Nature & Children’s Literature: Understanding How Words Carry Nature Through Time and Space

Nature often survives first in language before it survives in policy, conservation zones, or archives. For most children, the earliest encounter with rivers, birds, animals, and forests does not occur through direct experience but through words—spoken, sung, or read aloud. Poems introduce names of birds that no longer appear in neighbourhoods, stories carry rivers that children may never visit, and moral tales frame relationships between humans and non-human life long before environmental awareness becomes a formal subject of education.

Children’s literature, especially in regional languages, has functioned as an informal but persistent system of ecological memory. It preserves not only references to landscapes but also the ethical grammar through which societies have historically understood their environments. Unlike adult literature, which often reflects on environmental loss retrospectively, children’s literature works at an earlier stage. It introduces nature as normal, familiar, and embedded in everyday life, even when that everyday reality is already eroding.

This preservation is not symbolic alone. When words disappear from usage, the worlds they refer to often follow. Children’s literature resists this erosion by keeping vocabulary alive, names of local birds, seasonal cycles, rivers, animals, and agricultural rhythms, ensuring that nature remains linguistically accessible even when physically distant.

Migration, Urban Childhoods, and the Shrinking Radius of Nature

Contemporary childhood in India is increasingly shaped by mobility. Migration from villages to towns, towns to cities, and across states has altered how children relate to place. Many grow up without regular access to open water bodies, fields, forests, or shared commons. Their immediate environments are structured by enclosed spaces, roads, screens, and institutional schedules.

This transformation produces not only ecological loss but cognitive and linguistic thinning. Children unfamiliar with local ecosystems often lack words for them. A bird without a name becomes invisible; a river without stories becomes abstract. Over time, this absence reshapes imagination itself.

In this context, children’s literature becomes a compensatory cultural mechanism. Stories written in Odia and other regional languages carry the textures of local environments—monsoon rhythms, village ponds, animals living alongside humans, seasonal changes that once structured social life. These narratives allow children who live far from ancestral landscapes to inherit a sense of ecological belonging without physical proximity. Literature travels where geography cannot.

Why Children’s Literature Sustains Ecological Ethics More Effectively Than Instruction

Environmental education today often relies on facts, data, and warnings. While necessary, these approaches assume a rational relationship with nature. Children’s literature operates differently. It situates nature inside the moral and emotional universe of the child. Animals are neighbours, rivers observe human actions, and trees respond to care or neglect.

This narrative framing builds ethical proximity rather than informational distance. Children learn not because they are told to protect nature, but because nature is presented as part of social life. Moral education embedded in stories—kindness to animals, respect for water, restraint in consumption—shapes sensibility before abstract reasoning takes over.

Such ethical formations tend to persist. Adults may forget environmental statistics, but childhood stories often remain intact, shaping instincts and values long after formal education ends. In this sense, children’s literature acts as slow, durable environmental pedagogy.

Odia Children’s Literature and the Preservation of Landscape Knowledge

Odia children’s literature emerged alongside the broader consolidation of the modern Odia language and identity. From its early phases, it consistently foregrounded rural life, animals, seasons, and everyday human–nature interactions. This emphasis reflected Odisha’s lived geography, its rivers, agrarian cycles, forested regions, and village commons and an awareness that children were becoming increasingly detached from these environments.

Rather than framing nature as spectacle or loss, Odia children’s writers presented it as ordinary and present, reinforcing continuity rather than rupture.

Gokulananda Mohapatra

A foundational figure in Odia children’s literature, Mohapatra’s work introduced young readers to animals, birds, and village environments without sentimentality. Nature in his stories functioned as part of daily life rather than a metaphor. By embedding environmental ethics within ordinary narratives, he ensured that care, attentiveness, and coexistence became moral habits rather than abstract ideals.

Binod Kanungo

Kanungo’s writing trained children to observe. His stories encouraged attentiveness to small natural phenomena, ants, weather shifts, birds near water bodies, and cultivating habits of noticing. In an era where urban childhoods reduce everyday contact with nature, this attentiveness itself becomes a form of ecological preservation.

Ramachandra Behera

Behera bridged folklore and realism, allowing traditional ecological knowledge to flow into modern children’s narratives. His work preserved animal life, rural settings, and seasonal rhythms in forms that remained accessible to contemporary readers, ensuring continuity between inherited knowledge systems and modern reading practices.

Manoj Das

Manoj Das occupies a distinctive position in this literary ecosystem. Writing for children in both Odia and English, he treated nature as an active moral presence. His stories often unfolded in semi-rural landscapes where ponds, trees, animals, and village paths shaped ethical outcomes. Nature was not the background but the consequence.

Das’s significance lies in his ability to carry local ecological consciousness beyond regional boundaries. Urban readers encountered, through his stories, worlds of shared water bodies, intimate human–animal proximity, and fragile balances between greed and harmony. Without explicit instruction, his narratives allowed children to sense imbalance, cultivating ethical awareness through storytelling rather than prescription.

Pratibha Ray

While primarily known for her adult fiction, Ray’s engagement with moral storytelling reinforced the idea that environmental responsibility is inseparable from social and ethical life. Her narratives consistently positioned human action within broader systems that included community, consequence, and the natural world.

Children’s Literature Beyond Nostalgia

Children’s literature about nature is often misread as nostalgic, oriented toward a world already lost. This interpretation overlooks its future-facing function. Stories act as reservoirs of possibility. A child who grows up knowing the names of birds and rivers may later question their absence. Literature plants curiosity before activism or policy enters the frame.

Because children’s literature transcends time and place, it remains effective even when environments fragment. A poem written decades ago continues to shape imagination today; a village story read in a city classroom continues to transmit ecological vocabulary. This portability allows literature to function as a living archive rather than a static record.

Keeping Nature’s Voice

Nature does not survive only through conservation laws, protected areas, or institutional memory. It survives through language—through being named, narrated, and remembered. Children’s literature ensures that rivers remain speakable even when polluted, birds remain imaginable even when absent, and ethical relationships with the environment are formed before utilitarian thinking takes hold.

In a century marked by ecological uncertainty and social mobility, children’s literature in regional languages like Odia stands as one of the most understated yet effective instruments of environmental continuity. It does not issue warnings or policy prescriptions. It tells stories. And in doing so, it ensures that nature continues to exist—not only in landscapes, but in the shared imagination of the next generation.

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References

1. Mohapatra, Gokulananda. Odia Shishu Sahitya Ra Bikasha [The Development of Odia Children’s Literature]. Cuttack: Odisha Sahitya Akademi.

2. Kanungo, Binod. Shishu Sahitya O Paribesha [Children’s Literature and Environment]. Bhubaneswar: Friends Publishers.

3. Behera, Ramachandra. Lokakatha O Adhunika Shishu Galpa [Folklore and Modern Children’s Stories]. Cuttack: Granthamandir.

4. Das, Manoj. Selected Fiction for Children. New Delhi: National Book Trust.

5. Ray, Pratibha. Yajnaseni. New Delhi: Rupa Publications.(For ethical frameworks and moral reasoning in narrative.)

6. Odisha Sahitya Akademi. Shishu Sahitya Samiksha [Critical Essays on Children’s Literature]. Cuttack.

7. Mohanty, Artaballabha. Sarala Sahitya Samiksha. Cuttack: Odisha Sahitya Akademi.

8. Orr, David W. Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect. Washington DC: Island Press.