Energy perspectives on children’s and YA literature

Children often encounter place through affection before they encounter it through critique. They learn to love the smell of rain on dry ground, and they learn the names of rivers, animals, farms, and coastlines. Before they ever question its impact, they watch the sunrise with awe. However, the places children love are also shaped by our energy systems. The uneven distribution of environmental risk in society makes it so that children may or may not find oil fields, wind farms, dams, or pipelines as part of their encounters with place. The central question this lecture asks is this: What does it mean to love a place in a time of ecological crisis? This lecture develops the concept of Critical Love of Place (CLP) as a framework for reading and teaching children’s and young adult literature about energy and environmental justice. CLP begins with the premise that children deserve stories that help them value where they are from. The everyday attachments to landscapes, labor, and language are what make a place feel like home. However, love of place becomes ethically incomplete when it asks children to inherit only pride or nostalgia without also noticing the ecological harm of energy extraction and their responsibility to future generations. Drawing across my previous and current work, I argue that children’s literature can help readers hold together two ideas often treated as opposites: affective love of place and critical accountability.