening--not only to the economy but to our way of life--than to have young children learning one side of the issue,” said Donn Zea, vice president of industry affairs for the California Forestry Assn. “We’ve got to stop humanizing trees and animals.”

After all, he said, the very books that promote saving trees are written on paper made from trees.

Cherry said she tried to be fair to loggers in writing “The Great Kapok Tree.” She gave the logger a kindly, sensitive face, using a conservationist friend as a model. But she said the book would have been too complicated for children if she had discussed the reasons for logging in the Amazon--poverty and overpopulation.

Agricultural organizations have been particularly vehement in organizing letter-writing campaigns to publishers of children’s books. “Our members are just incensed with the material that is included” in many children’s books, said Mike Henry, spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation.

Stephanie Hutter, senior editor for Viking Children’s Books, said a 1990 book called “Going Green” attracted about 100 letters from farmers and chemical companies, many of them “vicious.”

The book, subtitled “A Kid’s Handbook to Saving the Planet,” warned: “Even something as healthy as an apple can make you sick if it contains pesticide residues.”

Cattlemen, farmers and others also wrote letters protesting the publication last year of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ABCs for a Better Planet,” which urged children to persuade their parents to buy organic food and less meat.

The merits of pesticides and organic food are “not something first-graders can sort out for themselves,” complained Robert L. Harness, vice president for environmental and public affairs of Monsanto Agricultural Co.

Kate Klimo, editor and chief of Random House Books for Young Readers, which published the turtles’ guide, would prefer not to remember it.

“It caused so much trouble,” she said with a sigh. “The cattle growers lobby had their lawyers call and they beat up on us.”

She paused, and her tone brightened. “Environmental groups and vegetarians loved it.”

When a book about a 12-year-old boy who tries to save an old-growth forest was published last year, the Oregon author found himself shunned in his small logging community. A local newspaper cartoon depicted the author as another Salman Rushdie.

But the uproar only inspired author Monte Killingsworth to write another environmental children’s book. “I feel I hit a nerve,” he said.

His second book will be about an American Indian and a boy who works to prevent a sacred beach from being developed into a hotel complex and golf course.

Random House’s Klimo said publishers consider this the second golden age in children’s literature--”golden in terms of the cash register.” The first occurred after World War II, a period in which many classic children’s books were produced. Then the emphasis was on writing. Today, publishers believe the art sells books.

Of course, there have always been children’s books with environmental themes. The Sierra Club has published children’s books since 1977. Dr. Seuss and author Bill Peet occasionally used environmental themes in the 1960s and the early 1970s.

One publishing executive said she believes the recent trend in environmental kids’ books has already peaked, with publishers now switching to “multicultural” themes.

“Kids getting involved always appeals to other kids, so the environment is just a natural subject,” said O’Connor of Grosset & Dunlap. “But I wouldn’t want to do a book series called ‘The Little Environmentalist’ . . . or a book called ‘The Little Engine That Could Use Less Fuel.’ ”

Most publishing houses, however, say the books remain popular and more are yet to come. Lois Sarkisian, owner of a Los Angeles gallery and children’s bookstore called “Every Picture Tells a Story,” estimates that 5% to 10% of her collection has environmental themes.

“I think they are probably as much around to stay as ABC books and good-night books,” said Klimo. “It’s now a permanent subject matter.”