Abstract
This essay explores how nineteenth-century nature study principles inform a twenty-first century New Nature Study movement, and gives examples of a trend toward nature writing in recent picture books. The pedagogical principles of nineteenth-century nature study, ascendant at the turn of the twentieth century and implicit in interwar children’s literature, yielded to a model founded on Cold War competition rather than environmental stewardship. In mid-century narratives for children, technological progress prevailed. In the 1990s, the ideals of the first nature study movement reemerged in a call for meaningful conservation to sustain future generations. Like the original nature study, the New Nature Study arises from anxieties about industrial development, habitat loss and extinction, and hazards to childhood itself. The New Nature Study treats children as agents for change and citizens being denied their full human rights when their land, soil, water, and lives are bought and sold.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Notes
Kevin Armitage (2009) and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (2010) elaborate on Bird Day and on how schoolchildren of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century were encouraged to understand and foster nature while learning natural history and practical farming methods. Meanwhile, Sally Shuttleworth (2010) and Alice Boardman Smuts (2006) trace the concurrent, early-twentieth-century rise of what was known as Child Study, with a focus not on children physically present and active outdoors but on children’s psychological development. Where Nature Study might be said to have looked beyond the individual and at collective experience, perhaps, Child Study interiorized and institutionalized the vision of the child and in many ways is how, culturally, we still think of childhood today.
Geographer and cultural critic Carolyn Finney (2014) explores how American environmentalism has been perceived as a white enclave despite the contributions of people of color. Thus, when we look at present-day billboards and ads featuring diverse children enjoying the forest, we find multiple problematic subtexts despite an overt message of inclusion. Billboards, print ads, and online images, which market nature to children and adults, sell an equitable, accessible vision of the outdoors, indirectly acknowledging the previously white-associated nature study movement.
See Sharon Smulders (2016).
See Matthew Teorey (2014) for an account of how Wallace Stegner’s use of the word “unless” in his writing to federal policymakers and academically-minded adults parallel’s Seuss’s deployment of “unless” as a rallying cry for young readers in The Lorax.
Julie Dunlap and Stephen R. Kellert (2012) collect essays that model a shared engagement in the natural world among people of different ages.
See op de Beeck (2017) on “Environmental Picture Books” and the late-twentieth to early-twenty-first century movement toward nature literacy, in line with project-based and experiential learning in science education.
In the age of the New Nature Study, environmental justice issues are finding their way into generally non-controversial, crowd-pleasing children’s publications in the U.S. This suggests shifting cultural attitudes toward environmentalist goals, not to mention respect for children’s subjective agency, political viewpoints, and economic clout. A 2014 cover story in Scholastic News, for instance, encourages young readers to question whether SeaWorld and other marine parks should keep orcas in captivity. The article, titled “Should the Show Go On?”, recognizes the killer-whale documentary Blackfish and grassroots youth activism concerning whales and dolphins in entertainment parks (Bubar, 2014, pp. 4–5).
Around 2015, publishers noted an increasing interest among children (and people who buy books for children) in nonfiction, and some attributed this to education trends like the recent Common Core State Standards in the U.S. (Rosen, 2015). The New Nature Study and the State Standards themselves could signal a shift toward a renewed concern for fact-based (even if still fictionalized) children’s literature and media, often with attention to environmental crisis and forgotten knowhow. See also Sanders (2018) on young nonfiction readers’ active and agential subjectivity (as opposed to passive receptivity) around fact-based texts.
References
Armitage, Kevin. (2009). The Nature Study Movement: The Forgotten Popularizer of America’s Conservation Ethic. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.
Arnosky, Jim. (2008). Dolphins on the Sand. New York: Scholastic Books.
Arnosky, Jim. (2010). Slow Down for Manatees. New York: Putnam.
Arnosky, Jim. (2011). At This Very Moment. New York: Dutton.
Broom, Jenny. (2014). Animalium, illus. Katie Scott. Somerville, MA: Candlewick/Big Picture Press.
Bubar, Joe. (2014, March 10). Should the Show Go On? Scholastic News 76(17), 4–5.
Burton, Virginia Lee. (1939). Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Caldwell, Erskine, and Bourke-White, Margaret. (1937). You Have Seen Their Faces. New York: Viking Press.
Callahan, Sean. (1999, June 1). DuPont replaces 1935 tagline to reflect corporate change. Advertising Age. Accessed October 11, 2016 from http://adage.com/article/btob/dupont-replaces-1935-tagline-reflect-corporate-change/247761/.
Carson, Rachel. (1965). The Sense of Wonder. New York: Harper & Row.
Davies, Nicola. (2004). Bat Loves the Night, illus. Sarah Fox-Davies. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.
Dowson, Nick. (2011). North: The Amazing Story of Arctic Migration, illus. Patrick Benson. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.
Dunlap, Julie, and Kellert, Stephen R. (2012). Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Finney, Carolyn. (2014). Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Flack, Marjorie. (1934). Humphrey: One Hundred Years Along the Wayside with a Box Turtle. New York: Doubleday, Doran.
Gaard, Greta. (2008). Toward an Ecopedagogy of Children’s Environmental Literature. Green Theory and Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy, 4(2), 11–24.
Geisel, Theodor Seuss. (1947). McElligot’s Pool. New York: Random House.
Geisel, Theodor Seuss. (1949). Bartholomew and the Oobleck. New York: Random House.
Gray, Rita. (2014). Have You Heard the Nesting Bird?, illus. Kenard Pak. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Green, Amy S. (2001). Two Women Naturalists and the Search for Autonomy: Anna Botsford Comstock and the Producer Ethic; Gene Stratton-Porter and the Gospel of Wealth. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 29(1–2), 145–154.
Hine, Lewis. (1932). Men at Work. New York: Macmillan.
Johnston, Tony. (2014). Sequoia, illus. Wendell Minor. Brookfield, CT: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook Press.
Karas, G.Brian. (2014). As an Oak Tree Grows. New York: Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin.
Kelsey, Elin. (2012). You Are Stardust, illus. Soyeon Kim. Berkeley/Toronto: Owlkids Books.
Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory. (2005). Nature, Not Books: Scientists and the Origins of the Nature-Study Movement in the 1890s. Isis, 96(3), 324–352.
Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory. (2010). Teaching Children Science: Hands-On Nature Study in North America, 1890-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lawson, Robert. (1942). Rabbit Hill. New York: Viking Press.
Levine, Sara. (2013). Bone by Bone: Comparing Animal Skeletons, illus. T.S. Spookytooth. Minneapolis: Millbrook Press.
Long, Loren. (2009). Otis. New York: Philomel Books.
Louv, Richard. (2005). Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books.
Lutts, Ralph H. (2001). The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, and Sentiment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
McCloskey, Robert. (1940). Make Way for Ducklings. New York: Viking Press.
Napoli, Donna Jo. (2010). Mama Miti: Wangari Maathai and the Trees of Kenya, illus. Kadir Nelson. New York: Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books.
Nelson, Marilyn. (1997). Carver: A Life in Poems. Ashville, NC: Front Street.
op de Beeck, Nathalie. (2017). Environmental Picture Books: Cultivating Conservationists. In Naomi Hamer, Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer (Eds.), More Words About Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People (pp. 116–126). New York: Routledge.
Piper, Watty. (1930.) The Little Engine That Could, illus. Lois Lenski. New York: Platt & Munk.
Platt, Kamala. (2004). Environmental Justice Children’s Literature. In Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth Kidd (Eds.), Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism (pp. 183–197). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Rabinowitz, Alan. (2014). A Boy and a Jaguar, illus. CáTia Chien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Ratelle, Amy. (2014). Ethics and Edibility in Charlotte’s Web. The Lion and the Unicorn, 38(3), 327–339.
Rosen, Judith. (2015, July 17). Is Children’s Nonfiction Having Its Moment? Publishers Weekly Children’s Bookshelf. Accessed July 17, 2015 from https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/67549-is-nonfiction-having-its-moment.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=6e46298726-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-6e46298726-304420897.
Samworth, Kate. (2014). Aviary Wonders, Inc. New York: Clarion Books.
Sandburg, Carl. (1936). The People, Yes. New York: Harcourt.
Sanders, Joe Sutliff. (2018). A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Shuttleworth, Sally. (2010). The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smulders, Sharon. (2016). “Information and Inspiration”: Wangari Maathai, the Green Belt Movement and Children’s Eco-Literature. International Research in Children’s Literature, 9(1), 20–34.
Smuts, Alice Boardman. (2006). Science in the Service of Children, 1893-1935. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Stratton-Porter, Gene. (1909). A Girl of the Limberlost. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.
Swift, Hildegarde Hoyt. (1942). The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, illus. Lynd Ward. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Teorey, Matthew. (2014). The Lorax and Wallace Stegner: Inspiring Children’s Environmental Activism. Children’s Literature in Education, 45(4), 324–339.
Wallace, Karen. (2004). Think of an Eel, illus. Michael Bostock. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.
Wehle, Mary Liddell. (2009/1926). Little Machinery: A Critical Facsimile Edition. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Winter, Jeanette. (2008). Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa. New York: Harcourt.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Nathalie op de Beeck is the author of Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). She is an Associate Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
op de Beeck, N. Children’s Ecoliterature and the New Nature Study. Child Lit Educ 49, 73–85 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9347-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9347-9
Keywords
- Picture books
- Environmental movement
- Nature study
- Ecoliteracy