Fissured lands, unquiet woods, hungry tides, creatures great and small – nature offers such enormous diversity that it can often be a challenge deciding what to write about when one writes about nature. But, does every book featuring nature qualify as environmental writing? And what does environmental writing for children look like? 

Over the last few years, as I have gone about facilitating the children’s honour book awards at the Green Literature Festival and curating the Nature Writing for Children programme at Azim Premji University, I’ve often found myself pondering such questions.

Many of the books published in India that fall easily into this category are either non-fiction or faction (fact + fiction). Wildlife is undoubtedly one of the most popular themes, and for good reason. In fact, I’ve often bumped into tweens who could well be pursuing PhDs on the animals they’ve taken a liking to! Facts roll off their tongues so easily and swiftly that it can get almost intimidating for unversed adults. 

There is much that one can write about wildlife, and conservation stories have been hugely popular in recent times. In a world that can leave young readers with a deep sense of despair and helplessness over vanishing nature, such stories instil hope that humans are not just the reason behind environmental destruction, but are very much part of the solution. The Rumbling Island: True Stories from the Forests of India is a definitive anthology of essays by people who have done much to preserve India’s forests and wildlife. People and Wildlife, an anthology by the environmental action group Kalpavriksh, and A Tigress Called Machhli and Other True Animal Stories from India by Supriya Sehgal feature incredible stories of human-animal harmony. Bumoni’s Banana Trees, an award-winning picture book by Mita Bordoloi and Tarique Aziz, is inspired by a true account of a cluster of villages in Central Assam’s Nagaon district that set aside land to create meal zones for elephants to prevent them from raiding crops.

But that’s not all. In fact, it barely scrapes the surface. Environmental writing has also encompassed memoirs about personal encounters with nature (Friends in Wild Places: Birds, Beasts and Other Companions by Ruskin Bond, Birds from my Window and the Antics They Get Up To by Ranjit Lal), books about various landscapes (Shorewalk by Yuvan Aves, Up the Mountains of India by Mala Kumar), biographies that draw attention to the work of ​‘eco-heroes’ (Salim Ali for Children by Zai Whitaker, 10 Indian Champions Who are Fighting to Save the Planet by Bijal Vachharajani and Radha Rangarajan), tales of eco-activism (The Miracle on Sunderbaag Street by Nandita da Cunha and Priya Kuriyan), nature-inspired poetry (Book of Beasts: An A to Z Rhyming Bestiary by M Krishnan, We are the Dancing Forest by Raj Shekhar, Devashish Makhija, Venkat Shyam and Nina Sabnani), eco-fiction that inevitably spotlights human-caused dangers (The Kaziranga Trail by Arup Kumar Datta, That Summer at Kalagarh by Ranjit Lal, Savi and the Memory Keeper by Bijal Vachharajani) and more.

Clearly, environmental writing comes with a (happy) problem of plenty. It is also, arguably, the only genre in the children’s space that has been consistently identified with several prominent writers – from stalwarts like Ruskin Bond, Zai Whitaker and Ranjit Lal to contemporary voices like Bijal Vachharajani, Arefa Tehsin, Rohan Chakravarty and Yuvan Aves. Yet, uniting all this abundance is an intention to celebrate and conserve nature. This becomes even more pronounced in a world where nature’s canvas is getting depleted with each passing day and many children are growing up with a profound nature deficit in their lives.

But is environmental writing just writing that foregrounds the environment and the message of ecological conservation? In his book, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, Timothy Clark suggests that in an age when human activities are wreaking havoc on the planet, we need to view literature from a broader lens. What is it saying about the relationship between nature and human society – regardless of whether it is foregrounding the environment? 

Thinking about this took me back to my experience of writing Unearthed: An Environmental History of Independent India. Environmental history explores interconnections between human society and the environment across time. But as I sat writing it, there were many times when I felt worried that environmental narratives would be overshadowed by human stories. In fact, the very first chapter in my book – on the Partition – was a challenge. Would focusing on the environmental fallout of such a mammoth human tragedy sound inconsiderate? Such thinking, as I eventually understood, emerged from the fact that we are too used to looking at the environment as something separate from us. The Partition wasn’t just a division of people. It was also a reckless division of land without any care for its physical or human geography. 

Similarly, when I was writing about ​‘waste’ in my book – a problem of burgeoning proportions on earth – I decided to extend the idea to include ​‘Waste in Space’. The fact that humans have soiled every environment they have ventured into – including the extra-terrestrial – revealed something truly profound to me about our callousness.

The moment one begins to look at things this way, the idea of environmental writing expands. It’s not just about celebrating and conserving nature, but about making sense of our own relationship with it. This is particularly vital in literature for children, who are taking their first steps into a world that has been fundamentally transformed and undone by human activities.

French historian Christophe Bonneuil surmises that stories alienating human beings from nature, which the elites of industrial modernity have told themselves over the past 500 years, have served as the cultural origins of the environmental crisis we find ourselves in. These stories shaped attitudes that endorsed environmental destruction in the pursuit of material wealth and convenience. So, in addressing the environmental crisis, we must tell ourselves and our children stories that mend the fractured ties between humans and nature. 

Nature isn’t separate from us. It pulsates in every breath of air we take, every drop of water we drink, every morsel of food we eat, every inch of land we occupy. From the moment a child is born, it shares this sacred, life-giving bond with nature – regardless of how much physical nature it actually encounters. Perhaps what we do when we write about the environment for children is that we venture into this vastness of nature with the vulnerability of a child and allow ourselves to find wonder and comfort in a relationship that we might have all but forgotten about. 

About Meghaa Gupta:

Meghaa Gupta writes on environment and history for children and young adults. She curates a programme on Nature Writing for Children at Azim Premji University and has co-founded a transnational exchange for young people’s literature at Bath Spa University in the UK.