I missed that field trip to the Nike site. I think my teachers tried to avoid the topic rather than making it even more vivid.

Most speculative fiction these days seems to be distopian, rather than utopian. The last fairly positive speculative fiction I read was After the Deluge by Chris Carlsson. Such books don’t seem that common (Aldous Huxley’s Island is the other one I can think of).

But what, then, is the naturalistic writer for children to do? Can he present the child with evil as an insoluble problem—something neither the child nor any adult can do anything about at all? To give the child a picture of the gas chambers of Dachau, or the famines of India, or the cruelties of a psychotic parent, and say, Well, baby, this is how it is, what’re you going to make of it?—that is surely unethical. If you suggest that there is a solution to these monstrous facts, you are lying to the child. If you insist that there isn’t, you are overwhelming him with a load he’s not strong enough yet to carry.

The young creature does need protection and shelter. But it also needs the truth. And it seems to me that the way you can speak absolutely honestly and factually to a child about both good and evil is to talk about himself. Himself, his inner self, his deep, the deepest Self. That is something he can cope with; indeed, his job in growing up is to become himself. He can’t do this if he feels the task is hopeless, nor can he if he’s led to think there isn’t any task. A child’s growth will be stunted and perverted if he is forced to despair or if he is encouraged in false hope, if he is terrified or if he is coddled. What he needs to grow up is reality, the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice. He needs knowledge; he needs self-knowledge. He needs to see himself and the shadow he casts. That is something be can face, his own shadow; and he can learn to control it and to be guided by it. So that when he grows up into his strength and responsibility as an adult in society, he will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what he sees, when he must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear, and the final shadow at the end of all.

The hardest part is the politics and economics of the thing. Parents of children want to have money so they can buy their family houses and cars and college educations, but the big bad environmentalists want to shut down the coal plants and coal mines so parents have no money. Well, how well received will the book be in a coal mining town or for kids who work in a coal power plant. Gotta tell them about all the wind power jobs people will have and that they and their parents and will have to move.

“humans can’t take to much reality.” Some smart guy said that like Carl Jung, or something like that, although I don’t think it was him.

It was easier in the old west when the good quys were the ones with the white hats and the bad quys were the ones with the black hats.

I am making jokes about writing a children’s book about global warming, but I don’t mean to be rude. I think that is a fine thing you are doing, but the humans don’t understand the science, economics and politics, how are the kids going to be able to sort it out. Just like the adults I suppose, not well.

I was just chatting with a colleague in Georgia this morning who is paralyzed by guilt about her emissions from her huge home and trips to Europe. This is a real problem.

The First Rule of Carbon Offsets: No Trees

http://climateprogress.org/ 2007/ 06/ 29/ the-first-rule-of-carbon-offsets-no-trees/

As an author of childrens’ books (The Great Kapok Tree, A River Ran Wild and 30 others) I really took to heart Bill B.’s comments. I am workikng on a book entitled How We Know What We KNow about our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming. Our goal was to present the science of climate change in a way that is engaging and hopeful and focuses on citizen-science and all the positive things that scientists and citizen scientists have done. For example, Susan Solomon, one of the scientists in the book, discovered the cause of the hole in the ozone. The story of getting rid of ozone depleting chemicals is a positive model. So is the creation of the Endangered Species Act.

And I wanted to let Earl Killian know that I’ve written another very different book similar to the one he suggested–about a world where we chose the right path and did the right thing.. It’s a vision of the world as we wish it would be. But, I agree, that unfortunately, many people need the vision before they can get motivated to work toward making it reality.

Lynne C.

In some ways, the global warming problem will be worse psychologically than the cold war, because a person can always think, am I doing enough, why don’t any of my friends care, I see all these SUV’s driving by at 70 miles an hour and more, what the hell are they doing. Maybe I should do more. I haven’t told enough people. They need to get involved, I need to do more.

That was my rant of what somebody might feel about global warming. How to resolve the doing something now when the really bad things happening 20 and 40 years from now and to few are listening. These problems are all the same as personal health, am I overweight or should I stop smoking, nothing bad is happening to me now. It’s a tough question on when people get scared from the message and are just scared or scare people into action. Good luck to answering that question.