If we are not in awe of the beauty in
the world around us with its vast variety of life, it is long past time for us
to learn about what we do not know.
To quote Sylvia Earle, whose biography is included among the books this
month, “You can’t care if you don’t know.” We must care, we must take care, if this spaceship planet we
inhabit is to survive and thrive.
Take this opportunity to read, learn, enjoy, and most important, act.
Energy
Island: How One Community Harnessed the Wind and Changed Their World
by
Allan Drummond
Farrar Straus
& Giroux
$16.99, Ages 6-10
The
island of Samso, “in the middle of Denmark,” and “in the middle of the sea,” is
also the home of the Energy Academy, a learning center “where kids and grownups
from all over the world come to learn . . . and to talk about new ideas for
creating, sharing, and saving energy.”
It’s also where the island’s people each have an energy independence
story to tell.
Author-illustrator
Drummond shares the story of how the people on the windy island of Samso, who saw
themselves as ordinary, worked together as a community. It started with the Danish Ministry of
Environment and Energy, which “chose Samso as the ideal place to become independent
of nonrenewable energy.” A person
who saw himself as ordinary, teacher Soren Hermansen was chosen to lead the
project.
He
began by talking with his students in class. They were very excited, but the adults on the island were
less so. There were local
meetings, and people came to agree it was a good idea, but nothing changed. Then one small and one large wind
turbine project began, but nothing else happened until a dark winter night when
all the electricity went out, EXCEPT the wind turbine in Brian Kjaer’s house. Now there are farms with solar panels,
a biomass furnace, and electric cars powered by windmills, to mention a few.
The
cartoon-like illustrations are colorful and energetic, to accompany the fast
moving, engaging text, and occasional sidebars of additional information are
sprinkled throughout to enhance the content. Plus an Author’s Note is included at the end.
The
Family Tree
by David McPhail
Henry Holt
$16.99, Ages 5-8
Using
his familiar and well-loved warm watercolors and ink, author-illustrator
McPhail supplies readers with a sense of the past and the passing of time, in
this story of one family’s generation-to-generation life on the land. McPhail’s trademark style begins the
story in pictures on the title page, where readers see a covered wagon pulled
by oxen coming through a deep forest, even before the words commence; “Many
years ago, a young man came to the wilderness to start a new life.”
Despite
the need to fell trees for making boards and beams, planks, posts and rails to
build his house, barns, and fences, he chooses one tree for shade from the hot
summer sun and shelter from chilly winter winds. And this is the tree that appears on every page following, accompanying
the wife’s arrival, the child’s coming, neighbors, traffic, even a gravestone
to mark the changes and passing of time.
It
is, however, the great-great-grandson’s friendship that ultimately protects his
family’s cherished swinging tree, when the workers come with ax and
chainsaw. Needing assistance to
prevent the tree’s destruction, the boy and his dog are soon surrounded by
bear, moose, raccoon, and wolf, summoned by a flock of birds, roosting in the
beloved tree. The workers confer
and devise a new plan for widening the road “that would work for everyone.”
With
a seamless merging of text and pictures, McPhail has created a successful tale,
blending family life with environmental protection.
Life
in the Ocean: The Story of Oceanographer Sylvia Earle
by Claire A.
Nivola
Farrar Straus &
Giroux
$17.99, Ages 6-9
Award winning
author-illustrator Nivola has once again skillfully designed a biography for
young children that captures the inspiring life of a world-renowned
environmentalist whose training and experience as a scientist draw attention to
an aspect of our world currently under assault largely due to ignorance and
carelessness. As a young child,
Sylvia Earle “investigated” (as her mother called it) the pond, a fallen tree, and
explored the outdoors around her rural New Jersey home. Until the family moved, when she was
twelve, to a new home north of Clearwater, on Florida’s Gulf coast.
Sylvia’s curiosity
took her not only snorkeling into the grassy water to “investigate” again, but
into scuba diving, “walking on the ocean floor in an aqua suit that looked like
a space suit,” “descending 3,000 feet” into the Pacific Ocean in a “spherical
bubble” she helped design, and “13,000 feet underwater in a Japanese
submersible” to see the ocean’s wonders – these being only a few examples of
her intrepid explorations!
The pages about the
whales and Sylvia’s experiences observing them and being observed by them are
akin to the interactions between Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees with whom she
has lived and worked for decades. Accompanied by watercolor paintings in rich, bright colors,
the illustrations give evidence of the astonishing variety of undersea
life. Especially on the
whale pages, the graceful, dance-like movements of these largest of the world’s
creatures are also rendered in careful proportion to a tiny image of Sylvia
herself to assist readers’ understanding of the ocean’s immensity and humans’
small part of the diversity of life on earth and in its waters.
This lovely nonfiction
book is also a well-written, well-told story of one woman’s pursuit of her
passion. Back matter includes an
Author’s Note and Selected Bibliography.
