An interview with Lynne Cherry

"Kids Keep Me Hopeful"              

Lynne Cherry is a member of Generation Green’s Sponsoring Board. She writes and illustrates books about environmental subjects for children, including The Great Kapok Tree and the recently published Flute's Journey: The Life of a Wood Thrush. Cherry also heads the Center for Children's Environmental Literature.

GG: Do you have a favorite environmental book?

Lynne: In the Absence of the Sacred made me look at technology and Western civilization in a very different light -- the way the whole system pushes us toward environmental destruction. Another book that deeply influenced me was Changes in the Land by Bill Cronin, a book about the different values that the early colonists in America and the Indians had towards nature. I based my book A River Ran Wild on Cronin's book.

GG: What was the last environmental book you read?

Lynne: These are not all environmental books, but they're the most remarkable books I've recently read. The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond; In the Absence of the Sacred, by Jerry Mander; and Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson.

GG: Who are your biggest environmental heroes?

Lynne: Of course there are the standard heroes we all know about and respect: Rachel Carson, John Muir, Aldo Leopold. But for me there is also Marian Stoddard. She worked to enact the Massachusetts Clean Water Act, the first Clean Water Act in the country. She lobbied for an environmental protection agency and she cleaned up the Nashua River in Massachusetts -- one of the first environmental success stories for river cleanup.

GG: What do you consider the greatest threat to the environment?

Lynne: I'd say television. Television is purveying our materialistic values all over the world now -- beliefs that people should acquire as many things as they can. Materialism is at the root of most environmental destruction. Think about it.

GG: What do you consider the most worrying environmental problem?

Lynne: It's a toss up between water and global warming. As global population expands and we drain the aquifers, clean drinking water will be a major problem. With global warming and global climate change there are going to be so many consequences that it's hard for us to imagine them all right now. And, my biologist friends very strongly believe that it's already started, because of the migrations of the animals northward.

GG: What can be done about it?

Lynne: I write for kids and know they can do a lot. Kids don't seem to practice denial as much as adults. When they hear about a problem they want to know what they can do about it and will write letters and raise funds. They have this boundless energy and more time than most adults. Kids keep me hopeful.

For instance, the Belt Woods, a wonderful old growth forest that supports the largest population of migratory birds in the northeast, was about to be sold to a developer. In my latest book, Flute's Journey, Flute the wood thrush lives in the Belt Woods. When I was writing the book, I told groups of kids I didn't know the ending to the story -- that Flute's woods could be sold and destroyed, or saved. Children wrote so many letters that the story got on CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood. Eventually, the land was sold instead to the Trust for Public Land.

Once kids get involved they're not going to let go. Kids serve as our moral compass. I've lobbied Congress, and I do find it really demoralizing. But when I do a children's book, I have a really receptive audience. Kids seem to see things so much more clearly.