The Politics of Climate Literacy in Picturebooks: Three Strategies for Shaping Ecocentric Attitudes with Text and Images

This chapter deals with the politics of climate literacy in children’s literature. It introduces planetarianism as a narrative framing; climate politics as an engagement with structures of power, governance, and the logic informing collective human action; and climate literacy as a broad socioscientific and sociocultural competence nourished through engagement with stories. Bringing the three together, the chapter explores three strategies used in picturebooks to shape young people’s ecocentric attitudes: Awakening, Belonging, and Inspiration. By engaging audiences in transformative thinking about ways of making a difference for Earth’s future, these strategies seek to build young people’s climate literacy through text and images. Awakening, Belonging, and Inspiration are examined on examples drawn from a large pool of Anglophone works, including Megan Herbert and Michael E. Mann’s The Tantrum That Saved the World (2017), Oliver Jeffers’s Begin Again (2023), Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade’s We Are Water Protectors (2020), and others.