“I am not an activist…I simply want to make children fall in love with our natural heritage; then they will save it.”

–Jean Craighead George, “Writing Nature Books for Children” (1993)

In the eighteenth-century poem, “Who Killed Cock Robin?,” which first appeared in a 1744 edition of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, children are introduced to an ecological cycle of death. The poem begins, “Who killed Cock Robin?/I, said the Sparrow,/ with my bow and arrow,/I killed Cock Robin./Who saw him die?/I, said the Fly/with my little teeny eye,/I saw him die.” The poem continues by asking who in the animal community will help prepare to mourn the death of Cock Robin, including through tasks such as “tolling the bell” and “sewing the shroud.” Everyone, it seems, is somehow responsible for taking care of the fallen bird. So it is perhaps not too surprising that in Jean Craighead George’s Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery (1971) that the children of Saddleboro, an American town in the state of Ohio, bear their own sense of responsibility when the town’s mascot, a male robin, falls dead just before he is set to become the proud parent of a brood of little chicks. The protagonist, a boy whose older brother has left him with the task of watching the robin population, quickly begins to realize that Cock Robin’s death is not an isolated event, and as the mystery unfolds we learn about the ecosystem in the town and how human intervention has dramatically altered it. The paratext for this novel, namely a foreword that is directed at young readers, indicates that it is the child’s role to not only inherit but to heal the Earth.

George’s message to her young readers not only places faith in the child to recover, or heal, the damage done to the Earth, but also reflects the contemporary positioning of young people as global climate activists. Through the actions of high-profile youth activists such as Greta Thunberg, children are positioned as citizens of a world community, not only in terms of developing awareness about how global issues such as climate change cross national boundaries but also through their shared sense of responsibility when it comes to helping to alleviate these problems. But what forms of participation are both offered and available to young people? In this essay, I will explore this question by tracing the evolution of contemporary ecological fiction for children, particularly following its rise in American publishing in the 1970s, as a way of understanding a new shift in this subgenre that has taken a decidedly darker turn. In works that include Sarah Baughman’s The Light in the Lake (2019), Kate Allen’s The Line Tender (2019), Ali Benjamin’s The Thing about Jellyfish (2015), and Joanne Rossmassler Fritz’s Everywhere Blue (2021), the development of children’s ecological consciousness is depicted both as a form of “healing” and “grieving” that will eventually lead to activism, a turn that is reflective of current debates among child psychologists about the emotional impact of the current climate crisis on children and young people.

Scholars of children’s literature have already identified climate fiction—a sub-genre of ecological, or “eco-,” fiction that focuses on topics that include rising sea levels and the mass extinction of animals—as an important site for introducing children to the complex topic of climate change. In the 2021 special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn, guest editors Marek Oziewicz and Lara Saguisag insist that climate change cannot be disentangled from the social injustice with which it is bound: we must, they argue, “become more deliberate in tying issues of inequity to the existential crisis of climate change we are facing” (p. viii). We must, in other words, not only make climate change feel more present, but also acknowledge the historical roots of the issues we are now facing and how they have contributed to climate injustice. In many respects, their argument, while focused on the need to give more concentrated attention to climate change within children’s literature, dovetails with that of the American literary scholar and ecocritic Lawrence Buell, who, in Shades of the Planet (2007), called for an “ecoglobal” approach to climate change. Buell identifies what he calls “ecoglobalist affect” within an American literary tradition that imagines an inexhaustible or continually renewable landscape, locating this history, as Oziewicz and Saguisag do, in early settlers’ colonial relationship with the land. He defines this affect as “an emotion-laden preoccupation with a finite, near-at-hand physical environment defined, at least in part, by an imagined inextricable linkage of some sort between that specific site and a context of planetary reach” (p. 232), or a process, often painful, of linking local ecological problems to global ones. Buell, moving on from his earlier work on the “environmental imagination” in American literature, makes the logical transition from literary works that focus more broadly on environmental destruction—green speculative fiction or eco-romance, to name just two sub-genres of eco-fiction—to works that recognize how ecological issues impacting on local environments ultimately contribute to the larger-scale problems associated with climate change today (p. 234).

The emphasis on affect, in its most basic sense of “feeling,” ties this scholarly work together on climate change. As Oziewicz, Saguisag, and Buell all seem to agree, there is an urgent need to make climate change more present, to make those, in this case young readers, feel strongly enough about climate change that they want to do something about it. This connection between grief and climate action is recognized by leading psychologists, who identify “ecological grief” as a real and profound response to climate change. As Susie Burke, an Australian psychologist with a focus on ecological grief in young people acknowledges, feelings of pain, guilt, and sadness are emotions young people will experience as they come to grips with the climate crisis; yet they are also emotions that can be processed in positive ways that lead to action (Burke et al., 2018, p. 35). While a recent UK study conducted by the University of Bath paints a bleak picture of frustrated children with little faith in governments to take action and who suffer from “eco-anxiety” (Marks et al., 2021, p. e870)—another newly coined term to describe the emotional response to climate change—it is imperative that we recognize children’s stories that acknowledge the deep link between grief and climate change. As one sixteen-year-old boy relates in a study on climate anxiety, “For us the destruction of the planet is personal” (Marks et al., 2021, p. e871). While in this essay I focus on Sarah Baughman’s The Light in the Lake, there are a number of contemporary middle-grade books that are explicitly concerned with this form of grieving, moving from personal grief to communal grief, from the closely felt loss of loved ones to the potential loss of species or landscapes on a planetary scale. Grief mixes and mingles in these stories, not collapsing into one another, but moving seamlessly between them in ways that enable young readers to feel the potential magnitude of the loss of resources that for too long have been taken for granted as always present and therefore continually exploitable.

Re-Wilding the Child: The Roots of Contemporary Climate Fiction

Climate fiction is a relatively new term. First coined by Dan Bloom in 2011, the term was intentionally created to be trendy enough to catch on in the global publishing market. As Bloom himself relates, cli-fi can both be considered a “sub-genre of eco-literature” and a “separate stand-alone genre of its own” (Bloom, 2017, n.p.). It is to this former view that I adhere in this essay, looking at the ways in which contemporary children’s literature with environmental themes or messages attempts to reassure children dealing with ecological grief and provide them with concrete ideas for acting on the source of their grief: in this case, loss of land or species and the harmful actions of humans that has contributed to this situation. By viewing these works as related to the broader category of eco-fiction, it is possible to move beyond the typical view of cli-fi as a dark or dystopian narrative which imagines a cataclysmic or disastrous end for the world. And, while American novelist Junot Díaz rightly points out that such “future” dystopias are feeling increasingly present following major weather events that include the deadly 2017 storm Hurricane Maria (2017, p. 5), these more hopeful narratives still have their place in raising awareness about global trends impacting on the Earth’s climate and positioning this trend within the larger historical narrative of loss and destruction central to the American tradition of eco-fiction. In this respect, such novels follow the patterns that Lawrence Buell originally set out in his most well-known work of eco-criticism, The Environmental Imagination (1995), where he defines several qualities of eco-fiction, including: a nonhuman environment that is central to the narrative, a sense of the environment as “a process rather than a constant or given,” and an emphasis on human responsibility towards this environment (pp. 7–8). In Where the Wild Books Are (2010), librarian Jim Dwyer takes on the ambitious project of charting the evolution of modern eco-fiction from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, drawing on this very same definition provided by Buell (p. viii, 7). While Buell and Dwyer fail to concentrate on children’s literature’s contribution to the development of eco-fiction, Dwyer does admit that the “inclusion of children’s literature” is imperative to future studies on the topic (p. viii).

Despite their lack of focus on children’s literature, these two pivotal books that chart the roots of contemporary eco-fiction in American literature provide a fruitful starting point for looking at children’s eco-fiction that has led to the emerging trend to cast children as grieving eco-warriors. Returning to Jean Craighead George’s Who Really Killed Cock Robin?, which was published in 1971 when the term eco-fiction first emerged, this text was what George referred to as the first “ecological mystery” for young people (n.d., Box 16, Folder 27, n.p.). George writes persuasively in her voluminous archives, held in the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota, about how she consciously sought to urge children to think about their relationship with nature and actively work to protect it through these and other nature-focused works, including her more famous Julie of the Wolves (1972) (1993, pp. 9–12). In one of her personal notebooks, George writes “can’t make up stories as good as the real thing” (n.d., Box 16, Folder 24, n.p.), followed by notes about communication methods between different animal species (mainly crows and wolves) (n.d., Box 16, Folder 24, n.p.). Her notes are littered with nature observations and communications with scientists focused on environmental conservation, which shaped and informed her writing for children.Footnote 1 As she explains in one of her letters to a young fan,

The best part of the research we are doing on the environment is that when we know what we are doing wrong we do change. The worst chemical in Who Really Killed Cock Robin was DDT. That has been banned. Others have been banned, too.

So we do change our ways when we know what we are doing to ourselves. That’s the reason I wrote Who Really Killed Cock Robin? (n.d, Box 16, Folder 27, n.p.)

In her letter, George identifies children as agents of change, initiating the questions that spark research into the cause for environmental destruction and ultimately lead to solutions to stop, or at least mitigate, it. In one personal anecdote, George recalls how a neighborhood girl came to her doorstep, dead bird in hands, asking, “Who killed the robin?”, an act that encouraged George to not only write Who Really Killed Cock Robin? but also to investigate this question as well (n.d., Box 16, Folder 27, n.d.).Footnote 2 While George begins by explaining the influence of key figures in the environmental movement of the 1960s, namely Rachel Carson and her famous Silent Spring (1962), it is the persistent questions and curiosity of the young that she positions as a driver for the development of change, both in her writing and within the ecological problems facing American society in the 1960s (n.d., Box 16, Folder 27, n.p.).

George’s ruminations on the child’s role in healing the Earth, or helping to stop environmental destruction, positions her as an early figure in contemporary eco-fiction for the young. While it is possible to trace even earlier publications for children that advocated for the protection of nature, it was at this moment that the authors of these publications consciously began to participate in the ecological activism sweeping the nation. This extended beyond those working within the children’s publishing industry, like George, and included the very activist that most of these authors found influential in their own work: Rachel Carson. Carson, trained as a biologist, also found value in creating writing for young people, and, while Silent Spring remains her most remembered work, she produced several books and magazine publications that were targeted at parents, mainly stay-at-home mothers, with advice on how to introduce children to nature. Chief among these publications was Carson’s The Sense of Wonder (1965). First published in a 1956 issue of Woman’s Home Companion and then posthumously in 1965 as The Sense of Wonder, in this child-oriented text Carson speaks of her grandnephew, Roger, who she claims benefited from early experiences in nature and encourages her readers, mainly mothers, to take their children outside to watch and observe nature too, even if it is messy or disrupts bedtime (Carson, 1956, p. 26). Carson, who felt that sensing nature rather than “understanding” it (in the sense of facts and figures) was far more important at a young age, advocated for the importance of nurturing this bond with nature in the young (Greenwood, 2020, p. 1650), a position that was rooted in the nature-study movement of the early twentieth century, which sought to “connect the learning of the science of natural history to the experience of excitement, joy, and wonder” (Greenwood, 2020, p. 1643).

Carson continued to be cast in the nurturing role that she advocates for in her writing for mothers in popular magazines. In the October 1962 issue of Life, she is shown standing in the woods surrounded by a group of neighborhood children, encouraging them to closely examine the local wildlife using scientific equipment such as a microscope or field glasses (p. 106). As in her other publications about the young, Carson emphasizes the wonder that such examination can spark: “[G]o out when the moon is full,” she begins. “If you wait you’ll see the migrating birds high up in the sky flying across the face of the moon” (1962, p. 106). Her literary descriptions of the night sky wax poetic, but they also underscore the importance Carson placed on children’s early experiences with nature. Biographer Linda Lear attributes Carson’s deep investment in nature education for the young to her early childhood experiences, including the successful publication of her juvenilia in the popular children’s magazine, St. Nicholas (1997, pp. 17–18). As Lear notes, Carson’s mother was influenced by the nature-study movement of the early twentieth century, including the popular Handbook of Nature-Study (1911) by Anna Botsford Comstock (1997, pp. 14–15). The handbook states that nature-study “gives the child practical and helpful knowledge” and “makes him familiar with nature’s ways and forces, so that he is not so helpless in the presence of natural misfortune and disasters” (p. 1).

The views about childhood wonder in nature, which Carson helped to popularize in her writing for mothers, began to make the connection between environmental activism and emotion. While the experience of wonder and awe at the sight of natural landscapes could be linked to earlier literary movements—namely the Romantic movement which did serve as an influence for early nature study writers that included the author of the very handbook that Carson’s mother drew lessons from when introducing her own daughter to nature (Lear, 1997, p. 14; Greenwood, 2020, p. 1643)—it was in this particular moment that this emotion began to be associated as a driver for environmental activism. While George kickstarted a new subgenre of children’s eco-fiction in the 1970s, it would continue to be Carson who acted as a key influential figure for future children’s writers, predominately women, who would also aim to encourage the young to wonder, and through this wonder to question, the cause of environmental destruction and seek to do something about it. Turning to one of the books that is part of the contemporary wave of eco-fiction focusing on grief as a form of as healing, it is possible to see this connection between earlier efforts to encourage the young to both immerse themselves in and to protect nature and more recent initiatives to raise children’s awareness about the severity of the current climate crisis.

Contemporary Examples of Grieving Eco-Warriors

Sarah Baughman’s The Light in the Lake (2019) follows an established pattern in children’s climate fiction, first developed by Jean Craighead George in the 1970s, by utilizing the mystery genre to entice children into critical thinking about environmental issues such as air and water pollution. The female protagonist, Addie, begins the narrative with the poignant words, “Mama says people who think mountains don’t move are taking the short view of things. They’ve been moving, she says. All this time. Doesn’t matter that we can’t see it” (p. 1). Addie, who reflects on how her worldview is shaped by her mother and scientific facts learned in school, is slowly building up to revealing the sudden death of her twin brother, Amos, before adding, “Amos saw something else, and he wanted me to see it too” (p. 2). The novel, with its blend of mystery, fantasy, and realistic fiction, begins to depart from earlier works of climate fiction such as the previously mentioned Who Really Killed Cock Robin? through the way that it explores the complex emotions of grief. While in Cock Robin death does motivate the protagonist’s climate activism, this death does not trigger any feelings of personal grief as it does in The Light in the Lake. Similarly, while in Cock Robin the children are both resilient and intelligent—those “wonderful kids of the sixties” as George describes them—in The Light in the Lake this resilience and intelligence is challenged by the fact that science alone cannot solve the problems the children face. Science helps track down the source of dangerous algal blooms in the local lake where Addie lives, but it does not help heal the source of grief and pain that attracts her to the lake in the first place. Yet this symbiotic relationship between lake and girl (her surname is literally Lago, or “lake”), where each one heals the other, is part of the magic, or fantasy element, of the novel.

A first-time children’s author, Baughman did not originally set out to write a work of eco-fiction. While she has long been interested in the way that nature “informs and echoes the human experience,” reflected in her earlier creative non-fiction writing, Baughman did not turn to harnessing this interest into a narrative about personal and ecological grief until writing The Light in the Lake (2010, p. 38). In a 2020 interview for her debut novel, she answers the question “Why do you think it’s important for books to address things like pollution and global climate change?” by noting the role books can play in “creat[ing emotional connections” which she recognizes as the starting point for change: that is, emotion becomes a means to moving children to action (Hill, n.p.). While other children’s authors have made similar claims, namely Newbery award-winning author Linda Sue Park (2015, n.p.), there has been skepticism about the extent to which books can inspire children to contribute to global climate activism. In an empirical survey of climate fiction readers, most respondents stated that they were concerned about the environment before reading climate fiction, making it more likely that these readers were already searching for ways to diminish the effects of climate change (Schneider-Mayerson, 2018, p. 479). In addition, within works specifically for children, the emphasis on human and animal relationships can undermine the complex processes contributing to climate change, including overlooking the destruction of plant life (Jones and MacLeod, 2022, n.p.). Despite these limitations, climate fiction for children continues to grow in strength and as such the emerging trend to cultivate ecological grief in the young is deserving of attention, as it provides one critical way to track how children resonate with these narratives of climate destruction and whether such attempts to emotionally move the child can indeed encourage climate activism.

Baughman’s emphasis on the importance of emotion and nature’s ability to reflect the human experience, alongside her deep investment in encouraging children to develop a global outlook on the world—sparked, in large part, by her own experience living and working abroad in four different countries including Germany, China, and Bolivia—begins to position The Light in the Lake more firmly within the category of eco-fiction, and, in particular, within the growing trend of contemporary works for children that focus on grief as a form of healing for both child and nature. Drawing on established tropes within American eco-fiction, Baughman begins to establish how Addie, her young protagonist, is inextricably tied to the lake within the novel. In earlier passages, we witness a grieving Addie who is hesitant to return to the lake because it was the site of her brother’s death. However, it is not long before Addie is desperately trying to convince her parents to let her complete a summer internship to determine the source of pollution of this same lake. In an initial conversation with her father about the position, Addie hesitantly introduces the idea of returning to the lake: “I might not always be at the farm. I…might be at Maple Lake” (p. 41). Shocked at this suggestion, her father responds by reminding her that “things are just different now,” implying that the loss of her brother Amos has created a permanent barrier to returning to the lake that Addie and her family once loved to visit (p. 41). A similar reaction comes from her cousin, who questions Addie’s decision and argues that it wouldn’t be that “weird” for her parents, and especially her mother, to protest to such a request (p. 47). Addie’s mother, the one most lost in her grief, simply has her “eyes flash” before quietly whispering “I can’t let you” (p. 59).

The powerful resistance of Addie’s parents to the suggestion to return to the lake overshadows Addie’s claim that the reason for her return is to investigate the cause of its growing pollution. In these earlier chapters, Baughman chooses instead to explore how the complicated grief that permeates Addie’s family flows and ebbs like the water on the shores of Maple Lake, using representations of personal grief to transition to conversations about communal grief about the loss of natural landscapes. As she does so, the lake emerges as a powerful character in and of itself, a key feature of American eco-fiction, which is reflected in both Addie’s memories of being on the lake as a child, introduced through flashbacks, and in her own initial impressions of the lake when she does, eventually, take up the Young Scientist position. In one particularly powerful passage, Addie reflects on the feeling of returning to the lake’s water after Amos’s death:

The mountains close in on me, dark and beautiful. I’ve seen the lake this way a million times, but now with Amos’s notebook, it feels new too. It’s not what I thought it was. Or, there’s more to it than I ever saw before. In the distance, a heron rises from the water and soars into the sky, its wings dripping silver. I have to catch my breath, even though I’ve seen herons fly a hundred times before.

If there’s magic anywhere, I think, it’s here. (pp. 141–142; emphasis mine)

In search of clues to prove Amos’s theory that a creature dwells deep in the lake’s water, Addie entertains the idea of magic being real. From the reflections on the water, which as a child she and her brother referred to as “Sparkle Island” following a story from their father (p. 218), to the creature itself, Addie begins to view the lake less as a physical body of water and more as a living thing. In shifting her viewpoint about the lake, her narrative opens up space for conversations about human and nonhuman relationships, as well as the patterns of behavior that lead to the destruction of such landscapes.

Such a shift in perspective is evidenced just a few pages later, as Addie and her friend Tai go to collect water samples from the lake. Returning to a favorite fishing spot of her father, Addie notices with dismay the green slime of the algal blooms they’ve been investigating. She thinks “my heart sinks, a heavy anchor” (p. 149). But despite this disappointment, Addie is able to continue to tie her evolving emotions to the lake, understanding that the pollution she is observing is a sign of loss as well. She notes, for instance, how the algal blooms will increase the phosphorus levels in the water and kill the native plant and animal species in the lake as oxygen levels diminish (p. 258, 288). Fighting to protect these beloved spaces that contain memories from her childhood, Addie persistently tries to counter local views that the lake is “clean” and “clear” and, as she does so, she further explores her own feelings around the lake. In a much later passage, Addie begins to separate her personal grief from her ecological grief, recognizing the potential for the lake she loves to be permanently destroyed:

I think if the creature’s [sic] in Maple Lake, it’s supposed to stay there forever too. Amos thought it was the last one, and it wasn’t supposed to die. I know technically every living thing does, but Amos’s creature would have to be different. It might be part white whale, but it’s part magic too. And it needs the lake to stay alive. (p. 269)

In author interviews, Baughman has indicated that such discussions were inspired by intense debates about water runoff from dairy farms in Vermont, one of the states she has called home, and these conversations continue to take place today (Hill, 2020, n.p.). A 2021 newspaper report describes how swimmer Christopher Swain experienced the effects of such runoff firsthand while crossing Lake Champlain: “I swam through clouds of manure runoff that were kind of slippery and sticky at the same time” (Greenberg, n.p.). Swain describes how the toxic smells of fertilizers and invasive species of plants and animals—including the algal blooms that appear in The Light in the Lake—turn what should be a natural wonder into a veritable nightmare.

Baughman uses the palpable emotion of her characters to foster environmental concern that is both directed at healing such natural landscapes and that is critical in its assessment of the complexity of the ecological changes happening in waterways due to runoff. Addie’s mother, the most lost of the surviving members of the Lago family, begins to connect to her old love of science and knowledge of the local geography to guide Addie towards possible sources of the lake’s pollution. In contrast, Addie’s cousin, Eliza, acts as a window into the life of the owners of small dairy farms, humanizing those who might otherwise be presented as a faceless corporation or business. Indeed, when her mother initially suspects a new set of condos and a Walmart as the main cause of the pollution, The Light in the Lake seems set to go down the path of other popular works of eco-fiction for the young, including Carl Hiassin’s Hoot (2002), where a group of children stand up to a national pancake company building on the nesting site of local owls. Addie, however, realizes quickly that her own family, who have been farming for generations, may also be part of the problem: “I don’t want to believe that this could really be my family’s fault. We’ve been on Maple Lake for so long, you know? Generations of us. Part of me feels like we must know the lake better than Mr. Dale or your mom or anyone else—” (p. 212). Facing an ethical dilemma when it comes to who to defend, lake or family, Addie’s inner conflict surfaces as a means of demonstrating to children the complex network of relations between the human and non-human.

Addie’s conflicting feelings about the lake and the loss of her brother come to a head in a final dramatic moment as she swims across the lake in search of “Sparkle Island.” As the sparkles, or reflections of light as they hit the water’s surface, continually slip away, she begins to lose control of both her emotions and her body, dangerously close to drowning like her brother. When she is about to slip below the surface, Addie feels something lift her up and attributes this to the creature she has been pursuing alongside her scientific study of the water pollution in Maple Lake. As she considers the power and strength of this force, she also recognizes its weaknesses:

Tears slip down my cheeks. Why didn’t it save Amos too? I ask. It’s the question I haven’t been able to answer. But just because the creature is strong, doesn’t mean it can do everything. I do know Maple Lake needs help, and maybe the creature does too. Maybe it can’t do all the saving. (p. 281)

In this moment, Addie realizes that the creature she has come to know through her investigation of the clues left behind by Amos is not invincible. Already viewing the creature and the pollution in the lake as tied together, this moment serves as a turning point both in her personal healing—letting her grief slip away like the sparkles on the water—and in terms of her evolving ecological consciousness. While Addie has already started actively working to generate awareness about this pollution in her local community, speaking to family members and even publishing an article in the local newspaper, the strengthening of her resolve to act on behalf of the lake promises that she will carry these tiny acts forward into more visible forms of eco-activism. Indeed, earlier in the narrative, she imagines herself on the shores of a lake in China which shares a similar topography to Maple Lake, demonstrating that she is already moving beyond a consideration of environmental destruction at the local level.

Baughman seeks to encourage young readers to make a similar turn in their ecological consciousness, and utilizes the trope of healing and grieving to help spark this transformation. In an online educational resource pack developed by Baughman, children are encouraged to write letters to their local newspaper and are prompted to become climate activists in other ways. But it is the grief, which is at the heart of the book’s narrative, that becomes the center of schoolchildren’s discussions. In one such example, a storyboard activity charting the character development of Addie is developed by a group of sixth-grade children from Hubberston School Center in Hubberston, Massachusetts. In preparation for this activity, the children had the following exchange about the symbolism of the creature in The Light in the Lake:

Andrew: “Do you think the monster is really a symbol for something else?”

Sam: “Maybe it represented the pollution in the lake?”

Brielle: “But what about the title The LIGHT in the lake…how does it connect to the monster?”

Allison: “Maybe the light in the lake represents Addie’s brother being the light in her life.”

Andrew: “Light usually represents something good, so maybe the light, a.k.a the monster, symbolizes Addie’s love for her brother and her finally finding closure with his death.” (Coons, 2020, n.p.)

As this exchange reveals, the children’s thoughts move from a focus on climate change (in this case related to water pollution) to grief, with one boy, Andrew, noting that the “monster” might in fact represent a healing force on Addie’s emotional journey. Baughman provides several direct quotations that tie the creature to the pollution in the lake, but she leaves her young readers to decide for themselves what the light symbolizes and how this adds additional layers of meaning to this magical creature.

The Light in the Lake is certainly not the only contemporary work of climate fiction to make a similar move away from an exclusive focus on the environmental issues that both launch and frame the narrative, but it does raise the question of the role of grief in motivating young readers to forms of climate activism. In its emphasis on the inner lives of children and their emotional need for nature, The Light and the Lake, and the new wave of nature writing for children that it represents, underscores the relationship between nature and humans that is central to discussions of ecological grief in the interdisciplinary field of ecopsycology. James Hillman, an American psychologist, describes the division of psychology, the world of the mind, with environmental studies, the world of nature, as a cut, one that creates an unnatural division that limits the ability of psychotherapists to help their patients heal (1995, pp. xvii–xx). Ecopsychology aims to repair this cut and respond to the fact that we are “living in a time when both the Earth and the human species seem to be crying out for a radical readjustment in the scale of our political thought” (Roszak, 1995, p. 2). Drawing on research on “biophilia,” or the intrinsic emotional connection of human beings to other living organisms, Theodore Roszak, one of the leaders of the ecopsychology movement, demonstrates how both a positive emotional connection with nature as well as a negative one, including feelings of fear referred to as biophobia, have a role to play in promoting climate activism (p. 2, 4). This split is similarly reflected in works of climate fiction for children, which swing between views of nature as safe and nurturing to wild and dangerous. In The Light in the Lake, Addie experiences physical symptoms of anxiety as she approaches Maple Lake due to her association of this landscape with death, and it is only in overcoming this crippling fear that she is finally able to begin the healing process and develop as an active eco-warrior. In repairing the cut between nature and the mind, the book suggests, we can discover something profoundly important about ourselves.

Reflections: From Ecological Grief to Climate Activism

In reflecting on contemporary debates about the relationship between nature and childhood, we might ask: What will these shifting views about nature and the roles presented to children within climate fiction mean for a generation where the climate crisis is one of the most urgent global issues? While it may be too soon to answer this question, what is certain is that contemporary climate fiction for children is invested in recognizing the complex emotions associated with ecological grief and encouraging children to participate in climate activism, departing from earlier religious tracts such as James Janeway’s A Token for Children (1671–1672) that utilized the “happy deaths” of children to convert its young readers to Christianity. It’s aim, as well, is not so much to scare children into activism, though arguably books such as Louis Sachar’s Fuzzy Mud (2015) do take this approach, but instead to think about the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. In doing so, these works of climate fiction for children reflect the participatory element of the poem I began with, where everyone plays a part in helping to mourn and grieve after Cock Robin’s death. Such a community approach to loss is not only healing for the fictional characters within these novels, it also models alternative methods for problem solving, particularly in relation to the environmental issues that the communities of these children face. The communities that are formed in response to these issues, both inside the book and through the participatory actions of its readers, help spark the formation of a global activist community, and that, I think, is quite a fitting legacy for the Cock Robins of children’s literature, who serve to develop children as empathetic and critical eco-warriors.