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Modeling Environmental Heroes in Literature for Children:Stories of Youth Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Sinéad Moriarty (bio) Since 2018 Greta Thunberg has emerged as a powerful voice for change, demanding urgent action from world leaders to address the climate crisis. Among the many responses to Thunberg's activism has been the publication of a number of texts for child readers, primarily nonfiction biographies, positioning Thunberg as an environmental hero. This article examines four such works: Valentina Camerini's Greta's Story: The Schoolgirl Who Went on Strike to Save the Planet (2019), Devika Jina and Petra Braun's The Extraordinary Life of Greta Thunberg (2020), Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara and Anke Weckmann's Little People, Big Dreams: Greta Thunberg (2020), and Jeanette Winter's, Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg's Call to Save the Planet (2019). We will also look at Thunberg's own book, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019), inasmuch as it too is addressed to children and adds her own voice to the body of environmental narratives examined in this essay. These texts were selected as they represent the range of literature for children about Thunberg, which varies from picture books for young readers to longer texts for middle-grade children, as well as representing the works about Thunberg by major children's publishers.1 These stories are positioned as hero narratives, but they can also be seen as radical instantiations of this form if we examine Thunberg's identity as a young female and neurodivergent activist, and explore how this intersectionality can be viewed from an ecofeminist perspective. It is also important to examine the problems inherent in the hero narrative as outlined by Margery Hourihan (1997), and to consider the efficacy of the form of the hero narrative as an ecopedagogical tool due to the persistent focus within hero stories on individualism and the exceptionalism of the hero. Drawing on Joe Sutliff Sanders and Clémentine Beauvais, we will [End Page 192] consider the texts as nonfiction biographies for children and examine how these texts might "invite or rebuff critical engagement" (Sutliff Sanders 1). Although the texts encourage critical engagement with the issues of climate crisis, the heroic narrative and its problematic focus on the individual remains unquestioned. Consequently, we shall consider Roni Natov's concept of the "community as hero" as a more productive model for environmental narratives for children as it circumvents the individualism of the conventional hero narrative in favor of a celebration of the power and responsibility of the group. Rewriting the Hero Narrative The problematic nature of the hero narrative has received widespread critical attention. Margery Hourihan writes: The tale of the hero and his quest has been the master story of Western civilization, and it has been especially ubiquitous in children's literature. […] it is a disabling story, naturalizing the exploitation of the environment, the domination of non-European peoples, the marginalization and subordination of women, the wanton slaughter of animals for use and amusement, and the use of force and violence to achieve these ends. It depicts this behaviour as natural, rational and good, as the struggle for the morally and culturally superior to achieve appropriate mastery. (235) Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins similarly critique the hero narrative for its association with "macho posturing, manliness, celebrations of physical bravery (often in a context of imperial conquest), and a consequent devaluing of what are often seen as feminine qualities" (1). Ursula Le Guin notes both the power and the problems associated with the hero story. The "trouble is," she writes, "we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it" (152). The alternative she offers is a "carrier bag" approach, where "[c]onflict, competition, stress, struggle" are seen as "necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process" (153). Neither Hourihan nor Jones and Watkins suggest the abandonment of this ancient form, as has been suggested by critics such as Joseph Meeker and Le Guin. Instead, Hourihan proposes new kinds of hero narrative...
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