Our Common Earth: The Local and Global Flow of Narrative in A River of Stories

Abstract

Globalization is rapidly changing the ways in which communities engage with their local landscapes; it is also changing the ways in which such landscapes are represented in literature for children. This article explores the tension exhibited by the Commonwealth Education Trust’s recent publication, A River of Stories (2011), between local and global understandings of human identity. The collection’s focus on environmental crises invites an ecocritical reading. This article questions whether the collection’s “common earth” motif masks social and environmental inequalities, or whether this motif prompts a collective understanding of environmental crises and a commonality of human response.