Battling Against Environmental Crisis: Children in Action

Abstract

With its historical privilege of the relationship between children and nature, children’s literature has long attended to ecological problems, often in concert with its attendant social problems. In a century of stories, from The Secret Garden (1911) to The Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Iron Man (1968), The Iron Woman (1993), and The Marrow Thieves (2017), children’s authors have been demonstrating how children, prefiguring actual child activists such as Greta Thunberg, can lead the way towards solutions. Whether in literature or real life, it seems that it is the children who understand the urgency of environmental crises and can bring about responses. Children activists, such as Lucy, Hogarth, Frenchie and his companions, take decisive action in saving nature and the human world.