The Best Cure for Climate Anxiety is Climate Action, a guest post by author Nora Dåsnes

I sometimes get asked why I write about heavy topics, like the climate crisis, in books for middle grade children.

The real answer is: I actually try not to. Not because I don’t think these books are worth writing, or because I think children shouldn’t read about difficult things, but because writing them is hard and often sad. I find the thought of ecological mass death incredibly upsetting and would like to think about it as little as possible. Unfortunately, I am unable to do so, because the consequences of our inaction are getting louder and louder every year.

Although I think my primary job as a children’s book author is to write for the people who are children now, I also remember the child I used to be. And the child I used to be was also scared, sad and angry about how we treat the planet that is our home. I felt like everything was going too slow, I felt like the adults in charge didn’t deliver on their promises when it really mattered, and worst of all, I felt like there was nothing I could do about it.

I was reminded of these feelings late summer in 2021. At the time, I had just finished my second book (a graphic novel for young adults and adults called Missed Calls about the aftermath of the 2011 terror attack in Norway), and I was trying to find my way back to writing for middle grade. Several of my readers had written to me and asked for a sequel to Cross My Heart and Never Lie, and I was trying to figure out if this was something I could do. That is when the “Code Red for Humanity”-report came from the UN, and I felt all the sadness, anger, and fear that I always do when these are presented. I made a short comic about it try to get it out of my system and posted it to Instagram. Unfortunately, or fortunately, my editor saw it and asked if I wanted to work with the same topic in my next graphic novel. “Maybe this can be Bao’s project,” she said.

This was the entry point I needed. Bao is one of the characters in Cross My Heart and Never Lie, an active kid who isn’t afraid to say her opinions and cares a lot about right and wrong. She was perfect to explore this topic in a way that wouldn’t just be sad. I also decided she needed a physical place to defend, the local forest that also plays an important part in the first book, as a sanctuary away from schoolyard politics and coolness. This also allowed me to use activism as a big part of the plot, which was great, because activism comes with tension, action, and the big emotions you need to drive a plot.

My only issue is that I have never protested the way Bao protests in the book, because I am much less brave than her and find breaking the rules terrifying to this day. To get help, I visited a Norwegian organization called Natur og Ungdom (Nature and Youth), at one of their protests. They are known for doing civil disobedience while being safe and responsible, which felt like the right mix of the exciting part of activism and not writing something that might get kids in too much trouble.

As a novelist, I of course wanted to talk to them about feelings as well. A common criticism of children’s media about the climate crisis is that it can supposedly drive up anxiety. Personally, I think a great way to prevent climate anxiety in children would be to actually meet our carbon emission reduction goals, but I was still interested in hearing how the young activists dealt with steeping themselves in all this bleak information about the world. Did it make them more scared? Did they stay up at night worrying about rising sea levels, droughts, and forest fires?

The answer was no. All the activists told me they had become a lot less anxious about the future after joining the organization. “The best cure for climate anxiety is climate action”, one of them said.

This idea stayed with me as I finished the work on Save Our Forest!. Because even though I sometimes can’t avoid writing about the sad and dark parts about the world, my goal is never to scare the reader into thinking we’re lost. I want my books to be an antidote to the disjointed news most of us get through 20-second video clips, to stay a while longer in the sadness and the anger, so that we also have time to work through those feelings and end up somewhere lighter.  

Author bio:

Nora Dåsnes is a Norwegian writer and illustrator. Her first graphic novel, Cross My Heart and Never Lie, was immediately embraced by teen readers, librarians, reviewers, booksellers — and Alice Oseman, NYT Bestselling author of Heartstopper, who said “Reading this was like a warm hug.” It was named a New York Public Library Best Book, a Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choice and received the ALA Stonewall Award. Nora’s second middle-grade graphic novel, Save Our Forest!, will be published by Hippo Park/Astra Books For Young Readers on July 30. 

Filed under: Climate Change, Mind the Middle, Mind the Middle Project