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The Best Children’s Book About Climate Change Was Written 40 Years Ago
Like many good children’s books, Cloudy With Meatballs tackles adult anxieties
Reading to my children, sometimes, turns into an excavation of adult anxieties. Sometimes this is intentional on the part of the author, and it’s thrilling to go back and see how I came to adopt the anxieties.
I loved Virginia Lee Burton’s quaintly illustrated but melancholy The Little House, which follows a little worker’s cottage as the concrete jungle surrounds, overshadows, and wears it down, like a child’s introduction to concentric zone theory. Burton’s Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is a clever retelling of the John Henry fable (Ezra Jack Keats’s more faithful retelling is a masterpiece as well), and like The Little House another melancholy account of how progress devours its preconditions: a cutting-edge steam shovel is ultimately cast out to marginal small-town uses, literally digging its own grave when it is used to excavate the foundations of a city hall. Even Burton’s happy ending is melancholy; the steam shovel is repurposed into forced retirement, fixed in place in the basement as the hall’s boiler. They’re always there when I’m writing about the built environment.
