The Evanston Public Library introduced the winners of the third annual Blueberry Awards Thursday night throughout a quick-paced occasion at the Robert Crown Community Center. More than 65 folks attended.
The Blueberry Awards honor excellent kids’s literature that strengthens younger folks’s connections with nature and fosters motion for the planet. The program emerged throughout the pandemic, when library assistant Martha Meyer started questioning how she might take local weather motion.
Meyer beforehand instructed the RoundTable that qualifying books promote a love of nature first and local weather motion second, “urge group action,” counsel sensible options to the issues launched, clarify that adults “are working on this already,” and, crucially, share info in an age-applicable method.
This yr’s Blueberry List options 35 books revealed in 2023, primarily for youngsters ages 3-10. Members of the choice committee – who included library and Ecology Center employees, the D65 sustainability coordinator, and metropolis sustainability and resilience supervisor Cara Pratt — introduced a few of their favorites, together with video messages despatched by authors and illustrators from round the world.
Evanston Public Library Executive Director Yolande Wilburn kicked off the displays with a message from the creator of considered one of her favorites, Nikki Grimes: “If A Walk in the Woods encourages young readers, especially Black children, to explore the great outdoors, nothing could be better.”
Two Blueberry Award winners this yr
Meyer, who additionally leads the award program for the library, stated that, with so many glorious books to select from, the committee determined to offer prime honors to 2 books this yr. The Gift of Mnoomin/Mnoomin Maan’gowing, written in English by Brittany Lubby and translated into Anishinaabemowin, an indigenous North American language, follows a toddler and household via harvest day as they encounter the net of relationships that make mnoomin a keystone species in the Upper Great Lakes. Mnoomin is often known as wild rice, however the guide notes {that a} nearer translation is “spirit berry.” Lubby says in a video message that introduced Meyer to tears that she hopes readers “feel a sense of intergenerational love and interspecies care through the pages, because that is the gift the elders gave me when they first invited me into the field, when they introduced me to mnoomin.”
The second 2023 Blueberry Award went to Rasha Hamid’s How to Bird, which suggests methods for turning younger kids into enthusiastic hen watchers. “This would be a great book to give to a kid or someone you want to get outside and away from screens,” stated librarian Judy Rand. In a video message, Hamid says that the guide “was inspired by the dream that our public green spaces can be safe and welcoming for everyone, that joyful, mindful activities like birding are available to all of us, wherever we live and whoever we are.”
Books that encourage motion
Four books have been acknowledged as “Changemakers” for excellent achievements in partaking kids in motion for the setting. A Little Dose of Nature, by psychologist Allison Greenwood, contains 25 actions that join kids with nature, making it a favourite of Ecology Center employees, stated Margaret Isaacson, the metropolis’s conservation and open air division supervisor.
One of Cara Pratt’s favorites this yr is The Mellons Build an Eco-House, which she recommends “for any kid who loves construction equipment, and any parent who lives in a building and wants to know how to make their home a little bit more environmentally friendly. This is the first children’s book I’ve ever seen that talks about heat pumps,” she added. “Also, this has such an amazing, diverse cast. We’ve got non-binary characters, people of all races, and this is reflective of the clean energy work force that we need. So I hope that it inspires all of our young people to be part of this fight and make our community more climate resilient.”
A particular designation, the Climate Action and Resilience Award, or CARP Award, went to Drawn to Change the World, a guide for younger individuals who wish to study extra about the local weather disaster and what we will do about it, written by Emma Reynolds in collaboration with 16 younger artists and 15 different youth activists from round the world. Pratt chosen the guide for this particular recognition as a result of it aligns effectively with the metropolis’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan.
“This is the book that gives our young climate activists the superhero treatment that they deserve,” she stated.
In a video message, creator Reynolds says that she hopes the guide can be used as a studying instrument. “It is the goal of oppressive systems to make us feel hopeless, to take away our joy, to steal our imagination, and imagination is such a powerful tool,” she says. “This is not just an opportunity to solve the climate crisis and to rewild nature and restore nature, protect nature. It’s also an opportunity to make a better, fairer world for everyone.”
From tumbleweeds to turtles, forest fires to thunderstorms, there’s a matter for everybody on the Blueberry List. There is even a guide, Not a Monster, about the axolotl, a kind of salamander that seems in an Aztec fable and is being affected by air pollution of canals in Mexico City. Attendees selected this guide to obtain the viewers award, and creator Claudia Guadalupe Martínez was there to just accept it in particular person.
Especially well timed for Evanstonians this spring are Cicada Symphony, by Sue Fliess, and Eclipse, by Andy Rash. (Seventeen-year cicadas are anticipated to emerge beginning in May, and on April 8, a complete photo voltaic eclipse can be seen because it transits from Texas to Maine.)
Look for all of those books at each library branches, or ask at native bookstores. The full record is on the Evanston Public Library website.
Climate Watch is a collection of occasional articles about what local weather change means for Evanston and what we are doing regionally to make a distinction.