🌎 Happy Earth Day 🌎

🌎 Earth Day 🌎

Earth Day is coming up, and I feel the familiar flutter of gratitude for our planetary home.

It is the time Spring is in full bloom in the countryside around us. When Earth’s bounty surrounds us, it is hard to not feel like we really must be foolish to ravage Mother Earth the way we do with our greed and pointless consumption.

It is the time I moon about outside, reveling in the lengthening days of spring, and watching the stars peep outside. A couple of days ago when the full moon rose a- beautiful golden orb in the sky, I gasped, and thought of the image taken from there that led to the creation of Earth Day as a concept.

Books Celebrating Our Life on Earth

Children’s books are one of the best resources for celebrating our marvelous planet. Authors like Oliver Jeffers seem to know the knack of grounding us while making us soar high above the Earth to see our home.

These two, in recent times, have had me humming. 

• If you come to Earth – by Sophie Blackall
• This is how we do it – By Matt Lamothe

If you come to Earth – by Sophie Blackall

The premise of the book is not unheard of. It is narrated by a boy named Quinn who introduces a visiting alien to Planet Earth. The pictures are a delight, and the book is charming in itself. The narrator show the esteemed visitor all the places

• Where we live – towns, cottages, villages, towns, cities, high-rise buildings.
• What we do – the range of occupations was truly fascinating to see. (I also had a little doubting-deborah contest trying to see which of these jobs would be around in a decade and in a century) 
• How we read, speak, and communicate – languages, written alphabet, morse code, braille

And so many more aspects of life. 

The best part of the book to me was the note by the author at the very end. I always seem to relish notes by the author, and this one went on to delight.

Excerpt from the Author’s Note:

The idea for this book arrived on top of a Himalayan mountain in Bhutan. 

Really, that right there was enough to capture my attention. Any idea that comes to someone when they are in nature on top of a Himalayan mountain has to be good.

I was working with Save the Children and had climbed a zigzagging path to reach a tiny two-room school with ten students. We couldn’t understand a word each other said, but the children drew pictures for me and shared their lunch, and I showed them some books.

The author goes on to name and thank every single child in her Brooklyn, New York classroom. She writes about the children she’d met in Beijing, Sydney, Nepal. She finishes on this note:

Right this minute, we are all here together on this beautiful planet. It’s the only one we have, so we should take care of it. And each other. Don’t you think?

Every single person she had referenced in the book, she said, was real. They were not inspired by real people. They really were people the author knew. The narrator, Quinn, was a curious boy who had engaged her in conversation about many things – planets, aliens and earth being among them, and that was how she found her narrator.

This is how we do it – By Matt Lamothe

This book takes a look of kids from around the world and shows us that we aren’t all that very different whether we live in a tiny hut in Uganda with a small family, or a large family in the hills of Peru, or in a multi story building in Italy.

The author’s idea of profiling 7 children from different countries is brilliant:

• Japan
• Peru
• Iran 
• Russia
• India 
• Italy & 
• Uganda 

The similarities and differences are beautifully illustrated. 

This book too wrote about real families in each of the different countries. What they ate, how they went to school, where they slept. 

There was something appealing about the fact that both books were about real people..

Who was the author who said, we are more like one another than different? 

 “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike,”

-Mary Angelou

April 22nd is Earth Day, and these books, in their simple, endearing ways, showed us what we have in common and help nurture our only home if we are to continue living harmoniously together.

Read Also: We, the People, on This, our Earth