Thinking in Stories about Nature (2024)

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6. Stories that trace out connections that emerge from studying nature

Environmental scientists have developed powerful and sophisticated ways of thinking, especially ideas about interdependence in natural systems. Cooks, gardeners, birdwatchers, and farmers, also notice long chains of interdependence and causality. Such ideas can be demonstrated in gardens, backyards, and wilderness areas: they have very broad applications. So, the next category is: tracing out connections that emerge from studying nature.

It is a preoccupation of children’s literature at a very basic level, to see how one thing leads to another, to trace out connections of all sorts, to see what unifies a group of events or actors. One sees this “The Farmer in the Dell” and “The House that Jack Built” – models of a kind of connecting play. Some books about nature do a particularly interesting job of tracing out connections, and thus model a kind of thinking that might establish itself as a habit among a group of children: the habit of asking, “What is this connected to? How does this fit into some larger, meaningful web of relations?” Here are some examples:

The Wolves of Yellowstone: A Rewilding Story (2022) by Catherine Barr (author) and Jenni Desmond (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Sam Piede
Publisher’s Website

The Depth of the Lake and the Height of the Sky by Kim Jihyunand (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Megan Jane Laverty (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website

What Is a River? (2021) by Monika Vaicenavičienė (author and artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Almost Nothing, Yet Everything: A Book About Water (2021) by Hiroshi Osada (author) and Ryōji Arai (artist)
Publisher’s Website

Everything Is Connected (2019) by Jason Gruhl (author) and Ignasi Font (artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

I’m Trying to Love Garbage (2021) by Bethany Barton (author and artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

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7. Stories that address spiritual responses to the natural world

Children and adults who attend to events outdoors, beyond their immediate purposes and projects, sometimes have powerful responses to the order and beauty of the world, responses that are not well captured in generalizations or theories. Philosophic discussion might be the most plausible place to honor and explore such responses, taking an inventory of spiritual responses to the natural world.

Literature from most parts of the world, including children’s literature, features texts that describe human experiences in nature in terms of spirituality, transcendence, or reverence—terms which may connote the sacred or the supernatural. The authors of these kinds of texts addressed to children recognize that children can have such experiences with nature, and that such experiences can be an important part of the meaning of children’s lives.

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8. Stories that take account of human interventions in the natural world and human relationships to natural systems

Human actions and constructions have ruined beautiful ecosystems, polluted waters, destroyed species, and made the climate change very fast and unpredictably. This reality will be present, to some extent, for all children – more, certainly, for those whose countries are about to disappear beneath the rising seas or whose neighborhoods are no longer viable because of water shortages or floods. Philosophy has to help people experience and think about painful ethical and political realities, finding their way as actors in a world where many irrevocable decisions have already been made. To be fair, exploitation is just one of the ways humans interact with nature; people are also preservers of wild spaces and, sometimes, good neighbors for communities of plants and animals. Books in the category taking account of human interventions in the natural world and human relationships to natural systems provides resources for beginning these conversations.

When I was young, my uncle destroyed a forest on his land, to extend his plowing. It seemed a shame, but I couldn’t say how it was wrong. The land was his, and no one else was using it. Did the land itself, or the animals and plants on it, have rights, or was the forest in some way sacred? That question stays with me, for all the interesting spaces I know that could easily be paved over or plowed or somehow sabotaged. It extends now to species, natural ways of life, that could be made extinct.

In my uncle’s later life, he devoted time and resources to preserving a native sacred site on his property from a dam project which he believed to be unnecessary, financing a legal battle all the way to the North Dakota Supreme Court. That modeled a different idea about people’s relationship to the land and a different kind of responsibility.

In this category, as in some previous groupings, the works available form a continuum, a range of different relationships between human beings and natural spaces and systems. We hope that, as this bibliography matures, we can find depictions and explanations of relationships that go beyond familiar distinctions to take account of cultures for which the line between humans and nature is not important, or is imagined in surprising ways.

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9. Stories that address how children and young adults might get to know nature, right where they live

It seems important to think about first steps for young people: ways to become more involved with and better acquainted with nature – first steps outside the merely human world. One might think of this category as about first experiments in environmental science, how children and young adults might get to know nature, right where they live.

Children grow gardens, raise chickens, build tree huts, make mudpies and sandcastles, form relationships with their pets, and get to know a particular swamp or mountainside better than most adults in the community. Some even begin scientific or artistic careers this way. Although we can’t produce a discussion plan for a philosophic treatment of such possibilities, it seems important, in a bibliography on thinking philosophically about nature, to include some consideration of the options open to those who want to get closer to nature. Here are some books we find helpful:

The Higher Power of Lucky (2007) by Susan Patron (author) and Matt Phelan (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea
Publisher’s Website
The Book at The Open Library

Southwest Sunrise (2020) by Nikki Grimes (author) and Matt PhelanWendell Minor (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
Read-aloud YouTube Video

Science in Your Own Back Yard (1965) by Elizabeth K. Cooper (author and artist)
The Book at The Open Library
Read-aloud YouTube Video

Winged Wonder: Solving the Monarch Migration Mystery (2020) by Meeg Pincus (author) and Yas Imamura (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website
Author’s Website
Read-aloud YouTube Video

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10. Stories that address the choices, responsibilities, and privileges of children and young adults in addressing pressing environmental policy issues

Youth activists, some very young, have demanded entry into policy discussions that aim at preserving natural places and living things, remedying damage to the natural world, and developing sustainable alternatives to wasteful and destructive ways of life. In the past, children and young adults have deferred to adults on these matters, but, as the deadlines for effective action approach, it is a pressing question of justice whether children and young people can be excluded from policy conversations that lead to irrevocable decisions. These coming generations will feel the effects of these decisions throughout their lives.

Another hard and important question confronts every young person growing up: given all the competing claims on my time, talent, and energy, what is my primary job? Which of these pressing issues and crises is my responsibility? How do I find a moral vocation, and how do I mediate between my moral ‘calling’ and other aspects of my life?

So, the last section concerns the choices, responsibilities, and privileges of children and young adults in addressing pressing environmental policy issues.

Biographical accounts of children and young adult activists come to mind as starting points for this discussion. It seems important that such a collection include (1) political organizing and peaceful protest, and (2) acts of civil disobedience and intervention. It is a matter of serious philosophical concern to map the appropriate options for people too young to vote, and thus of no account in terms of current electoral politics. Clearly, all the centuries of political discussion about the claims that those without representation have on political institutions – the questions asked when this country began, and then during the Civil War and the suffrage movement – are particularly relevant to this issue. Children will have to live with irrevocable decisions; they surely have some claim to be part of those decisions. Here are some books to start these discussions:

The Leak (2021) by Kate Reed Petty (author) and Andrea Bell (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty
Publisher’s Website

Someday, Something (2023) by Amanda Gorman (author) and Christian Robinson (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Greta Thunberg (2023) by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara (author) and Anke Weckmann (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

We are Water Protectors (2020) by Carole Lindstrom (author) and Michaela Goade (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website
Author’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Operation Redwood (2011) by S. Terrell French (author and artist)
Publisher’s Website
Book Website
The Book at The Open Library