In Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon warned of an impending tidal wave of books seeking to install fears of climate change in young minds (sub req):
Young readers in search of scary stories will soon have a whole new genre to enjoy. Children's books about global warming -- a market niche that didn't exist as recently as last fall -- are blossoming on booksellers' shelves faster than a red-tide algae bloom off the coast of Maine.
On Tuesday, Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (Viking/Rodale) will surface in yet another incarnation, this time in softcover for "a new generation" of readers age 10 and up. For impressionable minds, this is likely to be a persuasive book, for it is filled with the same doomsday charts and graphs supposedly showing man-made planetary warming that Mr. Gore has used before.
More provoking still are the photographs: of garbage dumps, strip mines, Pacific Islanders getting menaced by rising tides and even, gratuitously, the mushroom cloud from a nuclear test. It's the sort of book that children will flip through, flip out about and cite in their schoolwork, serving Mr. Gore's alarmist purposes well. There is a bizarre chapter, about the manufactured existence of sinister "skeptics," that attacks a single Bush administration appointee by name, in large red print. This may strike bookstore browsers as passing strange, but it won't bother those adults who will buy the book for children and who are, presumably, already Gore devotees.
For younger readers, "Why Are the Ice Caps Melting?" (HarperCollins) introduces first- to third-graders to one of the adult world's current obsessions through the use of gentle illustrations by Paul Meisel and text by Anne Rockwell. On the cover, cartoon penguins stand around looking perplexed while the ice cracks beneath them. Inside we find the now-familiar argument that too many people are burning too much fuel and cutting down too many trees and thus overheating the Earth.
One drawing shows two children at the seaside, marveling at how high the water is compared with last summer. This book is more generous to those whom Al Gore scornfully calls "skeptics," to the extent that it hints at alternative explanations of the warming trend: "Some people say we don't cause global warming. They say that the earth's climate has changed many times in the past. It has grown warmer or colder, and many great and drastic changes in temperature happened before there were any people on the earth." Readers are urged, nonetheless, to reduce greenhouse gases. The book ends, predictably, by urging sacrifice on children -- in this case reducing electricity use and avoiding food with multiple wrappings.
Parents everywhere can now look forward to getting hectored by their kids about leaving the lights on (quite a turnabout from the days of my youth) and not buying food with multiple wrappings, whatever the hell that means.
What are young readers to make of all this? It's certainly true that children have managed to contend with the alarming scenarios produced by adults for a great many years. When I was small, the surpassing terrors were pollution and the extinction of whales, and the signature face of environmentalism was that of the weeping TV Indian. In the intervening years, the Love Canals got cleaned up, and we all started recycling bottles rather than flinging them out of our cars on to the roadside (as apparently we once did). Now the signature face is that of an empurpled former vice president.
Now that's an apt descriptor.
Whether the sky really is falling this time or not, more books are coming. The publisher Scholastic is leading its autumn lineup with a children's version of "The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming" by Cambria Gordon and Laurie David (Al Gore's producer on the film "An Inconvenient Truth"). Here, too, the young will be asked to make sacrifices, such as putting their computers on "sleep" and switching toilet-paper brands.
Switching toilet paper brands? Keep your hands off my ply. I'd rather quit than switch. Unfortunately, that ain't really an option.
Recently the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, caused a furor by calling the notion of human-caused global warming a "myth" that no sane person could support. Until Mr. Klaus -- or some other bold soul -- manages to publish a children's book that challenges establishment opinion, it will be up to parents, if they dare, to raise a few questions. A good place to start a family chat: asking children what might have caused the Earth to warm up after that long chilly period they know from the animated movie "Ice Age."
First off, it's up to parents to not buy these books. Ever. Period. And if your school assigns any of this agit-prop as required reading, you better stand athwart your local educational establishment shouting, "Stop!"
More importantly, this article once again demonstrates the desperate need for children's books that make the conservative case. I know that there a few here and there, mostly dealing with history and patriotism, but we don't have widely available, reliable alternatives to the steady stream of left-wing literature aimed at our children.
Frankly, I would rather not have to bring politics into this realm. But that train left the station a long time ago and, unless we want to cede, rather than seed, the field of fertile young minds, we have to have our own age and ideologically appropriate reading material.
Last year, we interviewed Jeremy Zilber, author of the ridiculously stereotyped children's book "Why Mommy Is A Democrat" on the NARN (you can listen to the interview here). After the show, Saint Paul and I talked about coming up with our own book in response, "Why Mommy Is A Republican" or maybe "Why Mommy Is A Conservative."
The problem was that neither one of us can draw so much as a straight line, to say nothing of illustrating a children's book. We can come up with the story line, the subtle conservative message, and even a few humorous references for adult readers. All we need is an artistic and steady hand to produce the drawings.
It's a niche that's just dying to be filled. Most importantly, it's for the children.
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