Books about nature and the environment are a wonderful way to help young readers appreciate our planet. For Edge Effects’s tenth birthday, Megan Schliesman and the CCBC recommend ten environmental children’s books for middle grade readers.
Richard Bednarski connects the forest fires of 1910 to the subsequent media-driven age of fire exclusion policy, despite scientific evidence for fire inclusion. Did years of this practice worsen the United States’s “fire problem” today?
Edge Effects invites scholars from different disciplines to introduce texts on care with the environment. These books also offer varied entries to multispecies and pluriversal topics in the classroom.
Jagravi Dave speaks with Khairani Barokka on her poetry collection amuk. They use the book to connect tenselessness, the violence of colonial translation, and rage across personal, political, and environmental scales.
Cathleen McCluskey speaks with Andrea Brower on the intersections of colonialism, neoliberalism, and plantations in agricultural systems—from Hawai’i and beyond. How might possibilities of a better future be imagined through political and social resistance?
Sophie Chao traces how Marind People of West Papua suffer the effects of monoculture toxicity while also mourning for the waste it produces.
Charis Enns & Brock Bersaglio use Laikipia County, Kenya to trace connections between settler colonial power and conservation, offering an “other” way of maintaining biodiversity that prioritizes Indigenous Peoples and their endangered livestock species.
Sadie Rittman explores the history and significance of Pikirangi—a reforestation project—in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Ellie Kincaid turns to plants as kin through reflections on Victorian herbariums, coming across springtime trilliums, and their own journey of moving to Wisconsin.
In July 2023, historic floods swept through the state of Vermont. Erin O’Farrell examines the rhetorics of resiliency that emerged after this disaster, arguing for a reconceptualization of the Vermonter identity and resilience itself.