Growing Greens

Abstract

Wild Things: Children's Literature and Ecocriticism, Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004. "[C]hildren recognize that their world is more gray than green, literally and symbolically," writes Kamala Platt in this lively new anthology (192). Recent generations have grown up amid suburban sprawl and polluting industries, unable to identify the birds and trees indigenous to their regions, much less comprehend delicate ecosystems (e.g., the links between environmental justice, "bird migration and coffee-growing and -drinking practices," as Platt notes [186]). Children and adults alike hear unsettling daily news about deforestation, extinction, ozone depletion, and melting polar ice caps, receiving an image of the planet as a victimized "damsel in distress" (as Susan Jaye Dauer charges in her essay on the cartoon series Captain Planet and the Planeteers [258]). People of all ages are exhorted to save the Earth, and to protect childhood itself, in the absence of national and international policies to make this remotely possible. In this anxious climate, rosy accounts of bountiful nature are naïve and politically suspect, directing readers' attention away from critical environmental understanding. Meanwhile, doomsday scenarios reinforce feelings of disempowerment. "How does children's literature portray the troubling reality of our world," asks Platt, "in order to address social issues and to promote a path toward productive resolutions without shattering a sense of hope, without destroying . . . the 'green' and replacing it with 'gray'?" (192). Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd's wide-ranging Wild Things makes a concerted effort to address this crucial question, urging an interdisciplinary, ecocritical engagement with children's media and culture. "I have become less interested in ecocriticism's agenda of textual examination than in issues of ecological literacy," Dobrin writes in his essay on Jim Henson, which borrows and plays on the title of Kermit the Frog's signature song, "It's Not Easy Being Green." Dobrin, like most essayists here, envisions ecocriticism as a mode not just for contemplating children's or child-centered texts, but as an all-ages perspective from which to develop material environmentalist practices: [End Page 280] "Texts with implicit agendas of ecological literacy development can be examined not simply for how they teach about environment, for how they project images of environment, but for how they themselves become part of a larger ecological literacy" (233–4). Kamala Platt agrees, adding that ecocritical work must historicize its objects and treat the text "as an expressive agent for social change." She seeks "a methodology that allows—and indeed requires—that the texts themselves function as ecocritical, cultural artifacts, as organs of environmental justice, as a transformative poetics" (184–5). Wild Things' contributors take diverse approaches to ecocriticism, but all examine the construction of the reader in the text and the ways that texts express or reinforce cultural concepts of the natural world. In their introduction, Dobrin and Kidd explore literary commonplaces that set up relationships between the child and nature: the Romantic "belief that children are innocent and/or virtuous," and thus aligned with pure wilderness, versus a tabula rasa conceit that assumes the child "devoid of content" and needing education in all things, including the lived environment. The editors strive for a middle ground among these stances, writing that "even if the child has a privileged relationship with nature, he or she must be educated into a deeper—or at least different—awareness" (5–7). Toward this practical purpose, the anthology includes considerations of heretofore undertheorized topics—among them, ecopolitical and scatological children's texts. In "Playing Seriously with Dr. Seuss," Bob Henderson, Merle Kennedy, and Chuck Chamberlin appraise critical responses to The Lorax and provide a detailed bibliography of work in conversation with this foundational ecopolitical text. They do not shy away from the ambivalence of The Lorax itself, which pits an unrestrained capitalist, the Once-ler, against the back-to-nature title character. Both the conservationist Lorax and the destructive Once-ler subscribe to rabid idealism, the authors write, "for surely it is idealism...