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  2. Wouldn't it be great if Richard Scarry was still around to do a new Busytown book on science or sustainability? (I'd buy it anyway)

Wouldn't it be great if Richard Scarry was still around to do a new Busytown book on science or sustainability? (I'd buy it anyway)

By worldsfair on November 20, 2006.

Yesterday, I was playing with my kids and having fun with the Find Lowly Worm game that seems to be a rite of passage when looking through a Richard Scarry picture book.

Anyway, in our edition of "What Do People Do All Day?" I was amused by a substantial 4 page spread about coal as a source of energy (titled Digging coal to make electricity work for us). I guess it got me thinking that wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a similar children's book produced that can have the same degree of cultural prevalence, but also includes graphics looking at energy alternatives like wind, solar, wave, hydro, nuclear, etc. In essense, a Busytown book that focuses on concepts of sustainability or maybe even technology in general, where rapport can be continually fostered with analogous Lowly Worm type traditions.

I would soooo buy that book, if only because those kind of slides would rock in a slideshow. Anyway, check out the spreads below:

i-1e3c3801c1d14d8203e4a04f37cd97d1-digging1small.jpg

i-417e89df39a84574538f7c69cf1b9e23-digging2small.jpg

Ironic that one of more obvious graphic elements is the billowing smoke from the barbeque on the left right... (click here for larger shot)

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Great idea!

The barbeque is on the right in the lower picture.

Dr. Seuss' book, The Lorax, springs to mind as one that addresses sustainability.

I attended an EPA hearing where an adult read it aloud as officially recorded testimony against gutting the Clean Air Act. By popular demand, the moderator even granted him a little extra time to finish the last page.
 

You know, coincidental again, and interesting thing about this particular graphic, Dave: just two days ago (I know, I always say that, but it's true again) I noticed and made an out loud comment that our "What Do People Do All Day?" was the "abridged edition." and you know what didn't make the cut in the abridged version? That electricity image above.

You think there's anything to it? Like he thought better of it in the abridged, later edition?

Plus, we just re-read the Mountain Top Removal stuff in my class (from the posts we did on MTR a few months ago on here), which brought up again the same conversation about "where does our electricity come from boys and girls...?"

And then the "Another Way" post just yesterday also brings up the same point, about strategic ignorance. We live as if separate from our world.

Old Richard Scarry. Everything is connected.

I love reading that book to my kids. I have both the original (from my childhood) and abridged editions, and I'm not sure whether it was abridged before or after Scarry's death. I'm never sure which version to read to the kids. Usually the unabridged, since their favorite stories are "Water" and "Coal", even though the technology is pretty obsolete (as I have to keep pointing out to them). And as for "Mother's Work is Never Done"....

There probably is a "Busytown" version with sustainability addressed (published after Scarry died and written by someone else), but the people who run the Scarry estate seem to have decided that if they can put 1/10th the detail into pictures and still sell books, why bother to do it the way he used to? So watch out if you find a "new" one.