Our Home, Our Only Home

Today is the publication day of my most recent picture book, Our Home, Our Only Home.  The topic, climate disaster, the one we’re living through.  All of us, even those who witness the storms and rising sea levels and wildfires and floods and droughts and call it a hoax.

Our too-rapidly changing climate, the climate that has made this Earth habitable for us humans for hundreds of thousands of years, isn’t an easy concept to present to children.  Long ago, though, I began my career with one solid conviction: that I could take on any topic that touches a child’s life as long as—and this is the imperative—I have something positive to say.

Positive, however, isn’t easy to come by on this topic.  I began researching this book four years ago, and even then, I was plagued by the fear that anything I could offer would be too little, too late.  Today, with our government destroying even the inadequate safeguards we once had in place, my fear has grown.  Yet, if our children don’t believe in the world that’s waiting for them, believe in it and treasure it, then hope is truly lost. 

We, humans, are a self-serving lot, certainly.  And short-sighted, as well.  The more efficiently we serve our own needs, the more efficiently we destroy the environment that supplies those needs … beginning long, long ago when we learned to control fire. By the time we arrived at capitalism, a system that demands infinite growth out of finite resources, the race against our own survival was truly on. (Yet somehow, it’s still easier to believe in the end of the world than to believe in the end of capitalism.)

Nevertheless, I set out once more to deliver hope.  I asked my young readers to be “Grateful for our abundant Earth, for every life that blooms and burrows and crawls and swims and walks and flies on it.  Grateful for our own precious lives.”  What does gratitude have to do with healing our climate?  I asked my young readers to be grateful because only those who love this living world can save it, and “every solution, every single one, begins with that love.”

Then I asked them to act.  And in response to another reasonable question, “What can any kid do?” I presented Greta Thunberg, who, as a fifteen-year-old in 2018, camped out in front of the Swedish Parliament with a sign that read “School Strike for Climate,” and then the many, many young people who have followed in her footsteps, speaking out, organizing, inventing new ways to protect and cherish this beloved planet. 

I’m a very old lady.  I’ll not live to see this crisis resolved.  But I believe in my young readers.  I believe in their intelligence, in their passion, in their willingness to stand up to even the most intractable problems.  

I began my career as a children’s writer with one overwhelming desire.  Not to be famous.  Not to win awards.  Simply to be a truth-teller.  To break through the silence we wrap around our children when we refuse to acknowledge the realities they are living.  For more than half a century, that desire has fueled me.  It has kept me writing.  It has kept me writing and writing and writing. 

It has sent me out to save the world.

Not that I’ll be the one doing the saving, you understand.  Rather, my job is to inhabit young readers, to feed their own ideas, their own energy, their own solutions.  Their own hope.

Our Home, Our Only Home opens this way:

We,

you and I,

are alive.

Alive in a vast universe

of fire and ice.

Alive on the only planet

in all this burning, freezing universe

known to sustain

life.

We are as alive

as night-sprouting mushrooms,

as worms gobbling their way

through the living soil.

Alive as buttercups,

as chickadees.

As catfish,

as cats.

And the main text ends like this:

… our knowing means nothing

unless our big brains

and our even bigger hearts

learn again what we once knew

in our blood and bones.

That we are one with the giant sequoia

and the spiraling leaves of moss.

With the minuscule water bears

making their homes in that moss.

With the shining minnows,

wind-riding hawks,

the resolute march of ants.

With every dandelion,

with every rose.

One with our life-giving Earth.

Today, along with the amazing artist Sophie Dio, I present Our Home, Our Only Home to you.  We offer this small book with the audacious hope that it might be a catalyst for transformation in a world that longs to be transformed.