Toward an Ecopedagogy of Children's Environmental Literature

Abstract

The world we remember from our childhoods – whenever and wherever those childhoods were – is changing. Gone are the strawberry fields and orange groves, the stark blue skies and purple mountains from my childhood in the San Fernando valley of Los Angeles. Gone are the days of running through water sprinklers for hour after unthinking hour on summer afternoons, the water running off the thick grassy lawn and into the streets so that cars would splash through it, too. Gone are the mountains covered with sage and yarrow, orange poppies and purple lupin and yellow daisies, mountainsides where coyotes and jackrabbits and bluejays alike found food, water, and freedom enough for their wild lives. Gone are the days of gasoline at .25 cents a gallon, days of backyard trash incinerators, days of unlimited hours spent tanning and talking and playing on the beach without sunscreen protection against skin cancer, without fears of swimming in and through plastic bags, rusting metal, needles and broken glass. Some of these losses are cause for grief; others signify long-needed changes in heedless behaviors. As temperatures around the planet rise, as safe drinking water becomes scarce and costly, as food costs soar, populations swell, clearcutting continues, and the global violence against women, children, animals, and ecosystems proceeds unabated – what in the world are we doing by reading environmental literature? This is the question raised by ecopedagogy, a specific field of praxis that grows out of the work of eco-activists who are also writers, teachers, and scholars of environmental literature. To explain ecopedagogy and its importance to children’s environmental literature, I want to first contextualize ecopedagogy in terms of its evolution from both environmental literary studies as well as the activist and social movement practices that so many of us articulating an activist ecopedagogy have brought along with us: our histories as social change artists.

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