Remember “Blueberries for Sal” by Robert McCloskey? Young Sal heads for Blueberry Hill with her mother to pick berries for pie, but starts to follow a mama bear (also picking blueberries) home, while the bear cub follows Sal’s mother. If you haven’t read it, don’t worry — happy endings all around. Published in 1948 (and awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1949), “Blueberries for Sal” offers an old-school look at nature — and that’s just what’s missing from contemporary children’s books.
A group of researchers, led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s J. Allen Williams Jr., examined the pictures found in the pages of Caldecott Medal-winning books from 1938 (the first year the prize was awarded) to today. They looked for images of a natural environment (as opposed to a “built” or “modified” environment like a house or park) and of wild animals (rather than domesticated or anthropomorphized creatures). What they found probably doesn’t surprise any parent or child for whom the world of “Blueberries for Sal” is completely alien: where once children’s books offered essentially equal illustrative doses of built and natural environments, natural environments “have all but disappeared” in the last two decades.
Does their disappearance mean anything? The authors note that the fall in the depiction of the natural environment comes (as we’re all anecdotally aware) alongside our increasing isolation from natural environments as a whole. Most children rarely (if ever) pick wild blueberries, or see bears in the woods instead of in a zoo, or digging through suburban trashcans. The researchers point to other studies showing that we — adults and children both — visit our wild spaces and national parks less frequently than we once did, and that wild spaces within our midst are increasingly isolated or eliminated.
The fact that our changed interaction with nature is reflected in our children’s books may not be surprising — but should it be disturbing? Will it matter that we’ve relegated bears and blueberry picking to a world that’s distant not just in space, but in time? It’s such a small shift — fewer pictures of nature in the newest of 296 books chosen for the beauty of their illustrations. But is it (as the authors suspect) a symptom of a larger move away from any real interest in the world beyond our sidewalks and cars at all?