Environmental Book Club

Today I'm referring you to Katherine Hauswirth's First Person Naturalist for a review of No Entry by Gila Green. I found the review interesting because the book sounds like YA that has an environmental or, at least, nature element without being apocalyptic or climate fiction.

In my experience, books like that are few and far between. 

Environmental Book Club

I collected a few interesting environmental links this week.

75 Great Science and Nature Books for Kids Under 6 from Melissa Stewart's Celebrate Science blog.

Readers' Corner: Eco-Fiction from a Sno-Isle Library blog deals with older readers. It also seems to suggest that eco-fiction is about climate change.  

What is Eco-fiction? at North Castle Children's Corner is also a list of books for older readers. This library describes eco-fiction as "a work of fiction that reflects the relationship between humans and their natural environment."  Instead of isolating eco-fiction as a genre, itself, they say it is "present" in various other genres.  

In order to include all age groups, check out Love the Earth, Love Some Eco-Fiction, a list of adult eco-fiction.

Three of these lists came from Eco-Fiction's tweets.

The Environmental Book Club

 Not Your Grandfather's Nature Writing: The New "Nature" Journals by Andrea J. Nolan at Fiction Writers Review deals with contemporary nature writing in general. Something  jumped out at me relating to environmental fiction.

"But then how do you define environmental, or place-based, fiction?" First, defining environmental fiction has been an issue here at the Environmental Book Club. But the answer to Nolan's particular version of the question appears to be there in the question. It's place-based fiction. It's fiction that's strong fictional element (character, plot, voice, setting, point of view) is setting.

This makes sense to me, especially when you consider that setting includes time as well as, well, place. Futuristic post-environmental disaster worlds like you see in The Uglies series are about setting. A big part of the reason Carl Hiaason's books are considered environmental is the strong sense of place that is created with his Florida settings. What kept The Carbon Diaries 2015 from being just another whiney teenage story was the...wait for it...setting.

Nolan suggests that "we should use John Gardner’s definition of great fiction as our benchmark. He said that the hallmark of successful writing is the creation of  “a vivid, continuous dream.”" That dream could be the experience I look for in an environmental book. Setting is a a big part of that continuous "dream" experience.

The Environmental Book Club

I felt that at some point I needed to try a Carl Hiaasen novel for this book club, because he has a green rep. So I snatched up Scat when I saw it at a library.

Scat is about two students who become involved in the give and take between an oil company trying to steal oil in a Florida swamp and what might be described as an eco-terrorist trying to save endangered panthers living there. The book follows the big, bad company vs. small-time good guys formula that we've seen in another environmental book for young readers, Operation Redwood. This formula turns up in a lot of movies and TV shows relating to the environment, too. We could call them David and Goliath stories.

My question: Will I ever be able to find an environmental story for kids that doesn't follow either this pattern or the dystopian future brought about by human-made environmental disaster convention?  Stay tuned.

Scat's structure is significant because it involves point of view switches, a lot of them. The most interesting character, for me, was not either of the two kids who are the leads. I wish the book had been about Duane Scrod, Jr., who has been held back in biology for two years. He is not your traditional children's book/YA protagonist, and, as I said, he's not the protagonist here. Duane, known as Smoke, becomes interested in environmental science, because he recognizes that if the Black Vine Swamp changes, there won't be a place for people like him, people who are part of that environment.

Most of the characters in Scat experience the Black Vine Swamp from a distance. For the main characters, it appears to be just a school field trip destination. Smoke is what I'm looking for in eco-fiction, someone who is immersed in an environment. Could someone like him be the jumping off point for an environmental book?