To Change A Planet came out of a time of me feeling like really helpless and just doom, like feeling doom and gloom heavily about climate change. And then having this moment of realizing that this problem that seems so overwhelming and so huge is caused by something that’s really small. It’s caused by molecules. It’s almost as small as you can get, but there’s just so many of them. And that’s the same way that we’re going to solve any problem, any problem in the world, whether it’s poverty or climate change, anything that seems overwhelming, it gets tackled by people who are, each one of us, very small, very tiny, but all together we can make a big impact. And when I felt that, I was like, oh, that just clicked to me so much. And the feeling of hopefulness that I felt when I realized that was like, I felt like I had to share that.
So that is the inspiration for the book. And I knew I wanted to write it for something that could be read for really little ones, for families, something that a teacher could read in a class very easily, pick it up and do it as a read aloud very quickly. Because most of the climate change books that were out there at the time, and I think still are very fact heavy and dense. And I just wanted something that felt like a poem and felt light at the end. So that’s where that came from. I wanted the main text to be very lyrical and easily digestible. But then the back matter, I wanted it to be very rich, completely. All of the truth, everything that we know about climate change, like the best sources. So all of that is taken from the intergovernmental panel on climate change, their reports. And so to write the book, I just dug through their reports. They put out these incredible synthesized reports of the latest research of “how do we know the climate is changing?” “How do we know humans are causing it?” “What can we do about it?” “What’s the best?” So I just wanted to give teachers and parents the very best information, but you don’t have to go read those I.P.C.C. reports. So that was a lot of my science museum training coming in there to condense those, to make them even more synthesized for kids.
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