Mihir Pathak | મિહિર પાઠક

Why we need Green literature in our learning spaces?

· Mihir Pathak

Something has quietly shifted in childhood.

A generation ago, children moved freely between indoors and out. They knew the name of the tree in the street. They watched monsoons arrive and felt the season change in their bodies. That texture of daily life — small, unstructured, alive — is increasingly rare.

Today, the average child spends fewer than seven minutes a day in unstructured outdoor contact with nature (Louv, 2005). They spend more than seven hours with screens. The living world has moved from background to backdrop — and for many urban children, it has disappeared from daily experience almost entirely.

This is not a nostalgic concern. It has measurable consequences. And children’s literature — specifically, nature-based children’s literature — is one of the most practical and immediate tools educators have to respond to it.

The rationale: why now, why this

Children are losing the language before they lose the land

When the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed words like acorn, bluebell, heron, kingfisher, newt, and willow — replacing them with blog, broadband, and chatroom — writer Robert Macfarlane called it what it was: a cultural loss with real consequences.

Cognitive linguistics research tells us that language shapes perception. A child who knows the word “heron” sees a specific, irreplaceable living being when one stands by a river. A child without that word sees only a large grey bird. The word is not decoration — it is the organ of attention.

We cannot love what we cannot name. We cannot protect what we have no language for. — Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (2015)

When children lose nature vocabulary, they lose the capacity to notice the living world with precision and care. And what we do not notice, we do not protect.

Disconnection from nature has a real developmental cost

Environmental psychologists call it the “extinction of experience” — a cascading loss of familiarity with local species, seasonal rhythms, and ecological processes. The consequences are not only environmental. Research links nature disconnection in childhood to elevated anxiety, diminished attention, and a weakened sense of belonging to something larger than oneself (Kellert, 1997).

E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis argues that humans carry an evolutionary affinity for living systems — and children express this most intensely. They spontaneously name, befriend, and story-tell about insects, birds, and plants before being taught to. This instinct is real. But like any capacity, it needs to be fed. Without nourishment — through stories, language, and direct experience — it quietly fades.

Children are already living climate change — but have no language for it

In India and across the Global South, children are experiencing climate change not as a future threat but as present reality. The summer heat arrives earlier each year. The monsoon is unreliable. The mango tastes different from how grandparents remember it. Birds that used to come no longer do.

These are not abstract facts. They are lived experiences — felt in the body, noticed in the seasons, carried quietly by children who have no language or framework to process what they are witnessing.

Nature-based literature gives children that language. It makes the living world speakable. And when children can speak about it — with wonder and with honesty — they move from passive witnesses to active participants in their own ecological story.

What nature-based literature does to a child

It builds an ecological self

Stephen Kellert’s research found that children who developed emotional bonds with nature before age eleven — through stories, illustration, play, and guided attention — were significantly more likely to become environmentally responsible adults (Kellert, 1997). The ecological self — the felt sense of belonging to the living world, not merely living in it — is formed in childhood. Literature is one of the primary ways it is shaped.

It gives children the gift of wonder

Psychologist Dacher Keltner has spent decades studying awe — the emotion of vastness, mystery, and encountering something beyond oneself. His findings are striking: awe measurably increases prosocial behaviour, reduces self-centredness, deepens curiosity, and strengthens ecological connection. Children are neurologically more primed for awe than adults. A well-written nature book, a vivid illustration of a monsoon insect or a tidal mudflat, can trigger genuine awe in a child sitting in a classroom in the middle of a city (Keltner, 2023).

This matters because awe is not a luxury. It is, Keltner argues, one of the most reliable pathways to caring about something beyond yourself. Wonder precedes stewardship. Always.

It develops language, imagination, and empathy at once

Nature-based literature does not ask educators to choose between literacy goals and ecological goals — it serves both simultaneously. Children’s books are already among the richest sources of vocabulary for young readers (Hayes & Ahrens, 1988). Nature writing adds a specific register: precise, sensory, attentive language that builds both reading skill and perceptual capacity. A child who learns the word “monsoon” in a story and then feels it arrive is building vocabulary, memory, and ecological identity in a single moment.

It counters eco-anxiety without denying reality

David Sobel’s foundational research showed that leading with environmental catastrophe — before children have a loving relationship with local nature — creates ecophobia: nature as a site of dread (Sobel, 1996). But the answer is not to pretend the crisis does not exist. It is to sequence carefully. Wonder first. Love first. Then, from that secure foundation, children can hold the harder truths without being overwhelmed by them.

What you can do: practical steps for your classroom

You do not need a forest. You do not need a special programme or budget. You need a book with a heron in it, a schoolyard with one tree, and the willingness to slow down.

1. Choose books that name the nearby world

Most nature books available to Indian children feature faraway animals — African lions, Arctic penguins, Amazon rainforests. These have value. But they also quietly teach children that “nature” is elsewhere, and that the living world outside their window does not quite count.

Seek out books that name the birds, trees, and ecosystems children actually live among. The crow. The banyan. The koel before the monsoon. The specific insect on the wall. When a child sees their own world reflected in a book, the book becomes a mirror and the world becomes remarkable.

2. Read slowly, read dialogically

Do not read nature books at children. Read them with children. Pause. Point to the illustration. Ask: Have you seen this? Where? What was it doing? This approach — called dialogic reading (Whitehurst, 1992) — turns passive listening into active ecological attention. It connects the page to the child’s own experience and builds the habit of noticing.

3. Take the book outside

After reading a story about rain, go outside and watch it rain. After reading about a particular bird, spend ten minutes in the schoolyard listening. After a story about soil, let children hold a handful. The walk–book–walk cycle is simple and repeatable:

  1. Read — give children language for what they are about to encounter.
  2. Walk — use the words from the book. Name what you see together. Move slowly.
  3. Reflect — what surprised you? What do you want to know more about?

Repeated across a term, this cycle changes how children look. They begin to see because they have been given the language to notice.

4. Recover local ecological vocabulary

Ask children what their grandparents call the monsoon wind. What is the word in your home language for the first rain smell? What do the fishing families in your region call the tide? This is not a digression from literacy — it is literacy at its deepest. Indigenous and regional ecological vocabulary carries centuries of careful observation.

5. Let children write their own nature stories

This is the most powerful step — and the one most often skipped.

The Climate Author Programme by Anisha Jamal is built on a single, radical insight: children are not the audience for climate stories. They are the authors.

Invite children to write about what they have witnessed. The heat this May. The bird that no longer comes. The tree that was cut down. The smell of the first rain. The river their grandparents remember differently. No prompts about saving the planet. No moral conclusions required. Just honest, attentive writing about what they have seen and felt.

Collect it. Bind it. Share it. Treat it as literature — because it is.

Where to find good books:

Green Lit Fest — India’s festival of nature and literature

One of the most encouraging developments in India’s children’s literature ecosystem is Green Lit Fest — an annual festival dedicated entirely to nature writing, ecological literature, and environmental storytelling. Run as an initiative of SustainabilityNext and now in its fifth year, GLF brings together authors, illustrators, educators, and naturalists to celebrate books that build ecological connection.

The festival’s children’s book section (greenlitfest.com/childrens-books) is a curated resource in its own right — a growing library of thoughtful reviews of Indian and international nature books for children. If you are looking for a starting point for your classroom library, this is one of the best places to begin.

Eklavya Pitara

Eklavya Pitara is a one-stop education store founded by Eklavya, one of India’s most respected educational organisations. For educators looking to build a nature and environment reading corner, their curated Must Read Books on Environment bundle brings together carefully selected titles — including Hindi-medium books like Mendak Ka Nashta and O Harial Ped — at an accessible price point. The collection reflects Eklavya’s commitment to books that are rooted in Indian realities, available in Indian languages, and field-tested with real children in Indian classrooms.

Nature Writing for Children — Azim Premji University

Azim Premji University’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability runs a Nature Writing for Children certificate course — an online professional development programme designed specifically for writers, educators, environmentalists, and social workers who have stories to tell but need guidance to shape them into publishable manuscripts.

The course was launched in 2020 and has since run multiple online and offline batches, reaching hundreds of educators and writers across India. It is designed by Shashwat DC, Meghaa Gupta, and ecologist Harini Nagendra — three people who sit precisely at the intersection of children’s literature, ecology, and education.

What makes it directly relevant for classroom teachers is the course’s recognition of a gap that this blog post is also responding to: India made environmental education mandatory in schools in 2004, and yet the supply of engaging, age-appropriate nature literature for Indian children remains strikingly limited. The course is an attempt to change that — by finding and cultivating new voices among the very people who work with children every day.

For an educator who has been doing nature walks, building a classroom library, and watching children respond to the living world with curiosity — this course is the natural next step. It takes the question from what should I read with my class? to what could I write for children like mine?

→ Course details and upcoming batches

A final word

The children in your classroom are growing up inside a world that is changing faster than any previous generation has experienced. They feel it — in the heat, in the seasons, in the small absences that adults may not notice. What they often lack is language for what they are experiencing, and permission to take it seriously.

Nature-based literature gives them both. It says: this bees matters. This tree has a name. Your experience of this summer is worth writing down. The world you are inheriting is extraordinary — and it needs your attention.

Start with one book. Take them outside once. Ask them to write one true thing about the world outside the window.

That is enough to begin.

References and resources

✦ Note: Ideas, research, and argument by Mihir. English writing assisted by Claude AI — because I think better in my mother tongue than I write in English, and I did not want that to stop me from sharing these ideas.

#blog #learning resources #children's literature

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