MNN - Mother Nature Network

Are your eco-minded kids tired of re-reading The Lorax? Time to broaden their literary horizons and pick up some fresh green reads. Earlier this month, the Newton Marasco Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to create the next generation of environmentalists, gave out its 2010 National Green Earth Book Awards — to books that “best inspire children and young adults to care for the environment.” The winners are:

 

Picture book: Miss Fox’s Class Goes Green, by Eileen Spinelli and illustrated by Anne Kennedy, tells the story of, well, a class gone green.

 

Nonfiction: Earth in the Hot Seat: Bulletins from a Warming World, by Marfe Ferguson Delano, explains the science of global warming to inspire new eco-activists.

 

Children’s fiction: Operation Redwood, by S. Terrell French, tells the story of kids who band together to save a redwood tree forest.

 

Young adult fiction: The Carbon Diaries: 2015, by Saci Lloyd, is “a futuristic novel written in diary form about the challenges society faces while living on mandated carbon rations to counteract the ravages of global warming.”

 

That last sci-fi novel sounds the most interesting to me. Then again, I’m not a kid. Each award-winning book’s author and illustrator received $2,000; the books will also be distributed to schools and youth organizations in the Greater Washington, D.C., area.