ABSTRACT
This general conclusion reflects on how children’s and adolescent literature, when read through a critical lens of ecopsychology and ecotherapy, become spaces in which readers of all ages can be led to find the beauty in nature around them. It also examines how further dialogue could be opened between the disciplines of children’s and adolescent literature and ecopsychology and ecotherapy. Further, it considers whether such readings are or should be exclusive to fantasy and highly imaginative literature for children and adolescents. Examining L’Engle’s novels suggests that realistic novels also have much to contribute to evaluations of how ecopsychology and ecotherapy can be fruitfully engaged as a theoretical means of reading children’s and adolescent literature. Eventually, the hope is that a conversation between the disciplines of ecopsychology and ecotherapy and children’s and adolescent literature might lead to practical and real-life cooperation that contributes both to human mental and emotional health through “recollecting” our relationship to the environment and to the improvement of human treatment of that environment: a mutually beneficial endeavour.
