How to Talk to Children about Extinction: Picture Books for the Anthropocene
The first time my son asked about death, the conversation was not at all what I expected. His question did not concern our elderly family cat, but rather the asteroid that likely triggered the Fifth Great Extinction, wiping out 75% of the species on earth 65 million years ago. We had been reading a picture book about dinosaurs. On our fifth or sixth time through the book, he suddenly fixed, with a three-year-old’s intensity, on the idea of extinction. Over the next weeks, at the grocery store, at bedtime, at daycare pick up, we circled (and circled) around questions of mortality through this extraordinary displacement until, eventually, we arrived at the crux of the matter: will you go extinct, mama? Will I?
Both the very, very old and the very, very distant hold central places in our contemporary American culture of early childhood. Dinosaurs and planets make up an outsized proportion of books and pajama designs for children between the ages of two and six. My son could draw a map of all the planets in our Solar System and place himself on the third from the sun before he grasped the relationship between his daily routes (playground, preschool, grocery store, home) and the map of a city. He distinguished between the categories of “animals that all died before I was born” and “animals that still live on this earth today” before grasping fundamental differences between mammals and reptiles.
In his fascination with stories that play out on a planetary scale and at a geological pace my son was not all that unusual, at least judging from his playmates. And yet I found something unsettling about a child who had hardly ever seen the stars (his bedtimes were still too early) describing features of the surface of Mars. Shouldn’t a child’s knowledge of the world proceed from tactile, immediate things? Would he develop odd distortions of scale and of empathy if trilobites and archaeopteryx loomed larger in his imaginative world than the beetles and goldfinches in our own backyard?
At the heart of these anxieties are some longstanding tensions in young children’s culture given new urgency and context by our particular cultural and planetary moment: a time when science and curiosity can seem under attack and an equilibrium that allows human flourishing alongside animal and plant diversity on our globe appears more fragile and less achievable than perhaps ever before. How to teach young children the linked realities of evolution, mass extinction, and climate change has become one of the characteristic secular parenting quandaries of upper- and middle-class American parents in the 21st century. At the leading of edge what appears to be a sixth great extinction, our precariously privileged children are more and more likely to encounter the idea of death as a species event, and only later as an individual experience and tragedy. Meanwhile, climate change has joined sex and death as a landmark conversation in modern childhood — a “where do babies come from?” for the self-aware Anthropocene.
Culture wars waged over teaching children about evolution and dinosaurs are hardly new. In the United States, these conflicts have been with us at least since the time of the Scopes trial in 1925, in which a Tennessee high school teacher was accused of violating a recently-passed state law that made teaching children about human evolution illegal. These battles have been re-waged in ever new forms in the culture wars of the 1960s and the creationist theme parks of the early 2000s. All the way back to the late 1870s — scarcely two decades after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species — the first culture wars over teaching children Darwinian ideas unfolded in German schools.
Some of the questions of today are the same as in the past, but the tenor of the most recent iteration of our cultural focus on children and evolution is different, in part because of fears of climate change and the extinction event underway around us. While the great struggle between science and religion that so dominated American culture for much of the twentieth century has retreated to the background, at least for a moment, similar tensions between hope and anxiety, childhood innocence and human guilt, remain at the center. The struggle between belief and reason has become one between neo-liberal confidence and communalist concerns. What’s more, when introducing these ideas to the culture of childhood, we have shifted to younger and younger children, moving from the age of science education into the realm of the didactic preschool picture book, where moral lessons are rarely far below the surface.
A number of picture books published in the past few years have taken on the challenge of teaching preschoolers about evolution, extinction, and the changing shape of our planet. Although pitched as science books, these books’ most important lessons are really about how to understand ourselves as human beings in relation to nature, and ourselves as individuals in the context of vast planetary systems and species identities. Their texts demand close examination as a new category of picture book, important to our contemporary cultural moment, to our children’s moral education, and to the future of science and our planet. They reflect current conversations about the scientific and philosophical implications of understanding human beings as both a part of nature and also an agent of its possible destruction, in ways that speak to the particular challenges of raising children today.
A few years ago, the Kickstarter-funded picture book Grandmother Fish: A Child’s First Book of Evolution, written by Jonathon Tweet and illustrated by Karen Lewis, released to wide acclaim, becoming “the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers.” (There are other books out there explaining evolution for five- to eight-year-olds; Grandmother Fish merely claimed to be the first specifically targeted at under-fives.) Tweet’s engaging family tale of the animal kingdom, with Lewis’s bright and appealing illustrations, sold out soon after its Kickstarter-funded release before being picked up for publication by Macmillan. It then debuted as the number one new release on Amazon in the category “Children’s Prehistoric Books” in September 2016.
The promotional material for Grandmother Fish boasted, as if writing about the birds and the bees: “’Where did we come from?’ It’s a simple question, but not so simple an answer to explain―especially to young children. Charles Darwin’s theory of common descent no longer needs to be a scientific mystery to inquisitive young readers.” As dry as this might sound, Grandmother Fish reads as a simple and joyful celebration of life — honoring common descent, while avoiding challenging questions of extinction and anthropogenic change. There is no nature red in tooth and claw in this story. This is, after all, a book for preschoolers. But a slight discomfort hovers around the edges of the text. It is difficult to explain evolution without extinction or death. In fact, the book has a different vitally important goal, perhaps as significant as a technical understanding of evolution and common descent: making children feel part of the animal world. The book’s text and illustrations invite participation — asking if you can wiggle like your grandmother fish or crawl like your grandmother reptile. Although following a familiar call-and-response form for a young child’s picture book, there is a lot of thought behind the simplicity of the text. The particular words have been chosen to indicate key developments in an evolutionary story focused on the emergence of human beings. Grandmother ape could grab; grandmother human could walk and talk.
Seeing kinship, and hence feeling shared interests and empathy with fish and apes is a vital task. Grandmother Fish takes advantage of natural childhood narcissism to foster that sense of multispecies community and explain what might otherwise be a challenging and abstract topic.
But following the conventions of children’s picture books while telling this story, as acknowledged by the authors, also means centering the child and encouraging a teleological view of evolution. Tweet and Lewis created the book in collaboration with science educators, and it includes additional notes explaining the science for parents in the back with a section of useful responses to common errors of understanding. These include some of the misunderstandings that the book’s very gambit of thinking of all animal life in the terms of a human family might lead to: that common ancestry means we descended from a single grandmother fish or that evolution is only additive and improving. Another is that “evolution progresses toward the human form.” These explanations are outside of the text for children and explicitly addressed to parents.
Though distinguished by the very young age of its target audience and the way in which it was developed through collaboration and public support, Grandmother Fish is not entirely original in its approach. An older book, Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story by Lisa Westberg Peters and illustrated by Lauren Stringer (2003), targets young school-aged children instead of preschoolers, but takes a similar approach as does Grandmother Fish by making the story of evolution a family story. If anything, it takes a more extreme approach, extending a communal “we” out to the invisible and ancient worlds of protozoa: “When we began, we didn’t look like people. We didn’t have two eyes to blink or ten toes to wiggle. We were just tiny dark cells in the deep, dark sea.”
What does a less child-centered children’s book of evolution look like? The Story of Life: A First Book about Evolution (2015) by Catherine Barr and Steve Williams and illustrated by Amy Husband is one that takes a distinctively less anthropocentric approach, while still reaching a target audience of very young children. Unlike Grandmother Fishand Our Family Tree, The Story of Life deals explicitly with extinction as part of the story of life.The narrative takes a more distanced and scientific tone until the final pages: human beings are not at the center of this story. The book’s dynamic first pages introduce a stormy pre-Cambrian Earth. Husband’s images introduce animal life beginning with vaguely anthropomorphized single-celled animals in bouncy vibrant illustrations. (While the anthropomorphism seems well within helpful bounds to me, my son kept asking in confusion about the gestures at eyes on the paramecium.) Although there is much more detail here, the book provides clear points of transition for children to latch on to — like the first ventures of tiktaalik from the sea onto land.
Barr and Williams create a world that is inviting and exciting, but also dangerous. Mass extinctions are part of the story. Animals cheerfully hunt other animals in the background illustrations. Furthermore, they tell a story that not only connects present to the past, but also continues into an uncertain and unknowable future: “People, like all life on Earth,” the text reads, “will carry on evolving over time.” By its last pages, human beings have become agents of change, and yet are not made central to the story. In the first use of first-person in the book, the final page reads: “We are destroying wild places and changing the planet” and ends with an ambivalent, unemotional tone: “With or without us, our planet will spin through space for billions of years to come. The story of life on Earth is far from over.” In this way, the book manages the transition into the Anthropocene. Human beings are both products of evolution and also agents of planetary change and extinction. Decentering human stories allows the inclusion of extinction as part of the story of evolution — something that Grandmother Fish cannot easily accomplish within its fully child-centered text.
Stories of evolution and extinction — and not just those for young children — tend to focus on the most photogenic and interesting megafauna, but this isolates more easily identifiable protagonists from the complex ecosystems and landscapes of which they are a part. The story of evolution and extinction is not just a story of life and death, but also a story about a changing earth and landscape. Although a bit different in it focus, an interesting text to consider in this context is Where Do Mountains Come From, Momma? (2012) by Catherine Weyerhaeuser Morley. Morley approaches geological change in the soothing tones of a bedtime story, making mountains seem like part of the family. The book begins with a mother and daughter walking in the mountains: “The mountains were so big, and each one looked so different. The girl began to wonder. Where do mountains come from, Momma?” Morley’s text manages to be information-dense without ever disrupting this tranquil mood. Likewise, the richly patterned illustrations reconcile sulfurous gases and volcanic explosions with peaceful landscapes in which fossils ornament rocky landscapes evoke the folk patterns of patchwork quilts.
Outside of the mother and daughter, human life is absent from the text, but not entirely absent from Morley’s captivating illustrations. Animal extinction and human precarity are present in the background: a Pompei-like deserted city below a volcano on one page, a modern metropolis teetering between a mountain range and the ocean on another. In the book’s final spread, the cowboy-boot clad mother and daughter bend lovingly over fossils and rocks, the skulls of dinosaurs behind them, mountains reaching like toes above. At the close, the child is invited to identify with the mountains themselves: “Every mountain is different, with a special past, just like every child. If you look closely at a mountain’s rocks, you can discover its life story.” This language is almost jarring in its simple assertion of a profound association between the animate and inanimate. What implication does it have for the child’s behavior towards the landscape? The identification of individuality and history in non-animal landscapes might foster empathy and interest, but it does so again by appealing to the child’s natural narcissism and self-out understanding of the world: things are most interesting when they are like me. This is yet again a different approach to the relationship between the child reader/explorer and the natural world than either Grandmother Fish or The Story of Life. Building out from the child’s worldview, Morley’s text asserts a radical empathy with nature, spanning divisions far greater than those of species, based on a metaphor of life-as-development rather than any biological kinship, however distant. The vision of the child is one that is naturally revolutionary in its approach to nature.
Each of these books provides some degree science education for very young children, while also modeling ways that children can understand their own place in nature. The struggle between anthropocentric stories and the decentering of the human perspective at evidence in these picture books reflects larger cultural and philosophical debates about the implications of anthropogenic planetary change for our ethical systems. These books deserve attention because they address a set of urgent questions at the intersection of parenting, culture, and science that we are only beginning to discuss as a society. What kind of knowledge and what kind of stories foster curiosity and empathy? How does one best teach empathy toward a planet, toward an ecosystem — empathy not just for cuddly pandas, but for mucky lakes and poisonous frogs? What kinds of narratives encourage action, what humility, what hopelessness? What kinds of stories of life and death, evolution and extinction, would help children become responsible stewards of a threatened planet?
Authors like Amitav Ghosh have argued that one of the reasons we do such a poor job talking about and responding to the threats of climate change is that our present environmental crisis does not fit any of the ways we have of telling stories about human societies and experiences. Hence, the way we tell stories of climate change, extinctions, and the place of human beings within complex and changing non-human natures is vital. Whether we want to admit it or not, our children are born to a human society, and a level of consumption, that has taxed our planet beyond its capacity. This position, though unchosen, brings with it particular burdens and responsibilities. We need to start thinking about how to talk with children about this historical position and the relationship between their own lives and that of the planet. Whether human beings are at the center of the story or not, we need them to ask, and soon: Will they go extinct, mama? Will we?
