January 2022

First, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get your start as a nature writer and children’s author?

If I have a totem animal that first lured me into the wonders of nature, it’s got to be the humble Red-backed salamander. As a kid I spent hours prowling alone through the sugar maple forest behind my house, kicking over logs, searching for this elusive creature that, to my seven-year old brain, was undoubtedly some kind of mini dinosaur.

Sparked by those mysterious, googly-eyed salamanders, my passion for the natural world eventually led me to the wilds of northern Canada, tracking caribou over the Yukon mountains, or flying low over the Arctic tundra, searching for satellite-collared grizzly bears.

The man who opened up the north for me, and mentored me through graduate school, was a wolf biologist named John Theberge at the University of Waterloo. Besides being a first-class scientist, he was an exceptional writer who harnessed the power of story to promote wolf conservation and other environmental causes. Published widely in technical journals, John also wrote compelling articles, editorials, and books for  mainstream readers from all walks of life.

Theberge’s commitment to take science to the streets had a huge influence on seeding my own desire to write. From him I learned the power of the pen to not only connect people with nature, but empower them to rally for its protection.

I started spreading my own green gospel by writing environmental songs for kids. Soon I was doing a weekly nature column on CBC North radio and regular articles in northern magazines. Then came nature videos, ecotheatre plays, and one-man living history shows at the Yellowknife museum.

My first books were aimed at adults and included everything from hiking and river guides, to books on rocks, birds, bears, northern lights, and snow. Falling for Snow was among my adult titles, but it led to a series of “edutainment” videos aimed at middle-schoolers. Once my young daughters learned I was doing stuff for kids they declared, “No more books, Dad, unless you write a kid’s book!” I took their challenge seriously.

As I went about my work as a biologist, I began to keep my writer’s radar on high alert for a juicy adventure that young readers could sink their teeth into. I found it one day while searching for a slippery grizzly bear that was getting dangerously close to the Arctic diamond mine where I worked. When I finally spotted it leap out from behind a boulder, stand up, and shake its claws at our helicopter, I knew I’d found my story!

What sprang from that initial burst of inspiration was my first of several YA novels, Tracking Triple Seven, about a family of grizzlies struggling to survive in the shadow of a bustling diamond mine. I had no choice but to dedicate it to my daughters.

How has where you’ve lived, formerly in Yellowknife and now in southern BC, inspired you as a creator of books about the natural world?

I believe that all Canadians carry within them what I call a “metaphysical landscape,” reflecting some external landscape that gets under our skin as we grow up. Whether we were born under the northern lights on the banks of the Yukon River, on a farm out on the sprawling prairies, or a few blocks above Halifax harbour, all of us have a special landscape for which we feel a unique resonance, even reverence, that shapes how we see and value the world.

For me, that landscape is the Canadian Shield. My family spent every summer at a cottage on a granite-studded, wave-washed island on Georgian Bay, Ontario. Even though the cottage slipped from our family’s hands decades ago, that ancient rocky landscape, adorned with windswept pines and lily ponds, still underpins my soul.

So, no surprise that when I moved to Yellowknife I fell instantly in love with the surrounding landscape. It too had that unmistakable “blue lake and rocky shore” feel to it that reminded me so much of the Ontario Shield I grew up on. This affection for my new natural home inspired me to learn all I could about it – from its basement bedrock to its shimmering canopy of northern lights – and share this knowledge through my writing.

My life in northern Canada shaped the themes, topics and issues featured in my books. For example, I wrote a couple of “cli-fi” thrillers set in the heart of a fast-changing Arctic assaulted by climate change: On Thin Ice and its sequel, Sila’s Revenge. Through the power of stories like these, I invited young readers to experience the melting sea ice and freakish thunderstorms from the point of view of a frightened polar bear. Or ride a gush of solar wind as it crashes into our planet’s magnetosphere and erupts into an aerial volcano of northern lights. Or take a literal birds-eye view of the migratory adventures of one nighthawk as it flies from the Amazon rainforest to the Arctic tundra.

With Yellowknife as my base camp, these were the kinds of stories I was inspired to craft. Then, after living up there for 35 years, I moved to a completely different landscape, the densely forested mountains of southern British Columbia. Though nature’s glory is still on grand display not far from the towns scattered through this wild and beautiful region, it is, as one local from Nelson told me, a “managed wilderness.”

It was in my adopted southern home that I wrote Protectors of the Planet, a YA non-fiction that shines an up-close-and-personal spotlight on a dozen environmental trailblazers from across Canada. Though I’d done most of the interviews for this project before moving here, I now felt better equipped to write about things like forest fires, flooding, and loss of old growth forests because the impacts from these environmental problems are much more in your face in BC.

You may see me wearing a button on my jacket with the message: Write Local. I am a big believer in “place-based writing”. I am just beginning my adventure of befriending a whole new biome here in BC and very curious to see how this process will affect my future writing projects. Already I can tell that a kids’ book about trees is germinating inside me!

It’s easy to feel negative about the future, especially considering the frightening impacts we’re already experiencing from climate change. What advice do you have for young people who feel pessimistic about the future in regards to the environment?

In the fall of 2019, when millions of youth around the world were following Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, into the streets screaming for action on climate change, American novelist Jonathan Franzen published a super controversial article in the New Yorker suggesting that, yes, the climate apocalypse is coming, but to best prepare for it, we need to admit we can’t prevent it. In “What If We Stopped Pretending?” Franzen begins with a serious downer for anyone under thirty, declaring that they are “guaranteed” to witness the destabilization of life as we know it thanks to unstoppable climate change.

“If you care about the planet,” he writes, “and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.”

Instead of “rolling up our sleeves to try and save the planet,” Franzen, advises that our greatest hope lies in fighting smaller, more local battles – saving a wild place, a species in trouble, a stream that needs your love – “and take heart in your small successes.”

I get what Franzen is saying – but don’t agree with him. It’s true that young people who throw all their activist eggs into one global basket, are often plagued by frustration, anger, cynicism and despair. You can see that written all over Greta Thunberg’s face (she has vowed to “never be satisfied” until global carbon emissions start tipping downwards). And I appreciate that Franzen hasn’t given up completely on advocating positive action by focusing on more doable, homegrown projects.

But where do I find my greatest hope? Not kicking over logs looking for cool critters, though I still delight in that. I find hope in the lives of people doing amazing things to protect the natural world, at whatever scale. Think globally, act locally! That’s my activist’s motto and main advice to young people. All projects that fit somewhere on this spectrum, tackled with passion and smarts, work for me. Stirred together, they create a complementary mosaic of hope and possibility. That’s why I wrote Protectors of the Planet – to fuel young people’s hope and inspire them to action.

By showcasing the inspiring lives of a dozen environmental trailblazers, Protectors of the Planet offers an antidote to rampant despair which Elizabeth May, featured in the book, calls “an enormous threat” especially in children. “Hope,” she declares, “is a verb with its sleeves rolled up,” as testified by her own incredible life story.

Young readers will meet some pretty awesome people. A teen activist who risked gunfire to save a forest. A young woman who fought impossible odds to pioneer giraffe research in Africa. A teenage girl who barely escaped Nazi Germany and devoted the rest of her days to greening cities. A young climate crusader who lobbies nose-to-nose with the most powerful politicians in the land. And lots more!

I asked all of these change-makers what hands-on advice they had for young people who want to make a difference. At the end of each life story I distilled their answers into “Trailblazer Tips” to help readers blaze their own trail.

Each character in the book forged completely unique paths. Yet their tips for young people revealed many common themes:

Follow your passion.

Find your voice.

Trust in your wisdom.

Do what you love.

Do your homework.

Never give up.

Keep hope alive.

Embrace mentors.

Tell a story.

Capture the heart (the hand will follow).

Celebrate victories.

Stay positive.

Never forget that you are not alone.

Trust that you’re at least headed in the right direction.

Oh yes, and one of my favourite tips:

Get outside!

Whatever one’s passion, from wolves to whales, and whatever the scale, from local to global, the risk of activist fatigue and burnout is often just around the corner – the next rally to plan, speech to deliver, politician to lobby, or campaign to launch. In the thick of your overflowing to-do list, it’s easy to lose sight of the raison d’être of any environmental cause: to protect healthy, life-supporting ecosystems on which we all depend.

For environmental activists, both young or old, occasionally putting down the placard and pen, and spending some quality chill time outside is one of the best ways to recharge your batteries, refuel your hope, and reconnect with the natural world you are ultimately serving. As wolf biologist John Theberge advises in Protectors of the Planet, “Go roll in a bog, camp by a stream, or just walk in a park to connect with nature and regain perspective.”

“Get outside!” I say whenever I’m coaching young activists. Take the time to unplug from any AWFUL news about looming ecocatastrophes and plug into nature any way you can. Open yourself to its AWE-FULL wonders and magic, whether gazing out at a vast wilderness from the top of a mountain or simply enjoying an amazing sunset from the balcony of your 10^th story downtown apartment.

When you can’t get outside or crave a place that’s much bigger and wilder than your own backyard, the right books can take you there. Either experience – from the trail or from the page – can help you emerge refreshed and ready to roll up your sleeves once again to serve the planet in your own special way.

How can parents and educator’s use your books to promote activism in young people?

Soon after I started writing for children, I was hit one morning with an epiphany that revealed the whole point of my work. I awoke with this job description ringing in my head: To promote environmental literacy through the power of story!

I saw that by always putting the magic of story first – above the facts of nature or environmental issues – I’d discovered a creative mix between two important dimensions of environmental literacy. I call them the “M & Ms” and the “N & Ns”: the Magic and Mystery and the Names and Numbers, or if you like, the heart stuff fostering affection for the natural world, and the head stuff fostering awareness of how it all fits together.

I also saw the need to tweak these dimensions to conform to the age and aptitudes of young readers. Here’s how Earth-shaking environmentalist and writer Rachel Carson put it in The Sense of Wonder: “I sincerely believe that, for the child, it is not half so important to know as to feel.” Putting emotional connections first – the heart stuff – she stressed the importance of paving the way for children “to want to know rather than putting them on a diet of facts they are not ready to assimilate.”

And these days, those facts are pretty scary, with much of the news blaring how the natural world is falling apart!

Galvanized by a gnawing sense of urgency and 2019’s colossal “Youthquake” when millions of young people marched to protect the planet, I added a third arrow to my environmental literacy quiver. I call it the “P&Ps” for Placard and Pen. This is the hands-on stuff to help young Earthlings build a more sustainable future, whether in their own backyards, their community, or on the global stage.

Yes, we need to nourish young readers hearts with the M&Ms that reinforce their inborn connection with nature. And, when they’re old enough, we can dial up the N&Ns to help their heads decipher the natural world. But now, like never before, the stories we write or select for children – when they’re ready for it – should help engage their hands in activism.

In my books I like to play with these three dimensions of environmental literacy, dialling them up or down according to the target age. For instance Free as the Wind is a picture book about how one boy helps to save the wild horses of Nova Scotia’s Sable Island. This story begins by cultivating a strong connection with this magical place, then introduces a stirring but relatively simple threat to its wild horses (turning them into dog food!) which the child protagonist ultimately conquers.

At the other end of my target audience is Protectors of the Planet. From the get-go this book dives headlong into Big Environmental Issues, explicitly exhorting teenagers to help solve them. But this treasury of compelling biographies is much more than a young activist’s handbook. As I write in the introduction, “In following the trails blazed by these remarkable people, may you discover excellent adventure, deep inspiration, practical advice, and rekindled hope for the future—as I have.”

Whether aimed at pre-schoolers or high-schoolers, whether fiction or non-fiction, my stories for young people are propelled by central characters bent on making the world a better place: a young boy who saves wild horses, a teen climate change crusader from the high Arctic, a city-slicker kid who becomes a defender of grizzly bears, a “screenager” who finds deliverance on a wild northern river. And of course the colourful cast of real-life characters in Protectors of the Planet – all ordinary people doing extraordinary things to safeguard life on Earth and preserve its magnificence.

My hope is that young readers can see themselves in these characters, real or imagined, and that, ultimately, they serve as role models, showing kids and teens how they too can make the world a better place when they really care about something. In that spirit, I often sign my books, “Believe in the power of one!”

What projects are you working on now? Can you tell us about any upcoming books?

While holding fast to the primacy of story – in my case outdoor adventure stories – my impulse to dive into a new book project always springs from some environmental issue that I care deeply about. Examples from my children’s books to date include climate change, endangered wildlife, the decline of migratory birds, and the impact of digital technology on our relationship with nature.

In the case of my most recent book, Protectors of the Planet, the underlying theme is, ‘How do we find hope and empowerment in our rapidly darkening world?’

An issue that’s grabbed me lately, especially since moving to BC, is our often-troubled relationship with forests and how we can better take care of them.

I remember while on a canoe trip many years ago, stopping on a portage to admire a white pine tree clinging to a sliver of soil on a rocky cliff high above a gorgeous lake. Wow! I thought. What would it be like to spend your entire life right here on this incredible spot?

As a nature writer committed to portraying animals accurately, one of the most challenging and fun things I like to do is enter into the first-hand experience of the non-human world. The points of view inhabited in my books include a grizzly bear, polar bear, nighthawk, turtle – even a wallaby – to name a few of my animal heroes. Often I will flip perspectives from animal to human then back again to cultivate more engagement and empathy in the reader.

So heck, why not inhabit a tree? Or a forest?

I used to create kid songs about trees in the early days of my writing career. Given what we’re learning about the miraculous interconnections within and below forests, and how quickly they are falling down or burning up, I feel like I’m in the right time and place to write an empowering kids book about trees.

Whatever I end up writing down the road, my top priority will always be to help nourish environmentally literate children – their hearts, heads and hands – through the magnetic power of story. This goal drives me even more since the birth of our first grandchild, whose very presence on this troubled planet tangibly changes my sense of the future, and the urgency to do what I can to make it rosier.