Thinking in Stories about Nature

The most common place that topics from nature are mentioned is our first book category: stories that derive human lessons from stories about animals. These stories fall on a continuum. In Lobel’s Frog and Toad stories, it is not very important that the lead characters are amphibians, and the three little pigs could as easily be rabbits or squirrels. Other stories make some use of the natural history of animals, while taking liberties with that history: the fable of the ant and the grasshopper rests on a real difference in these species’ approach to survival and flourishing. Other stories convey detailed and sometimes surprising information about animal behavior, in ways that offer a moral question or challenge to humans. As stories rely on more detailed information about animals, they become more interesting for the purposes of this bibliography.

A range of adult, young adult, and children’s books present information about the lives of animals with the aim of promoting human virtues, suggesting that humans and animals rest on the same moral foundation, despite the ways that humans have sought to distinguish themselves with language and culture and recorded history. These books are plausible – not just fantasies – because people who live closely with animals often come to see them as partners and friends, as beings capable of presenting moral challenges and moral examples. This situation is philosophy’s home territory: how do we distinguish between our wishes and fantasies (dressing animals in human clothing) and the real connections that make humans part of nature? What is uniquely human about human virtue, and what do we share with animals, perhaps even plants and ecosystems, that have also their own integrity and their own purposes?

Becoming a Good Creature (2020) by Sy Montgomery (author) and Rebecca Green
Thinking in Stories Review by Sam Piede
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Feathers Together (2022) by Caron Levis (author) and Charles Santoso (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

At the other extreme from books featuring animals that act like people, there is a kind of book that takes the difference between people and other creatures more seriously, prompting questions about the human tendency to ascribe purposes to nature, emotions to animals, and in general, to assimilate animals into the human family. So, a second category: thinking about the parts of nature that are different from human life.

Plants and animals are not much like us, in some ways. They follow their own rules, in their own time. The initial encounter with an orderly system that isn’t human presents a very rich field for philosophy, especially as humans attempt to apply human ideas to the natural world. There are many books that present animals as just like people, and there are some books that capitalize on the strangeness of animals. But in the middle, there are books that lead one to wonder about how much we share with animals, how much our stories about them are wishful thinking and how much those stories reflect our unity with the rest of nature. Those are the stories that might open up helpful conversations, both about what it is to be human and about our appropriate relationships to non-human beings.

One of the most disquieting facts one encounters in studying nature is that nature operates on time scales and levels of size that are foreign to human beings. We get impatient with gardens for growing so slowly; changes in species happen over vast time spans; the interesting “action” in a garden may be visible only under a microscope. If we expect natural things to happen on our schedules and to be visible to a casual glance, we will often be disappointed. People need particular help to think about the differences that appear when one turns from everyday human life to biological time and biological space.

It is possible that, besides the differences in time-scale and size that make it hard for humans to understand animals and plants, there are other, deeper differences, so that some living things are just alien to us and to our strategies for flourishing. An investigation of the natural world will always consist in experiments in understanding, checked rigorously against what actually happens in nature. Of course, the questions, “How much can we understand?” and “What are the limits of our understanding?” are among the oldest and deepest philosophic questions; nature provides many examples for articulating these questions in new ways.

Here are examples of books highlighting differences between humans and particular animal species:

The Big Fur Secret (1944) by Margaret Wise Brown (author) and Robert De Veyrac (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea

The Honeybee (2020) by Candace Flemming (author) and Eric Rohmann (artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

My Octopus Teacher (excerpts), Netflix documentary directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed (2020)
Netflix Website with Trailer
Amanpour & Company Review (18:31 min)

Here are some books that present natural time and space scales in ways that provoke astonishment and questioning:

I’m Trying to Love Spiders (2019) by Bethany Barton (author) and Bethany Barton (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story (2021) by Maria Popova (author) and Ping Zhu (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Taking difference seriously, being conscious of systems and relationships that are not human-centered, provokes one to wonder how to approach plants, animals, gardens, wilderness, so as not to miss what they have to offer – by being either overwhelmed or oblivious. That interest prompts the next category: things look different when one approaches them differently.

Often, our entrenched habits and ways of being in the world close us off from certain dimensions of meaning, preventing us from really seeing and attending to our surroundings. If we have little to do with animals, for example, we may lack the descriptive vocabulary that helps people pay close attention to animals on which they depend. These books offer opportunities for readers to shift their focus and experiment with new ways of perceiving: slowing down, being present (practicing non-distraction), and attending to details that they may miss at first glance. Readers confront the values of each way of seeing: which meanings emerge, which meanings recede into the background, with each change of ‘focus.’

Here are some books that illustrate different ways of being in nature, and raise questions about our options, as superbly flexible minds in a multi-dimensional world.

Owl Moon (1987) by Jane Yolen (author) and John Schoenherr (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

I’m in Charge of Celebrations (1995) by Byrd Baylor (author) and Peter Parnall (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website
The Book on Open Library
YouTube Read-aloud

Blackout (2011) by John Rocco (author and artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

The Ugly Place (2022) by Laura Deal (author) and Emma Pedersen (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Samantha Piede (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website

At the Drop of a Cat (2023) by Elise Fontenaille (artist) and Violeta Lópiz (artist)
Publisher’s Website

My Baba’s Garden (2023) by Jordan Scott (artist) and Sydney Smith (artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Frederick (2017) by Leo Leonni (author and artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Some people who watch ants in their back yards or plant gardens or follow the caterpillar’s transformations until it emerges as a butterfly get hooked on their subject and devote their lives to learning more about natural systems and to advocating for the preservation of non-human spaces. Biographies are written to help children see how such careers start, how they might move on from their own initial thoughts to deeper engagement. The next category explores that sort of literature: the children who kept asking questions.

It seems important to invite beginners to reflect on the kinds of interests and enthusiasm that lead people to spend their lives engaged with natural phenomena, to invite them to try on some of these ways of thinking. Often, hero stories point out differences between the heroes and ordinary people, celebrating the hero as an adult, in full mature splendor. But some stories show how a life-long interest began, how children persisted in their first questions and widened those questions over time. This might lead to a discussion of what starting points are present in each student’s life, in this classroom, and how those initial impulses might be pursued. Sometimes, people just need to know that it is possible for people like them to become interested in something in nature, and to pursue that interest in simple ways.

This sort of book isn’t much explored in philosophy for children practice, so we don’t have good information about how to approach it. The standard Mat Lipman approach is to read it and ask, “What’s worth talking about?” – and then work through the responses in a receptive way. Another thing to try: ask everyone, including the teacher or leader, to tell a story about a time when something in nature made them curious or interested. Then, read the book, and see how much the character’s way of thinking is like what came out in the stories. What questions do you have in common, and how might you investigate them. There might be interesting follow-up activities to try outdoors. Sometimes, a well told story of a curious person infects other people with a similar curiosity. Here are some examples we found:

Buzzing with Questions: The Inquisitive Mind of Charles Henry Turner (2019) by Janice N. Harrington (author) and Theodore Taylor (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Alexander Von Humboldt: Explorer, Naturalist & Environmental Pioneer (2022) by Danica Novgorodoff (author and artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea
Publisher’s Website

The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: A Story About Edwin Hubble (2021) by Isabelle Marinov (author) and Deborah Marcero (artist)
Publisher’s Website

Dinosaur Lady: The Daring Discoveries of Mary Anning, the First Paleontologist (2020) by Linda Skeers (author) and Marta Álvarez Miguéns (artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Another kind of life-long engagement with nature arises out of aesthetic appreciation and artistic creation. So, another category of philosophical thinking about nature is Can nature be—or be made to be—beautiful or ugly?

Many people, including children, find beauty and ugliness in nature: in texture, colors, patterns, and structures of natural objects and in the drama of large scenes and landscapes. Some of us have had philosophical discussions with preschool children about which insects are pretty, ugly, disgusting, or amazing. Artists sometimes look to nature for ideas, constructing objects and ‘performances’ celebrating its most remarkable features and also integrating natural sounds, images, locations, and patterns into their work. Jan Estep constructed a performance piece by engaging in meditation at each of the sites in the Grand Canyon where someone had taken their life. Annea Lockwood made a sound map of the Danube, taking samples at intervals with an underwater microphone. Andy Goldsworthy constructed elaborate ephemeral structures in forests and prairies, weaving grass and positioning hundreds of leaves. Remo Campopiano’s piece, 8-bit Ant Farm, combined computer equipment with 1000 live red ants. Such pieces push against museum-centric ideas about works of art, and make viewers consider what aesthetic appreciation and artistic “intervention” are all about. They also raise ethical questions: are animals and natural objects at an artist’s disposal, like paint and clay, or do they have claims and dignity that should be respected? (Perhaps Campopiano’s live red ants did not want to be part of a living sculpture. Artists imitating Goldsworthy’s ephemeral pieces have disrupted landscapes and ecosystems.)

Here is a book that explores how different kinds of things might seem beautiful to different creatures:

How Beautiful (2021) by Antonella Capetti (author) and Melissa Castrillon (artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Here is one example of a book that conveys the experience of beauty and order in nature – imagining the youth of a famous artist:

A Boy Named Isamu: A Story of Isamu Noguchi (2021) by James Yang (author and artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

This documentary, from which one could extract usable excerpts, shows one way that a contemporary artist works with natural scenes and materials.

Andy Goldsworthy: Rivers and Tides (excerpts) directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer (2002)
The Documentary on YouTube

Note: teachers might simply present works of art, without much explanatory context, as starting points for these discussions.

Environmental scientists have developed powerful and sophisticated ways of thinking, especially ideas about interdependence in natural systems. Cooks, gardeners, birdwatchers, and farmers, also notice long chains of interdependence and causality. Such ideas can be demonstrated in gardens, backyards, and wilderness areas: they have very broad applications. So, the next category is: tracing out connections that emerge from studying nature.

It is a preoccupation of children’s literature at a very basic level, to see how one thing leads to another, to trace out connections of all sorts, to see what unifies a group of events or actors. One sees this “The Farmer in the Dell” and “The House that Jack Built” – models of a kind of connecting play. Some books about nature do a particularly interesting job of tracing out connections, and thus model a kind of thinking that might establish itself as a habit among a group of children: the habit of asking, “What is this connected to? How does this fit into some larger, meaningful web of relations?” Here are some examples:

The Wolves of Yellowstone: A Rewilding Story (2022) by Catherine Barr (author) and Jenni Desmond (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Sam Piede
Publisher’s Website

The Depth of the Lake and the Height of the Sky by Kim Jihyunand (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Megan Jane Laverty (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website

What Is a River? (2021) by Monika Vaicenavičienė (author and artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Almost Nothing, Yet Everything: A Book About Water (2021) by Hiroshi Osada (author) and Ryōji Arai (artist)
Publisher’s Website

Everything Is Connected (2019) by Jason Gruhl (author) and Ignasi Font (artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

I’m Trying to Love Garbage (2021) by Bethany Barton (author and artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

7.  Stories that address spiritual responses to the natural world

Children and adults who attend to events outdoors, beyond their immediate purposes and projects, sometimes have powerful responses to the order and beauty of the world, responses that are not well captured in generalizations or theories. Philosophic discussion might be the most plausible place to honor and explore such responses, taking an inventory of spiritual responses to the natural world.

Literature from most parts of the world, including children’s literature, features texts that describe human experiences in nature in terms of spirituality, transcendence, or reverence—terms which may connote the sacred or the supernatural. The authors of these kinds of texts addressed to children recognize that children can have such experiences with nature, and that such experiences can be an important part of the meaning of children’s lives.

Such children’s stories recommend attitudes or perspectives: paring down the ego, broadening one’s perspective, awakening awe and reverence, appreciating stillness, celebrating interconnectedness, being open to compassion. Some also describe methods for putting oneself in the way of such experiences, including rituals and holiday observances.

These stories invite philosophical reflection. What different qualities of experience are possible, and how might we name and describe them? What is the potential range of meanings for experiences with nature? What is the value of such experiences? Do they matter enough to try to arrange our lives to invite them more often? What might we have to change or exchange in order to do so?

There are two important but very different directions this kind of philosophical inquiry might take. One is to develop a common language for a kind of experience the children come to recognize as common to them, and perhaps to relate that language to cultural discourses on nature and spirituality represented in the text. The other is to help children recognize and appreciate impulses and experiences that are not widely shared, that may be particularly fragile. If led respectfully, philosophical reflection can help children maintain their differences and resist the provocation to always make public sense of everything. It could be especially useful in approaching spiritual responses to nature to begin a philosophical inquiry around a provocative text with a story circle: Tell a story about a time you had an experience similar to this.

Here are some books that might prompt this kind of conversation:

The Dead Bird (1944) by Margaret Wise Brown (author), Remy Charlip (1965 artist), and Christian Robinson (2016 artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea
The 1965 Edition on Open Library
2016 Publisher’s Website
2016 Edition YouTube Read-aloud

Sidewalk Flowers (2015) by JonArno Lawson (author) and Sydney Smith (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Samantha Piede (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

A Walk in the Woods(2023) by By Nikki Grimes (author) and Jerry Pinkney & Brian Pinkney (artists)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-Aloud

The Lost Soul (2021) by Olga Tokarczuk (author) and Joanna Concejo (artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Showing

8.  Stories that take account of human interventions in the natural world and human relationships to natural systems

Human actions and constructions have ruined beautiful ecosystems, polluted waters, destroyed species, and made the climate change very fast and unpredictably. This reality will be present, to some extent, for all children – more, certainly, for those whose countries are about to disappear beneath the rising seas or whose neighborhoods are no longer viable because of water shortages or floods. Philosophy has to help people experience and think about painful ethical and political realities, finding their way as actors in a world where many irrevocable decisions have already been made. To be fair, exploitation is just one of the ways humans interact with nature; people are also preservers of wild spaces and, sometimes, good neighbors for communities of plants and animals. Books in the category taking account of human interventions in the natural world and human relationships to natural systems provides resources for beginning these conversations.

When I was young, my uncle destroyed a forest on his land, to extend his plowing. It seemed a shame, but I couldn’t say how it was wrong. The land was his, and no one else was using it. Did the land itself, or the animals and plants on it, have rights, or was the forest in some way sacred? That question stays with me, for all the interesting spaces I know that could easily be paved over or plowed or somehow sabotaged. It extends now to species, natural ways of life, that could be made extinct.

In my uncle’s later life, he devoted time and resources to preserving a native sacred site on his property from a dam project which he believed to be unnecessary, financing a legal battle all the way to the North Dakota Supreme Court. That modeled a different idea about people’s relationship to the land and a different kind of responsibility.

In this category, as in some previous groupings, the works available form a continuum, a range of different relationships between human beings and natural spaces and systems. We hope that, as this bibliography matures, we can find depictions and explanations of relationships that go beyond familiar distinctions to take account of cultures for which the line between humans and nature is not important, or is imagined in surprising ways.

Here are three relationships to start with:

Defense/conservation – preserving what is important or essential.

The Lost Words (2018) by Robert Macfarlane (author) and Jackie Morris (artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Exploitation – subordinating the purposes and integrity of natural systems to human projects and goals.

The Lorax (1971) by Dr. Seuss (author and artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Megan Laverty
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud
1972 Animated Film

Two Islands (1985) by Ivan Gantschev (author and artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Gareth B. Matthews

Eva (1988) by Peter Dickinson (author)
Thinking in Stories Review by Megan Jane Laverty (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website
Author’s Website
Wikipedia Entry

The Mess That We Made (2020) by Michelle Lord (author) and Julia Blattman (artist)
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Does Earth Feel? (2021) by Marc Majewski (author and artist)
Publisher’s Website
Author’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Non-exploitative relationships: Gardens, Agriculture, Domesticated Animals

Sir Fig Newton and the Science of Persistence (2023) by Sonja Thomas
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website

9.  Stories that address how children and young adults might get to know nature, right where they live

It seems important to think about first steps for young people: ways to become more involved with and better acquainted with nature – first steps outside the merely human world. One might think of this category as about first experiments in environmental science, how children and young adults might get to know nature, right where they live.

Children grow gardens, raise chickens, build tree huts, make mudpies and sandcastles, form relationships with their pets, and get to know a particular swamp or mountainside better than most adults in the community. Some even begin scientific or artistic careers this way. Although we can’t produce a discussion plan for a philosophic treatment of such possibilities, it seems important, in a bibliography on thinking philosophically about nature, to include some consideration of the options open to those who want to get closer to nature. Here are some books we find helpful:

The Higher Power of Lucky (2007) by Susan Patron (author) and Matt Phelan (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea
Publisher’s Website
The Book at The Open Library

Southwest Sunrise (2020) by Nikki Grimes (author) and Matt PhelanWendell Minor (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
Read-aloud YouTube Video

Science in Your Own Back Yard (1965) by Elizabeth K. Cooper (author and artist)
The Book at The Open Library
Read-aloud YouTube Video

Winged Wonder: Solving the Monarch Migration Mystery (2020) by Meeg Pincus (author) and Yas Imamura (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website
Author’s Website
Read-aloud YouTube Video

10.  Stories that address the choices, responsibilities, and privileges of children and young adults in addressing pressing environmental policy issues

Youth activists, some very young, have demanded entry into policy discussions that aim at preserving natural places and living things, remedying damage to the natural world, and developing sustainable alternatives to wasteful and destructive ways of life. In the past, children and young adults have deferred to adults on these matters, but, as the deadlines for effective action approach, it is a pressing question of justice whether children and young people can be excluded from policy conversations that lead to irrevocable decisions. These coming generations will feel the effects of these decisions throughout their lives.

Another hard and important question confronts every young person growing up: given all the competing claims on my time, talent, and energy, what is my primary job? Which of these pressing issues and crises is my responsibility? How do I find a moral vocation, and how do I mediate between my moral ‘calling’ and other aspects of my life?

So, the last section concerns the choices, responsibilities, and privileges of children and young adults in addressing pressing environmental policy issues.

Biographical accounts of children and young adult activists come to mind as starting points for this discussion. It seems important that such a collection include (1) political organizing and peaceful protest, and (2) acts of civil disobedience and intervention. It is a matter of serious philosophical concern to map the appropriate options for people too young to vote, and thus of no account in terms of current electoral politics. Clearly, all the centuries of political discussion about the claims that those without representation have on political institutions – the questions asked when this country began, and then during the Civil War and the suffrage movement – are particularly relevant to this issue. Children will have to live with irrevocable decisions; they surely have some claim to be part of those decisions. Here are some books to start these discussions:

The Leak (2021) by Kate Reed Petty (author) and Andrea Bell (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty
Publisher’s Website

Someday, Something (2023) by Amanda Gorman (author) and Christian Robinson (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Greta Thunberg (2023) by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara (author) and Anke Weckmann (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Maughn Rollins Gregory
Publisher’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

We are Water Protectors (2020) by Carole Lindstrom (author) and Michaela Goade (artist)
Thinking in Stories Review by Peter Shea (forthcoming)
Publisher’s Website
Author’s Website
YouTube Read-aloud

Operation Redwood (2011) by S. Terrell French (author and artist)
Publisher’s Website
Book Website
The Book at The Open Library