Burning Down the House
Picturebook Backstories : 13b The Trouble with Dragons
Let’s dive straight back in, shall we? This edition of Bonus Content is the follow-up to last week’s newsletter which was all about the why of my book, The Trouble with Dragons. This edition is about the how.
So. How. Trying to write a picturebook about the impending catastrophe of the climate crisis is a tough call. I don’t know how other artists have managed to pull it off but I felt obliged to frame the subject in a way that wouldn’t cause children to have nightmares while simultaneously remaining truthful to the increasingly uncompromising bleakness of the IPCC’s predictions.
And that was then. That was back in 2007. Nineteen years ago.
Since then…
For once, I have no words.
Look. Here’s an infinitesimal fraction of what we’re losing.
And I’m 100 percent sure that you, just like me, have many similar images of the natural world tucked away inside your camera, your phone, your hard drive, your holiday photo album and anywhere you cache your treasures. Just in case they are lost forever. Just so that you have a record of how the world used to look. The world of the Before Times.
Before we went 100% Dragon.
So. How to explain the grave peril we were in without causing alarm? Back when I began the process of dreaming up this book, my first thought was utterly irreverent. Probably because my response to terror is frequently to try and de-escalate by using humour as a kind of fire extinguisher. Hence:
Santa Claus up to his knees in melting ice with an obliging polar bear holding his hat. Because in a warming world, Santa’s icy homestead would have melted into a giant puddle. There. That’ll get the message across. If the grown-ups keep on burning fossil fuels, there’ll be no Christmas, in fact, there won’t even be a lump of coal in your stocking.
Santa and his polar bear companion did put in a cameo appearance in the book but thankfully, I didn’t pursue this lame idea any further. Instead, I tried to gather every single thing I’d read and understood about the climate crisis and write about it in as factual and non-sensational a form as possible. With one proviso: there was no way I was going to sugar-coat the real danger that we were facing.
The whole point of making the book was to get children on side. To alert them sufficiently to the existential threat that we were facing and to engage their considerable powers of persuasion1 in the effort to get the grown-ups to pay attention and change their ways before…2
As you can probably imagine, I struggled with how to write the truth without spreading fear. How to sound the alarm whilst at the same time saying don’t panic. I went backwards and forwards and round and round, which is to say I wrote and scored out and rewrote. I did this on repeat.
I went for long walks. I muttered stanzas to myself, like some crazy lady of the woods. I tried it this way( prose), that way ( rhymes) and finally, I found a way in.
Which was - what if I didn’t write the book with humans as the creators and victims of the climate crisis? What if I substituted a race of mythical creatures? A bunch of fire-breathing beasts who were causing the world to burn, mythical beings whose actions had turned their hitherto perfect planet into a burning hellscape? That wouldn’t be nearly as frightening, would it? I could lay out the case for what was coming to our planet if we didn’t mend our ways… but at a complete remove.
Thus ; it wasn’t us (who were burning down the house and were about to suffer the consequences) it was the dragons.
Phew! Those pesky dragons, eh?
However, less you think I diluted the message, on the very last page of the book, the narrator addresses the reader directly.
So, if you know a Dragon and most of us do, ask it if it thinks that this story is true. For if we can't see that our stories are linked, then sadly, like Dragons we'll soon be extinct.
The image on this, the book’s final page is a dragon parent reading a bedtime story to their child.
And just to hammer the point home, the dragon child is pointing to the most frightening picture I’ve ever painted from the actual The Trouble with Dragons book.
‘Ask it if it thinks that this story is true.’
In my reading on the subject, I had stumbled across references to the existence of methane clathrates. These are deep frozen, vast bubbles of methane which are beginning to bubble up from their centuries old storage in the (now melting) permafrost. Methane being a greenhouse gas several factors of awful beyond dear old CO2 . Apparently, there’s enough methane in cold storage to drive global temperatures far beyond a pissy 2 degrees of warming. In fact, this was my vision of a world with 6 degrees of warming, which is probably the kind of world where most of the methane clathrates have entered our atmosphere.
Those dragons, eh?
Anyhoo. I’m sorry. You came here for lighthearted stories from the world of children’s publishing and what do you get? A message from The Dark Side. In my own defence, can I just say that my current lack of jollity has probably got a lot to do with the conversations I’ve been having with the electorate on their doorsteps? Conversations that make me want to go and stand under that beautiful spider’s web and tear my hair out. To stand in a forest and howl like a wolf. To lie in the moss and beg forgiveness from our beautiful biosphere. Forgiveness for not making it our number one priority to halt the ongoing destruction of our exquisitely beautiful home planet.
Like - what the hell are we thinking of? Why are we simply going about our lives while our only house is on fire?
You know the drill. You’ve read your Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben, George Monbiot, Jill Lepore etc. You love David Attenborough’s life-affirming documentaries. You know exactly what the score is. And possibly, like me, you’re peering into your fridge and wondering what the heck to make with one withered aubergine and a pack of on-its-dates halloumi? Wondering if you can fit in yoga into your ridiculously crammed schedule? Wondering why you feel exhausted every time you poke at your little black rectangle of doom? Wondering why you are drawn to being constantly informed about the endless ongoing wars and genocides and biosphere emmiseration against the backdrop of a climate that is clearly letting us know that This Cannot Continue.
Hmmmm.
The actual dedication for The Trouble with Dragons is
For my children with love and hope
While I still think we can turn this one around, I’m beyond tired. I’m doing my best to get this message out there, but I cannot do it on my own. If any of this has struck a chord with you, then please~
And finally, look, here’s one of the billions of reasons why all of this matters -
I think it’s fair to say that if we love something, we’ll do our best to protect it.
Our home planet deserves nothing less than our deepest love. Every atom, every creature, every single living thing.
AKA ‘Pester power’. Moves mountains, turns captains of industry into compliant jelly and turns parental thus-far-and-no-further boundaries into rubble. Never underestimate the power of a small person’s determination to get what they want.
Before it was 2026 and we’d burned our way through enough carbon to ensure a rise in global temperatures that we possibly could have avoided back then. But here we are. Living in interesting times. Hugging our loved ones. Looking at photographs of spider’s webs and weeping. Out campaigning for a better world, which I am sure is still possible but one which will be far, far harder to achieve now in 2026 than it might have been back in 2008.
Thank you. This burning world needs to pay attention 🥺🥺🥺
What can I say?
I applaud every word. Big time.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️