Take a minute to think about your favourite book from childhood. Do you envision lots of furry animals? A wise old tree? Kids in the forest? A new study has found a steady decline in the number of children’s books that depict the natural environment.
For the study, a group of researchers led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist J. Allen Williams Jr. evaluated the images found in the American Library Association’s prestigious Caldecott Medal-winning children’s picture books between 1938 through 2008. They looked at more than 8,000 images in almost 300 books, noting whether they showed natural settings, human-made environments, or something in between (like a playground).
The results? Initially, natural and built environments were equally represented, but beginning in the 1960s, depictions of natural settings began a steady decline. By 2008, images of human-made environments showed up in books twice as often as those depicting nature scenes.
The study’s authors attribute the decline to the increasing isolation of children from the natural world.
In Canada, children’s picture book publishing is much different than in the U.S., says Judith Saltman, chair of the master’s of arts program at the University of British Columbia. It didn’t get underway until the late 1960s and the 1970s, nearly five decades later than in the U.S.
Picture books in the 1970s represented multicultural diversity, gender equity, urban imagery and regional landscapes showing nature. In the 1980s and 1990s, Saltman says, Canadian picture books moved more toward nature themes, life in rural communities and the wilderness.
When she and her co-author, Gail Edwards, were researching their book, Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing in 2005, many writers, illustrators and publishers told them the industry needed more urban stories.
In recent years, Saltman believes Canadian children’s picture books have balanced out between urban representation and regional images of nature. “We still hunger to reflect our entire landscape, including the unlived wilderness, a sense of the north,” says Saltman.