Nature Education as a Conservation Tool – A Personal Narrative from Kas Plateau, a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site

I was all of seven, when I went crawling on all fours across a patch of Lodhi Gardens in Delhi. I was looking for a four-leaf clover. I don’t think I even knew what a clover leaf looked like, but I was determined to find one. After all, I had read about it in my book. Spoiler alert: I didn’t find one. However, I met lots of ants, beetles and a rather alarmed praying mantis.

For me, this is what my childhood books did; those stories whisked me away into a magical world where nature came alive through words and illustrations. Where children explored the woods near their houses, had adventures while rescuing animals, and had long picnics by babbling brooks and rolling hills. It sparked in me, what turned out to be, a lifelong love for nature and wildlife. After all, Richard Louv wrote exactly that in The Last Child in the Woods – “Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination.”

Today’s readers have access to a dazzling array of books, from picture books to middle grade stories to young adult novels. Stories that celebrate local flora and fauna, highlight the work done by amazing eco-champions, that bring to the forefront issues of climate change, and that infuse a sense of wonder about the natural world in children.

As a commissioning editor at Pratham Books, a not-for-profit publishing house based out of Bengaluru, my day job is to dream up picture books. Our talented team works with a wonderful motley crew of writers and illustrators to bring nature back into stories. We have teamed up with scientists, researchers and subject matter experts to create these books, a lot of which go into our STEM Library-in-Classroom kits, in our mission to reach the last mile child.

A Butterfly Smile by Mathangi Subramanian and Lavanya Naidu tells the story of Kavya, who has just moved from her village to a city with her family. Struggling to fit in, Kavya discovers a special connection with butterflies, as she understands their migration stories, and finds resonance with these.

Then there are the books by wildlife filmmaker and photographer Radha Rangarajan that can be read for free on Story-Weaver, like all of Pratham Books’ titles. Radha’s stories take readers into the world of oft-overlooked flora and fauna. Whether it’s a hermit crab looking for A Suitable Shell in a trash-strewn beach or inviting children to look at all around them for nature stories in The Other Way or different pugmarks in Who Just Went By? One of my favourites is Uh-Oh, a book she co-wrote with Aparna Kapur. Illustrated by Kalp Sanghvi, each page in this clever book becomes a little interactive tableau that explores defensive mechanisms in nature. Similarly, Vena Kapoor and Pia Meenakshi’s book Off to See Spiders introduces different species to children in a fun and accessible manner, while Rohan Chakravarty’s Making Friends with Snakes (but from a distance) is a unique comic book on these reptiles.

The underwater world comes alive in books such as Rajiv Eipe’s Dive, Sheila Dhir and Anjora Noronha’s Goby’s Noisy Best Friend, and Sejal Mehta and Pia Meenakshi’s Whoop, Goes the Pufferfish. Written by marine biologists Shreya Yadav and Divya Panicker, The Night the Moon Went Missing touches upon bioluminescence and Razia Learns to Swim is centred around how different creatures move in water.

When I first joined Pratham Books in 2017, my team and I worked with Sejal Mehta and Rohan Chakravarty to create a set of Phone Stories – Watch Out! The Tiger is Here; Did You Hear?; Wild Cat, Wild Cat; and Who Ate All That Up?, audio visual books that can be accessed as e-books on StoryWeaver, as YouTube videos, as audio on Soundcloud, and as MP3 files on WhatsApp. All for free. All this, apart from their print avatars of course. During the month-long campaign that year, the set of four books reached over 2,800 Schools/ Centres and teachers, impacting over 56,000 children.

For the last couple of years, we have been creating picture books that highlight the climate crisis – from its impact on habitats and species in mine and Archana Sreenivasan’s PS What’s up with the Climate to livelihood impacts in Uddalak Gupta and Ruhani Kaur’s The Grass Seeker to the basics of climate change in Bibek Bhattacharya and Joanna Davala’s, Our Beautiful World.

By publishing them under Creative Commons, we have been able to provide open access to our books, enabling educators and translators in India and around the world to translate the books into multiple languages for their use. For instance, Watch Out! The Tiger is Here is available to read in 79 languages; this is crucial. For instance, author Robert Macfarlane discovered that nature words were being left out of newer editions of the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

This is not surprising, given that we are suffering from, what Peter H Kahn Jr. and Thea Wess describe in their paper The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature, as environmental generational amnesia. They define this as – ‘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.’

This is why green literature, especially children’s literature, is a response to turning the tide when it comes to climate change, habitat fragmentation, and our collective environmental amnesia. Macfarlane teamed up with author Jackie Morris to create The Lost Words, a stunning illustrated poetry anthology that urges people to conjure up spells to bring back lost and forgotten nature words such as otter, kingfisher and acorn. This is why I wrote A Cloud Called Bhura and Savi and the Memory Keeper – to be able to tell stories about the climate crisis, and lure readers back to nature, to remember, to celebrate, to cherish everything on this planet we call home.

In an interview, the writer on the hill, Ruskin Bond, once told me, “Perhaps, 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.”

Or, that author Lauren James, who wrote the compelling Green Rising, formed the Climate Fiction Writers League – ‘… a group of authors who believe in the necessity of climate action, immediately and absolutely.’ In that group, you will find some of the finest creators of climate stories from different parts of the world, connected in their commitment to nature.

Bring their stories to your classroom, your home bookshelves, and your community library. In India, you will find nature writers and illustrators such as Ranjit Lal, Rajiv Eipe, Deepak Dalal, Arefa Tehsin, Priya Kuriyan, Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli. And all the ones mentioned in this story, and many more. Read their books, invite them to talk to young minds, share their experiences, and celebrate nature through stories.

As James puts it on the league’s website – ‘Fiction is one of the best ways to inspire passion, empathy and action in readers. Our works raise awareness of climate change, and encourage action at the individual, corporate and government levels.’ So, read these books, and take children out into nature. It can be a park, a tree, a forest. Even cloud watching from your window. Everything is nature, after all. Including us.