What do you get when you combine the intimate feltness of poetry with prose tales about visionary young people inspired to do something about climate change? A big dose of hope in the form of No World Too Big.
This book begins with a description of the 2015 United Nations "Paris Agreement" and then introduces readers ages five to nine to young activists around the world: Greta Thunberg in Sweden, Lina Yassin in Sudan, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Maanasa Mendu in the United States, Autumn Peltier in Canada, Artemisa Xakriaba in Brazil, Leah Namugerwa in Uganda, and more. It also describes communities of young people acting together, like students in the Marshall Islands who created a Youth Leadership Coalition to advocate for climate progress.
All the stories are moving, meaningful, and meant to inspire readers' own actions. In Kyiv, Ukraine, for instance, two eleven-year olds named Nikita Shulga and Sofiia-Khrystyna Borysiuk heard about overflowing landfills and took it upon themselves to raise money to install compost bins in nearby schools. They then got support from Ukraine's ecology ministers to install more than 230 school composters, until "war with Russia disrupted the project and changed their lives." Their efforts encourage readers to divert food waste from landfills to keep it from becoming methane, a powerful heat-trapping gas.
Each page highlighting the aspirations and accomplishments of the activists is matched with a poem about them. In the excerpt accompanying this review, you can read the poem Renée M. LaTulippe wrote about Marinel Ubaldo, who — in response to a typhoon that destroyed her village in the Philippines and killed thousands — held theater productions to teach about climate change and attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Closing pages suggest actions like reducing meat consumption, planting trees, and contacting city officials about safer bike paths. Rounding out this wide-ranging coverage are a glossary, a helpful chart for visualizing the impact of greenhouse gases, descriptions of the poetry forms featured (acrostic, free verse, sea chantey, and more), and biographical sketches of the poets and the book's science consultant. What a bounty of well-informed, motivating hope!
