How giving books to children this Christmas will help to save the world

by Alison Hill

There are so many reasons to give children books as Christmas gifts. Improved literacy and numeracy, opening their eyes and minds to new ideas, and the joy of shared reading time are just some of them. 

Sharing the joys of nature and the importance of caring for the Earth is another great reason to give a book to a child this Christmas. Loving our planet, and learning to do what they can to save it, is the theme of this pick of books to gift to the kids in your life. 

For 0 to 6-year-olds – give an Ethicool book
An owl with eyes as large as the moon guides Charlie around the world on a river, teaching him about Earth long before he was one of its inhabitants. Stuart French’s My Rainforest Classroom is just one of a number of books for 0 to 6 year olds published by Ethicool Books, the publisher he set up with his partner, Teigan Margetts, in February this year.

The couple bonded over their love of reading and writing, and then when Teigan’s mum died suddenly, she wrote a book to help her own children to understand death and to remember their grandmother. ‘We got thinking from that, oh wouldn’t it be nice if someone created books that were just that bit more special, had that bit more meaning’, says Teigan. ‘So we both wrote a couple and then figured out how to get them illustrated and produced, because we definitely wanted to do it sustainably from the very beginning.’


They planned from the start to be carbon-neutral, using recycled paper and soy-based inks. They have now published more than 10 titles, all available for online purchase. Each one tackles an important issue, from boys being allowed to cry to depression, from where stuff goes when we throw it ‘away’ to ensuring Earth’s beauty is still here for future generations. All their books are beautifully illustrated in full colour, and every step of the publishing process is managed sustainably.


They don’t produce ebooks. Teigan has written about the effects of too much screen time on children’s learning. ‘If people are becoming addicted to screens, are we robbing the world of the book that was never written or art that was never done or an exploration that never happens?’ she asks. ‘The point of reading is connection, to have a conversation and when you're working a screen its so passive and processes really not good for little brains.’


A book or three from Ethicool Books makes a wonderful Christmas gift for children and grandchildren, and does good for them and the planet. Ethicool is a member of 1% for the planet, donating 1% of all revenue to environmental causes. 

For 8 to 10-year-olds – Bondi Finz are rad!

For kids aged 8 and up, The Bondi Finz series offers a crazy adventure with an undertow of a story about plastic pollution in the oceans. There are four books in the series by S J House, or Simon as he’s known in his non-writing life – which includes making music and a lot of surfing. He also spends time cleaning up on beaches and in the ocean.


Simon first wrote the story as a television series, and then decided to convert it to a series of vibrant and amusing chapter books. ‘If the books are funny, it’s a great way to get the kids involved and do something that's good in a fun way that's not preachy, he explains. There’s also a song, ‘Plastics Not Fantastic’, and a way to donate or to organise a clean up with your school or your group. ‘The song “Plastics Not Fantastic” is one of those sort of brainwashing songs’, says Simon. ‘When you see rubbish on the beach you get that song in your head.’


What better way to motivate everybody to step up and clean our beaches and oceans of non-fantastic plastic?


For 9 to 11-year-olds – Learn and do

On a more serious note are How to Save the Whole Stinkin’ Planet by Lee Constable, and Hope: 50 ways to help our planet every day, both published by Puffin Books.


How to Save the Whole Stinkin’ Planet is filled with activities and experiments that will help kids aged 9 to 11 to understand littering, waste and landfill, recycling and composting. It’s practical and fun, and has quizzes in each of its six chapters, with Waste Warrior badges to be won. Children – and adults too – will have a much better understanding of where waste goes and what happens to it next. Kids with a science bent will love it, and those who haven’t had much hands-on experiment time will find the instructions simple to follow.


Hope: 50 ways to help our planet every day is a beautifully illustrated guide to 50 practical ways to step more lightly on our planet. Kids will learn to make compost, tackle food waste, host and environmentally friendly party and much, much more. Its full of facts, and there are many case studies from groups of children, mostly in schools, who have dealt with the issues successfully.


From 10 to 100 – it’s the Indefatigable EnviroTeens

Much loved Guardian Australia Walkely Award-winning cartoonist First Dog On the Moon has just published a graphic novel, The Carbon-Neutral Adventures of the Indefatigable EnviroTeens (Allen & Unwin). Those 10 and up will love this environmentally conscious adventure, in which the EnviroTeens take on Singleuse Plastic Brendan and – even more dastardly -  climate change. Adults will love it as much as kids will, and it is bound to spark conversations. It even has a Climate Denialist Potato in there. As Letitia the wombat says, ‘I feel like rubbish a lot – angry and sad and frightened – it would be a bit weird if we weren’t feeling some of those things.’


Signed copies are for sale on the First Dog website, and a proportion of the publisher’s profits will be donated to School Strike 4 Climate Australia.



Alison Hill writes features and web copy from the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

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