The Little Green Book

WHEN YOU HUG A TREE, YOU HEAR a heartbeat. Your heartwood beats with the tree’s, becoming one. This pounding reverberated through me as I stood hug­ging a tree, one that had been planted in Cambridge sometime in the 1800s. Yes, I do make a habit of hugging trees. This one, was gnarled and wrinkled, her autumn canopy towering above the rest, her dappled orangey brown floor, a crunchy carpet beneath my feet. Why did this tree feel so familiar? I wondered.

Then, I read the little plaque by the buttress (don’t laugh, OK you can)— Platanus X Hispanica (London Plane).

Suddenly I was transported under a bedsheet and blanket fortress, a for­midable one that kept the grown-ups away in my childhood room in Delhi. Where a six-year-old me was curled up with a bowl of spiced puffed rice as I read about a boy called Benjy bidding farewell to a plane tree outside his house and informing them that he’s moving to a place with lots of willow trees “growing along the bank of silver streams.” The book was The Children of Willow Farm, the author, the oft-debated Enid Blyton. I remember every detail of that book vividly, strange at a time when I need to reach for my phone for reminders, my planner to keep track of my schedule and Dear Google to remember names of books and films and anything else.

There’s been a staying power of my childhood books, a list replete with dark fairy tales, abridged classics, British books about adventuring children, folk tales in Gujarati, Russian picture books, and North American teenage comics. But the beloved ones, I now realise, were about all things green. About talking animals, about wildlife, about enchanted woods.

I understood from books that when you climb a tree you find magi­cal worlds on top of it. No wonder, I insisted my cousin brother take me tree climbing in Lodi Garden. I was most worried about falling, but I still remember the thrill of being somewhere in the middle of a tall(ish) tree.

I gleaned from stories, kindness to animals, underscored by my mother bringing in injured animals and nursing them to health.

I found a friend in those pages, who told me that it’s okay to be quiet, like the many children in those stories. They turned to woods and walks and made friends with animals and trees. Spaces where quietness is welcomed. I turned to the gulmohur tree outside our flat in Mumbai when we moved cities.

When my mother sang the Gujarati nursery rhyme, ‘Chakki Chokka Khande Che,’ I tasted the word chakki. Sparrow. And stood on tiptoe on our balcony looking for the charcoal scarf-wearing birds as they took dust baths in my neighbour’s garden. I learned to distinguish the male from the female when I read a folktale on why the male sparrow has a black marking.

I have mostly lived in cities. My tug to nature was through children’s books, and it continues to be. I have learned to look for spiders that leave signatures on their web (Hi, Charlotte’s Web), to listen for the scamper of a bushy-tailed bright-eyedsquirrel(Ahem, Flora& Ulysses), to feel completely okay not know­ing a bird’s name (Thanks, Salim Mamoo and Me) but continue to marvel at the winged beauty, because books led me to them. And in turn, I explored the outdoors, in my building society, in my neighbourhood, and in the forest.

In fact, whenever I talk to naturalists and activists and scientists, many fondly remember their childhood reading and rambles as a big part of their growing-up influences. As author Jason Reynolds recently pointed out, children’s books are the cornerstone for literature—the fact is they are building blocks for literacy, yes, but also for a lifelong love for stories, and for sparking imagination. Without young readers, we will not see a grown-up generation of readers.

Which is why books matter. Children’s books matter. Because that simple act of opening a nature book invites them into different worlds, yes. But it also keeps alive, what as writer and marine biologist Rachel Carson described as, their “inborn sense of wonder,” “the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.”

I stood in a classroom in Srinagar and discussed the im­plications of the unprecedented November snowfall on the harvests with extremely well-informed senior school students. In Mumbai, I was regaled with stories about tigers and elephants by children, and others drew food monsters with seasonal vegetables. In Bengaluru, I felt humbled as students talked urgently about greenhouse gas emissions. One afternoon, in Jodhpur, my heart sank when I realised no one in my workshop had heard the term climate change. We did spend the next hour talking about seasonal changes and the climate crisis. In Wardha, we talked about inspiring green heroes, and on the island of Nicobar the changes they see on their coastline. In Delhi, I was torn when children came session after session to talk about the impact of the smog in their daily life, one said his parents took him away to safety and how much he missed his friends. Another looked at me and said, with a sad shrug, I have asthma, you can imagine how it was. Then he asked me, how is it fair?

In these virtual and offline visits, I have had many delight­ful conversations. About favourite animals—a lot of dogs, cats, lions, snakes, and rabbits; of what is climate change; when the climate changes, global warming, refrigerators and deos; of what would you do when faced with a climate crisis. The adults want to pack up and leave. Almost every child in the room wants to take action ranging from stop­ping pollution to asking the government to do something.

Every time I leave a classroom or a library, I leave with one thought. That children and young people care, they care about their future, they care about animals, the envi­ronment, the world around them, and like Greta Thunberg, Ridhima Pandey, Tamanna Sengupta, Disha Ravi and Arch­ana Soreng, they are demanding a better future.

But what also struck me was something I came back and sat thinking about for a very long time.

I haveheard children make pledges for Earth Day and Envi­ronment Day. Promises to protect their planet. To not use plas­tic. To walk to school. To save the Earth. Most of them would put an average groan-up to shame with their earnest pledges.

I realised something was missing.
It was a pledge to love the planet.
To understand that there are many reasons to love her.
To be out there, exploring her stories.
To experience the world through their fresh eyes, every leaf a wonder.
To have wild places to run amok in, roaming radiuses forever expanding.

It’s actually very simple. You protect what you love. It’s just that. There’s nothing else to it.

And yet, that simple fact is one of the hardest. Back in 2005, Richard Louv in his book Last Child in the Woods coined the word, nature-deficit disorder, “to serve as a de­scription of the human costs of alienation from nature.” He writes, “The children and nature movement is fuelled by this fundamental idea: the child in nature is an endan­gered species, and the health of children and the health of the Earth are inseparable.”

When I read Robert Mac­farlane’s Landmarks, I found out that we are losing our nature lexicon. The author explained that nature words are being axed from the dic­tionary in favour of techno­logical ones—and through his many writings includ­ing the enchanting The Lost Words, has urged people to conjure up spells to bring back lost and forgotten ones.

Worst, this forgetting of nature is becoming more com­monplace. Peter H Kahn Jr and Thea Weiss wrote a paper titled, ‘The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature’, where they said—‘The problem of environmen­tal generational amnesia is that nature gets increasingly diminished and degraded, but children of each generation perceive the environment into which they are born as nor­mal. Thus, across generations, the baseline shifts downward for what counts as healthy nature.”

A collective amnesia.

This is alarming, especially because there’s a general sci­entific consensus that being introduced to nature at a young age can help children grow up to be compassionate adults. Their childhood experiences shape the adults they grow into. And, reading, as Louv writes, “stimulates the ecology of the imagination.”

Which is why we need books that fuel imagination— that remind children of the wonders they are defending, that introduce them to the natural world, that foster their love and respect for nature, and inspire them with ideas of conservation. While themes of magic realism, adventure and mystery have always been a part of publishing for years, nature and environment have also featured predominantly in narratives, especially for books meant for younger age groups. It has been evident through studies that books can play a significant role in shaping children’s perceptions, values and attitudes. I know it did for me.

FACT IS, INTERNATIONALLY, there are tons of books on wildlife, nature and the climate crisis. A lot of the books are gorgeous works of non-fiction, revealing stories of science and nature. As a teenager, I came across Gerald Durrell and made up my mind to rescue animals, especially penguins, (still on the bucket list) as a grown up, and read James Herriot and wanted to go meet all the animals he wrote about. The classics by Beatrix Potter, EB White, Richard Ad­ams and AA Milne convinced me that animals spoke to me, and they did. As an adult, my bookshelf is lined with MG Leonard’s Beetle Boy series, Lauren James’ latest Green Rising, Piers Torday’s Wild series, Bren MacDibble’s Across the Risen Sea and Nicola Penfold’s Between Sky and Sea. No wonder in response to today’s pressing problem, we are seeing the Greta Thunberg effect—which Guardian called the “boom in books aimed at empowering young people to save the planet.”

Despite the Greta Thunberg effect, we don’t see many climate books in India for young people. In a scenario where books about mythology rule the bestselling lists, it makes me wonder why environmental books are not perceived as popular in India. Or more crucially, why there is so little effort in producing environmental books that can have a wider readership in the country. Our folk tales are full of nature, the motifs powerful in the indigenous art forms, yet we already seem to suffer from nature amnesia in publishing.

One problem is that nature stories are constantly brack­eted into learning, boxed into academics and curriculum. Nature is about discovery, which leads to learning. But it’s not about answering an exam question on the water cycle or how trees communicate, but to marvel at the intricate mycorrhi­zal network that creates a Wood Wide Web, to watch a snail leave a trail of silver after the rain. When did the fun get taken out of this adventure, when did it become about mugging and rote, instead of a celebration of curiosity? I was listening to librarians from The Community Library Project in Delhi, and they said the same thing—when it comes to reading, the moment you make it about a lesson or something teachable or homework worthy, children don’t want to read.

There are fine writers and illustrators in India who do that. Just look at the shelves of indie bookstores—they’re brim­ming with glorious stories. Every time I read Ranjit Lal’s The Tigers of Taboo Valley, I laugh and marvel at his characteristic dry wit and his ingenuity in combining natural history with compelling storytelling. Illustrators Priya Kuriyan, Rajiv Eipe and Archana Sreenivasan’s art recreates the gorgeousness of trees and birds and animals in picture books, while Rohan Chakravarty’s Green Humour comics has a loyal fan follow­ing. Bittu Sahgal and Zai Whitaker’s inspiring work come together to tell stories that have inspired so many children. There’s writing by Deepak Dalal, Bulbul Sharma, Meghaa Gupta, Radha Rangarajan, Arefa Tehsin, Lavanya Karthik who have all looked at nature through different lenses.

The writer on the hill, Ruskin Bond, who is the one you’ll find in mainstream bookstores, once told me in an interview, that he finds inspiration in a stream at the end of a hill, the neighbouring villages and the many rambles that he has taken in the mountains. He feels that it is possible that readers of his books could form a natural affinity with their environment. “Perhaps,” he said, “many who have read my stories might have been influenced by my feelings for the natural world. In my stories, there is a certain respect for the world of animals, trees, birds and everything that’s part of the natural world.”

This is why I feel we need fiction. To foster that inherent sense of childhood wonder about nature. To offer hope at a time when 412ppm of carbon is part of our atmosphere, when we are seeing unprecedented weather events, we are witnessing relentless heat and cold waves and droughts and floods across the world, our food resources are being impacted, our very breath is. We are at a time where climate anxiety is very real, and so like today’s young people, I turn to children’s fiction for hope. Books become a safe space to explore these feelings, where children can read about the natural world, the changes being wrought, explore and un­derstand climate vulnerability and injustices, while think­ing about our own roles and responsibilities.

I wrote A Cloud Called Bhura and Savi and the Memory Keeper to tell stories about the climate crisis. I recently read an article in Round Glass Sustain, which said that sal trees, if planted singly, die of loneliness. They need a community of trees, each other’s shadows. Just like us, we need to become part of a collective to face the climate crisis.

And really as Thunberg says, “I’ve learnt that no one is too small to make a difference.” Recently I saw my nephew kneel down in his garden. His mom turned to tell him to hurry but she stopped when she saw what he was doing. He had let a spider scuttle onto an autumn leaf and carefully placed her away from the path. “She’d get trampled other­wise.” This is why I believe in children, and their infinite capacity for wonder and compassion. And their stories.

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