ABSTRACT
Scholarship in children's literature, including studies of basic books for emergent readers, must pay greater attention to how texts represent and promote environmental awareness. In addition to the approach whereby activists write to and for adults, urging adults to teach children about bioregions and take kids hiking, motivated environmentalists might share these values with adults and children alike via picture books. Often adults are not as well versed in natural history as their advanced age might suggest, and picture books reintroduce concepts dormant since those adults last took a science course. If conservation and sustainability are explicitly and implicitly represented as childhood values, then, young audiences perceive them as cultural norms. Picture books—whether a functional literacy–based Common Core selection or a self-consciously artful and profound text such as North—introduce readers to specific ways of imagining animals and the outdoors.
