Opinion | Only One State in America Includes the Study of Climate Change for All Grades

I especially loved Peter Wohlleben’s “What’s Wild Outside Your Door?” and Dan Rouse’s “The Children’s Book of Birdwatching.” Both are lavishly illustrated with nature photographs and stocked with suggestions that invite kids to investigate their own ecosystems and help their own wild neighbors. Children will inevitably worry about the safety of what’s wild outside their doors, but these books teach them how to help.

My favorite picture books are the ones that include the whimsy of imaginative storytelling with the information children need to understand what is happening to their planet — all in ways that empower rather than terrify.

One of the best new books in this genre is “One World,” written by Nicola Davies and illustrated by Jenni Desmond. Beginning at one minute before midnight and traveling across the globe hour by hour, the book follows two children as they fly around the planet. At each stop on this fantastical journey, they learn about animal species imperiled by habitat degradation, a heating climate, human predation and the like. Miraculously, this is not a sad book. Ms. Desmond’s magical illustrations are cheerful and bright, and Ms. Davies takes care to explain how all is not yet lost for these creatures, that we can still save them.

This is the message, too, of the new middle-grade edition of Douglas W. Tallamy’s “Nature’s Best Hope,” a best-selling approach to conservation that begins at home. “Over the years, human beings have shown that we’re very good at destroying habitats. Now we have to show that we’re smart enough and thoughtful enough and caring enough to restore what we have ruined,” Mr. Tallamy tells young readers. “I believe we can do it, if you help.”

This is all crucial information for children who live in a country where only one state — New Jersey — includes the study of climate change at all grade levels, and where the science standards for middle-school students in more than 40 states include only a single reference to climate change. In hurricane-plagued Florida, middle-school science standards make no reference to climate change at all.

Maybe it seems a little excessive for someone to bring home an armload of environmental books meant for her neighbors’ children to read, but to me it felt like an exercise in hope.

As I read those books, it dawned on me that picture-book authors and illustrators are laying the groundwork for a better climate future by tapping into children’s inborn compassion, curiosity and sense of justice. These books explain how important it is for everyone to help, kids included, and they give the adults no place to hide. If a child can care so much, shouldn’t we care, too?