Making environmental issues engaging

Emma Shevah is the author of five books for children and her latest book, How to Save the World with a Chicken and an Egg, is a mystery adventure with a strong eco theme at its heart. Her blog describes the challenges of writing about environmental issues in a way that will make children want to read on.

They have a point. Climate change isn’t an obvious page-turner; human plastic usage isn’t typically fun to read about, and ramming a book with bizarre animal facts runs the risk of it being didactic. But there is a way to make fiction about environmental issues engaging. We all live in this world, and as such, we are surrounded by issues – it seems ludicrous not to include some in stories for 8 –12-year-olds, especially considering the rise in climate change anxiety among young people. They are inheriting a world they feel has been wrecked by the generations preceding them, and they feel powerless because, in Ivy’s words, ‘what are you supposed to do when you’re only eleven, and you have no jeep or money or veterinary skills?’ My primary aim in writing it, apart from balancing the gravity of the topic by making it fun and funny, was to create a sense of hope. It’s easy to lose optimism when facing the facts of climate change, and if we do that and give up, it’s all over. It may be all over anyway, but that’s defeatist, and I wanted to avoid defeatism. Children need to feel they can do something, but they can’t do it alone because no one can do it alone.

Another way I tried to make the story engaging was to write a collective ode to nature. Animals are amazing. Trees are amazing. The ocean – don’t get me started on the ocean. The natural world blows my mind every single day. I wanted to share my astonishment and joy in a literary way and yell alongside them, ‘WOW! Look! Isn’t this INCREDIBLE!’

 At author events and at talks in schools, authors are always asked, ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ or more specifically, ‘how did you come up with the idea for this book?’ My answer is that once you start polishing your writerly antennae, you see the potential for stories everywhere: in the news, in people’s anecdotes, and in the random oddness that life serves up with alarming regularity. I tend to add that I write about what bothers me. Fathers leaving their children bothers me, so I wrote Dream on Amber. Orphanages in Asia being full of girls who have no chance of an education or to fulfil their dreams bothers me, so I wrote Dara Palmer’s Major Drama. Families arguing and cousins being separated bothers me – I’ve experienced it myself – so I wrote What Lexie Did. I’ve also written an early reader for Bloomsbury called Hello Baby Mo about a school-aged boy with a newborn sibling because that’s a tricky one, too.