Tag Archives: Environment

It is challenging for anyone to grasp the gravity of the impact of the climate crisis on our planet. It is even more challenging to share these concerns with children and students without it becoming overwhelming or depressing.

The story of Climate Change and its impact is not very old. It is a by-product of our development in recent years. However, the debate around it and the issues related to it are reduced to sloganeering and jargons in the developed world community.

A few weeks ago in Himachal Pradesh, this year’s monsoon flooded towns and swelled rivers, causing buildings and bridges to collapse, entire mountain sides to cave in, and cars and concrete structures to be washed away in an angry, muddy, and swollen Beas. It was a harrowing reminder of what we humans do to the land we live on.

Board books are one of the first ways in which a baby encounters printed words. It’s through these books that a fundamental journey of decoding, and making meaning begins. Board books with their sensory experience of touch, visual contrast and animation, bring joy and excitement to a child’s learning experience.

Reading Wild Treasures & Adventures: A Forester’s Diary feels like stepping into the cosy home of one of your parent’s friends, who has the most captivating profession.

The Adventures of Sirdar is an interesting story about the life of a herd of wild elephants. It begins with the dramatic selection of ‘Sirdar’, a thirty year-old male elephant as the youngest leader of the herd and his life from then on. The author, Dhan Gopal Mukherji, describes how Sirdar leads his herd.

The forest department wanted to capture Lightning Tusker. But he is no ordinary tusker, and the most experienced experts are summoned to do the job. And at the end of this insufferable 107-page novel, they fail. This novel could not have been more than 20,000 words but I struggled to finish it.

A freely roaming centipede in the bathroom or a happy family of lice in our hair is the stuff of nightmares and feverish dreams. In horror, we often ask, ‘Why on earth do we need a mosquito?’ As it is with mother nature, there is always an answer. Turns out, there would be no life on earth without these seemingly disgusting and terrifying little beings. Biologist and Naturalist EO Wilson rightfully called them, ‘the little things that run the world’.

All of 16 pages, this children’s book is one that must find its rightful place in every library across schools and homes. It is appropriately narrated without any purple prose, and it is about big, old and ancient trees. No poem has a single unnecessary description and the message conveyed is deep to arouse the child’s curious mind.
The tile itself is an invitation to the child, as well as the reading and thinking adult, to move away from the obvious. Trees surround us, many of us have seen saplings grow into trees that today provide shade and comfort during summer months, and yet, few of us have the time to think about trees more deeply.

The book gives us a window into Jaishree’s world—both professional and a bit of personal. As a child, she was sensitive, loved climbing up trees and being close to plants and nature in her grandmother’s garden. Even after growing up, she fondly remembers a tree that was her ‘friend’.

How much do we know about the trees in our surroundings? Strange Trees may make you ask this question and look around. Set during a school summer vacation in the fictional Suryanagar village, this book explores the interdependent lives of trees, birds, animals, and humans.

The dominant colour for the book cover, green, sets the tone for the book. The illustrations and the text do a fabulous tango together, bringing alive the world of plants for young readers.

The book is the outcome of a singularly complicated remit, whose complexities are duly reflected in its structure. The question is, does it fulfil this remit? In my view it does so most satisfactorily. And scholars, activists, and even members of the public who seek a deeper understanding of environmental law will be greatly benefited by the way it seeks to foreground the black-letter legal narrative against larger social, economic, and political issues, particularly through extracts culled from appropriate secondary literature.

In his book, Maan Barua goes beyond the traditional focus on the old and new in modern urban life, introducing a discourse that integrates ecology and the role of non-human life in shaping the political dynamics of urban development. This challenges the fundamental understanding of what constitutes the ‘urban’ and the ‘city’, transforming our understanding of urban ontology.

Efforts to achieve justice and compassion for the protection and safety of animals have been ongoing. However, acts of violence towards animals continue to be rampant and prevalent. Activists, politicians, and people from all walks of life around the world have made everyday efforts to become the voice for voiceless animals and call for stricter rules and legislation.

Nagaraj Adve’s Global Warming in India is a brief and practical guide that enables the reader to engage with the discussions, debates and actions about the most pressing social and moral issue before our generation. It is written with a sense of hope and compassion for the ‘ordinary people’ that is largely missing in similar and popular books, which tend to focus more on the specialist and technocratic solutions handed over from above and to which most of us are expected to assent to and participate merely as a consumer or observer.

Picking up the book—the name made me wonder how an elephant in Rajaji National Park, far removed from the southern kingdom of Mysore got the name Tipu, fondly called Sultan of the Siwaliks. Amirtharaj Christy Williams’ memoir has the answer, and more! Elephant naming anecdotes abound.An insightful Foreword by Prerna Singh Bindra, India’s leading environmental journalist, tells how Williams makes a case for the Asian elephants, remarkable animals fighting a losing battle as forests get rapidly cleared for human use.

Have you ever wondered why we feel scared or become very excited when we hear about forests? Being born and brought up in metropolitan cities like Delhi, most of my understanding about forests comes from school books and they have usually portrayed forests as dangerous places.

Karthika Lakshmi’s So Shall You Reap was one of two prize winning entries in CBT’s Realistic Fiction category in the 20th Competition for Writers of Children’s Books organized in 2019. The story is about an expedition by students from across India to deposit seed samples in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, with narrative conflict introduced through ‘vested interests’ who seek to replace the indigenous seed varieties with genetically modified ones.

Our Wiggly Friends, Earthworms is a small book of 32 pages. The book can be divided into two major parts; the first and the main part of the book provides various details about earthworms while the second part focuses on the role that earthworms play for soil, and introduces the readers to vermiculture (artificial rearing of earthworms).