Ah Yes, Earth Day

Meghan Cox Gurdon surveys eco-fear-mongering in children’s literature:

If you have somehow missed the fact that April 22 is Earth Day, it’s probably because you are grown up.

Were you a child, there’s not a chance you’d be allowed to miss the urgent chthonic nature of the day — nor the need to recycle, to use water sparingly, to protect endangered creatures and generally to be agitated about a planet in peril.

Contemporary children are so drenched with eco-propaganda that it’s almost a waste of resources. Like acid rain, but more persistent and corrosive, it dribbles down on them all day long.

They get it at school, where recycling now competes with tolerance as man’s highest virtue.

They get it in peppy “go green” messages online, on television and in magazines.

And increasingly, the eco-message is seeping into the pages of novels that don’t, on their face, necessarily seem to be about environmentalism at all.

Thus children who might like to escape into a good book are now likely to find themselves pursued into that imaginative realm by didactic adults fixated on passing along endless tellurian warnings.

Susceptible children are left in no doubt that we’re all headed for a despoiled, immiserated future unless they start planting pansies in their old shoes, using dryer lint as mulch, and practicing periodic vegetarianism.

Not surprisingly, many young people are anxious. The more impressionable among them are coming to believe that their smallest decisions could have catastrophic effects on the globe.

This, of course, is nonsense, unless their smallest decision involves tipping vats of mercury into forest streams.

But they’re children, for goodness’ sake: They tend to believe what adults tell them — minus the nuance.