Introduction: "The Environmental Imagination and Children's Literature" (2011)

Introduction:"The Environmental Imagination and Children's Literature" David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood What makes the imagination in children's books "environmental"? What do climatologists and botanists, children's writers and artists, and the playing child have in common? This special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn takes its title and focus from a conference on "The Environmental Imagination and Children's Literature," hosted by Trinity College at the University of Toronto in March 2010. The conference brought together authors M. T. Anderson, David Almond, Susan Cooper, Tim Wynne-Jones, and Sarah Ellis and environmental scholars Lawrence Buell and Marguerite Holloway to answer the questions posed above. We are honored to publish here, with minimal revision, the responses of Almond, Wynne-Jones, Ellis, and Holloway, which retain in print form the conversational quality of their spoken presentations. Our great thanks to conference co-organizer, Deirdre Baker, for approaching us with news of the conference and for her assistance in securing the participation of the presenters. 1 From a small island with a large population, David Almond asserts that wildness is a state of mind, of receptiveness to the past and to the dark in "A Necessary Wilderness." The essay reflects upon children's play, storytelling, and the archetypal "home-away-home" plot. Almond muses that even in the center of civilization and technological prowess, children seek out spaces that evoke atavistic wildness and danger, to return home "to tell me mam," thus completing the circuit between self and other, human and nature, mortality and cosmos. "What purpose is served by imposing . . . Apollonian principle on Dionysian nature?" Tim Wynne-Jones asks in "Where Is Here Anymore?" He had been photographing found alphabets of leaf, rock, and wood in the woods. Are sign and language a simple imposition on nature's Other? [End Page v] Using a wide range of writers and genres, from Lawrence Buell and Barry Lopez's environmentalist nonfiction to Margaret Atwood's and his own young adult novels, Wynne-Jones concludes that interpreting nature through signs also has the capacity to connect us, to establish a human habitation in and with the wild. Marguerite Holloway relies upon her scientific background in her essay, "In Amongst the Green Blades," in which she reflects upon the value of scale in children's literature. She demonstrates how differently scaled worlds depicted in children's books (from microscopic to gigantic) can help children to connect with the universe, the earth, and with each other. Sarah Ellis tackles the issue of the compatibility of narrative with the environmental imagination. She looks closely at three works—Wanda Gág's Millions of Cats, Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard's The Little Island, and Leo Yerxa's more recent Last Leaf First Snowflake to Fall—examining the various ways the writers and illustrators use narrative in stories about the natural world. Joining the presentations from the Toronto conference is Roxanne Harde's essay "'I got everything in me': Fraggle Rock's Trash Heap, Spirit, Earth, and Connection." As its title suggests, Harde's discussion complements the conference's conversations about the environmental imagination, exploring how the popular television series Fraggle Rock (1983-87) encourages its child and adult audiences to understand, in creator Jim Henson's words, "the delicate balances of the natural world." Margery the Trash Heap, Harde explains, is "the matrix of the ecological literacy Henson promotes" and serves as "the moral center" of the show through " humor and wisdom" and "a blend of mystic and earth-centered knowledge." As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions for the journal. Please contact us at <lionunicorn@ksu.edu>. Note 1. For a published version of Lawrence Buell's contribution, see Buell's "Environmental Writing for Children: A Selected Reconaissance of Heritages, Emphases, Horizons" in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard (forthcoming, 2012). We look forward to publishing an extended version of M. T. Anderson's presentation, "E - I - E - I - O: The Reproduction and Destruction of the Pastoral Landscape in Children's Literature," and an edited version of Deidre Baker's interview with Susan Cooper, "Fantasy, Naturally," in a future issue of The Lion and the Unicorn...