This Picture Book About Climate Change Won’t Freak Your Kids Out

The Verge - Alessandra Potenza

Instead of highlighting the bleak stuff, author Megan Herbert focuses on the solutions

Illustration by Megan Herbert

Megan Herbert knows how hard it is to talk to children about climate change; she has a five-year-old son. “Some of those images and some of those ideas can really be too much for a kid to take onboard,” says Herbert, a writer and illustrator. “You have to make the conversation something that’s not overwhelming.”
So, instead of highlighting the bleak stuff — the melting ice, the rising sea levels, the more extreme weather — she focuses on the solutions: the small steps anyone can take to try to solve the problem. To help other parents to do same, she’s releasing a picture book that she illustrated and co-wrote with climatologist Michael Mann.

“You have to make the conversation something that’s not overwhelming."

The book, titled The Tantrum That Saved The World, tells the story of a girl named Sophia, whose life is disrupted when a polar bear, a Kiribati family flooded by the rising seas, a bee swarm, a fisherman, and others knock on her door seeking help. Annoyed at first, Sophia then realizes she has to help, so she organizes rallies to sway more people — and policymakers — to act on climate change. It’s a sweet story, and Herbert says she designed the protagonist to be racially ambiguous. Although Sophia is fair-skinned, she could be South American or mixed race, so any child can identify with her. “I wanted to keep that as vague as possible,” she says.

The picture book, which was funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign, comes with a glossary of climate change terms at the end, such as coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and ice sheet. It also has a section that explains what’s going on with polar bears, bees, and the people who live in low-lying islands that are already going under because of rising sea levels. It’s for kids as young as four, but also as old as 11, she says.

Illustration by Megan Herbert

The story, Herbert says, is an allegory. Though no Bengal tigers or pink flamingos will ever knock on anyone’s door asking for help, “we’re leaving this problem on the doorstep of the children that we’re bringing into the world now,” she says. And Herbert wanted to empower children — and adults — to be part of the solution. The book comes with a poster listing things kids and parents can do to make a difference: turn off unnecessary lights, ride your bike or take public transport instead of driving, avoid using disposable plastic items like plastic bags and water bottles, buy second-hand stuff, and shop locally.
Herbert says it took six months of brainstorming before settling on the current story. Some initial story ideas weren’t very relatable to children; others were just too bleak. “The worst thing to do is, ‘Here’s this horrible problem. The end,’” Herbert tells The Verge. “You can’t give information to adults or children that makes them feel powerless and overwhelmed, and then not give them any sort of feeling that they can do something about this.” That’s where the “World Saving Action Plan” poster comes in. Herbert hopes readers will hang it in the living room so that the whole family — especially children — can take little steps that will help solve climate change.

Illustration by Megan Herbert

 That’s how she approaches the problem with her own son: when they go grocery shopping, for instance, they don’t have a list of stuff they need. Instead, they look for the locally grown produce that’s not wrapped in plastic or served on styrofoam trays, and then they figure out together how to cook the food they found. It’s basically a game, Herbert says. “People are so daunted with the idea of changing everything at once, that they just don’t do anything,” she says. But “if you’re doing one little change a week, if you’re changing two or three habits over a month, if everyone is doing that, it actually makes a big difference.”
About 20,000 copies of the book are currently being printed in the UK and will ship to Kickstarter backers next month. In the meantime, the hardcover can be preordered for about $28 online.

Links

• The Tantrum That Saved The World
• Climate Change Predictions Can Be Scary For Kids. What Can You Say?
• Aussie Kids Are Worried About Our Planet, And They Want To Take Action
• Climate Policy Must Protect Children’s Rights, UN Panel Hears
• Book Week: 8 Classic Kids' Books About The Environment
• Dear Prime Minister, Our Kids Are Trusting Us On Climate Change
• With Kids For Climate Action, Strength ‘Is Going To Come From Numbers’