Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Virginia Lowe Tison and Taylor’s picture book Barbapapa’s Ark presents a degraded world with animals in danger and pollution affecting people. Barbapapa and his family (huge, amoeba-like shape-changing creatures) rescue the animals and take them to a ‘quiet green planet’, inducing people to clean up to the world with underground factories, tree planting etc. Then they and the animals return. My son and daughter found the text very stimulating, inspiring numerous questions as they tried to understand over a period of years and almost one hundred readings: ‘Why is there pollution?’; ‘Why didn’t they stay on the planet?’ This paper will look at their responses to the book, and how it affected them in their environmental awareness and responsibility into adulthood. The research is based on the record I kept of their book contacts from birth to adolescence (6000 handwritten pages). My book, Stories, Pictures and Reality covers the period from birth to eight. Virginia Lowe has lectured at university, and has been a children’s librarian and a judge for the CBCA’s Book of the Year Award. She runs a manuscript assessment agency (www.creatakidsbook.com.au).
