‘Fair To Tell Her Stories Of Healthy Ecosystems?’ Author Questions Reading Classic Kids’ Books To His Daughter In NYT Piece

On Friday, the New York Times published a piece by an author who teaches English at a small Minnesota university in which he questioned whether he it was fair to read his children classic books such as “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Swimmy,” “The Story of Babar,” “A Snowy Day,” and “Make Way for Ducklings” because they represented a “vanishing world” and he suffered from “distress caused by environmental change.”

Paul Bogard began by noting that friends and family had bestowed the classic books, including four copies of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar’” and three copies of ‘”Goodnight Moon” upon him for his prospective children.

Writing “the wild world my favorite books had encouraged me to love has been under assault.” Bogard continued, “Becoming aware of this loss had led me to serious grief and now to a steady undercurrent of ‘solastalgi — the distress caused by environmental change, a feeling of homesickness for the place we still live. And so, I found myself wondering if reading these books to my daughter would in a way be a lie. Was it fair to tell her stories of healthy ecosystems and the steady seasons to which we’ve become accustomed?”

Apparently former President Obama had no such qualms; in late March 2016, he and first lady Michelle Obama imitated monsters as they read “Where The Wild Things Are” during the White House Easter Egg Roll.

“Since the oldest of the books, ‘Babar,’ was published in 1931, Africa’s elephant population had dwindled from 10 million to roughly 400,000. Since ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ was published in 1963, the world had lost an estimated two-thirds of its wildlife,” Bogard wrote, possibly referencing the environmentalist group World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) widely-quoted Living Planet Report 2020, which claimed that 68% of wildlife in the world had been destroyed between 1970 and 2016.

Of WWF, Buzzfeed reported in March 2019, “In a May 2018 report, WWF told the EU (European Union) that indigenous people were in support of the proposed national park. But a recent Buzzfeed News investigation reveals that WWF was fully aware of indigenous Baka people’s opposition to the park, and their fear of repression by eco-guards, as documented in a July 2017 internal WWF report.”

As far back as 2009, Tom DeWeese noted a WWF ad that claimed that polar bears were becoming endangered. He wrote, “Not one word of the ad is true. Polar bears are not endangered. There is no indication of any reduction of their populations. In fact, they are actually being hunted by locals who have to live with them in an effort to keep their populations down. Of 13 Polar Bear populations, 11 are thriving and growing.”

The Global Warming Policy Foundation opined in 2017, “In 2005, the official global polar bear estimate was about 22,500. Since 2005, however, the estimated global polar bear population has risen by more than 30% to about 30,000 bears, far and away the highest estimate in more than 50 years.”

Bogard lamented, “I had chosen to become a father knowing well the dire predictions, the destruction that leaves me quiet. Now, with an actual child on her way, I wondered again about telling her stories of a world diminished.”

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