The Future of the Earth: An Introduction to Sustainable Development for Children

The man who brought you The Earth from the Air, Arthus-Bertrand, is the man who takes remarkable photographs from his balloon, and, allegedly, listens to Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Burleigh wrote that superb book about Chocolate, and probably enjoys Sun Ra and Charles Mingus. Original thinkers all.

Here again, the pictures are absolutely stunning but the role of the text stretches beyond that of Earth from the Air as it explains the perilous plight of many features of an environment and the dangers to which human activity increasingly exposes them. Each spread presents a part of the world and the global concerns that influence it, with, where applicable, intimations of solutions to dangers. The balance per spread is about three-quarters terrific picture to a quarter highly relevant text and the whole much less ‘for children’ than Earth from the Air which helps a lot.

So we get, in 80 pages, brilliant expositions of, among other situations, Kosovan refugee camps, Fair Trade pineapples in the Côte d’Ivoire, glaciers shrinking in Patagonia, the U.S. war machine, garbage-pickers in Mexico City. It’s all there, and easy to absorb.

My only worry about this spectacular, highly relevant and great value tenner’s worth is that the pictures are so impressive that they may distract from the text and its valuable complementary information, but this is a great experience and everyone, of any age, should be exposed to it – from 7 years upwards, forever.