When I first contacted Tim Magner about featuring his Green Sugar Press at The Recession Kitchen, he warned me that he wouldn’t be much help in offering recipes. He’s not a cook.
“I’m like a lot of Americans, maybe even most Americans,” he later explained. “I don’t spend so much time on food preparation. I mean, here’s an example, right before you called I was munching on some granola.”
This isn’t to say Magner doesn’t care about where his food comes from. He cares immensely. That’s why, when he can, he buys all of his food at farmers markets.
“You can talk to the people who grow your food. For the last 10,000 years we’ve always had that. It was the last few generations when we lost that. There’s something about being able to talk to the farmer who grew your food and ask him, ‘when did you pick this? How did you grow this?’ There’s something to be said for knowing more than what we usually know.”
Magner likes to be in the know. That’s why when he started writing children’s books he decided to start Green Sugar. He wanted to know about the process, from first draft to delivering the finished book to a reader’s hands.
Part making this possible required that the Chicago-based writer keep things local, that allowed him to keep tabs on where each of his projects stood. When he needed illustrators, he found them at the Art Institute of Chicago. When he needed a printing press, he called a friend in Chicago ‘burbs.
“I like to know how everything works from soup to nuts,” he explained.
Magner has now seen three picture books through the process.
There’s Earl the Earthworm Digs for His Life, which follows an earthworm as he
discovers his importance. My two-year-old, by the way, loves the story and now
must dig for earthworms with almost every trip into the yard. And there are N is for Nature: An Environmental Alphabet
Book, an alphabet book targeted at emergent readers, and An Environmental Guide from A to Z.
None of the books preach. None speak of the evils of reliance on fossil fuels. They don’t blast factory farms or shovel guilt for the state of the fish. They simply do not offer a view of a planet gasping for a heroic generation to save it.
“I think kids should be given he chance to love the planet before we ask them to save it,” Magner said.
It’s an idea he thinks should be at the core of all environmental education, and it’s at the core of Green Sugar’s motto: “Growing Green Minds.”
Magner grew up when the environmental movement was first capturing the attention of the nation. But, he said, it wasn’t Woodsy the Owl asking him to keep it clean that made him love the outdoors.
It was diving into the lagoons at the golf course that abutted his family’s home. It was shucking sweet corn at his grandparent’s Wisconsin summer home. It was catching frogs with his four brothers and sisters.
“I think unstructured outdoor time is a really important part of a kid’s development,” he said. “Instead of going to soccer practice, maybe skip it and ride your bike to a botanical garden and wander around for a while.”
Getting into touch with our own backyards is a critical part of learning to love the planet, he continued.
“I was recently talking to a local school district [in northern suburbs of Chicago]. They were telling me about a program they are starting, a whole curriculum based around the Brazilian rainforest,” he said. “They asked me what I thought. I told them I thought it was great. All they needed to do was scrap the rain forest thing, and use the Skokie Lagoons.”
Magner believes all children should be given the opportunity to get outside.
“I was at a school on the South Side and I met with the principal afterwards and was like, ‘that backyard you have is awesome! It’d be a perfect spot for a garden and use it to teach math, science, reading, and writing. You can do it all right there!’ And she looked at me like I was crazy and she gave me 14 reasons why that wouldn’t work for her school.”
He conceded that she did have some good reasons. “There aren’t any easy answers,” he said.
But, he added, not all 14 of the answers would stop him.
The goal, he repeated, is giving kids a chance to love their planet, and this time he quoted John Burroughs.
"Knowledge without love will not stick. But if love comes first, knowledge is sure to follow."
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