Editorial

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Notes

1. Sheds, like gardens, are often a somewhat secretive place that might no longer be all that real to which an individual, or parent and child, can temporarily escape from the hurly burly of the everyday, do odd jobs, fossick around in or, more earnestly, pursue or pass down a long forgotten but meaningful craft.

2. Recent Anglophone examples include Children’s literature: Classic texts and contemporary trends, edited by Montgomery and Watson (2009). Essays therein examine, among others, Little women, Treasure island, Peter Pan, Swallows and amazons, Tom’s midnight garden, Northern lights, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Junk and Mortal engines. We note Children’s literature: Approaches and territories, edited by Maybin and Watson (2009), has contributions in Part V: Words and pictures, on ‘Texts and Pictures’, ‘Picturebook Codes’ and ‘Postmodern Experiments’. Tatar’s (2009) academic‐popular hybrid, Enchanted hunters: The power of stories in childhood, is noteworthy for this special issue too, given its exploration of the power of children’s literature to take hold of their imaginations, how classic and contemporary tales of beauty, terrors, death and horror stimulate their curiosity, and how transportation and transformations may evoke wonder and engage emotions in ways adult readers may not expect. But despite its scope, it does not offer a significant analysis of place, nature and environment. Similarly with Gubar’s (2009) Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the golden age of children’s literature. Even though it critiques the power and focus of children’s literature studies, and in particular, both ‘the cult of the child’ and Rose’s (1984) analysis of it in Peter Pan and the impossibility of children’s Literature (arguing that, for example, ‘Golden Age’ authors were centrally concerned with the complexities of children’s agency), Gubar frames this anthropocentrically rather than with ecological or socio‐ecological considerations in mind. Also, in focusing on recent texts on children’s literature, this is not to forget that young adult/juvenile/adolescent literatures have also received similar treatments; while some texts, such as Where the wild things are and Alice’s adventures in Wonderland have continued to attract new generations of young readers in the decades since their initial publication, and this has often been triggered by film versions – see Morgan (2010) too.

3. Our wider conversations had included sharing a mutual cherishing of Leopold’s (1948/1987) Sand County Almanac, and sketches here and there. This too would suggest another dimension to ecocosmopolitanism to consider: on the importance of having embodied selves not always turned citywards, but landward, at least once in a good while.

4. The MacIntyre (1984) quotation noted on p. 261 continues, ‘Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things.’ Arguably Leopold’s Almanac is littered with mythologies. It exemplifies a form of nature writing whose register, structuring and foci both celebrate natural history, processes and rhythms, and lament the narrowing and diminution of the West’s ‘ecology of values’ to utilitarianism, expediency, conquest and self‐interest, in this case, through careful observation and illumination of the local and wider effects of Abrahamic, evolutionary and ecological community conceptions of land. Leopold’s meditation on the geese returning in March to Sand County rhetorically asks, ‘Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?’, concluding that the mid‐twentieth‐century consciousness of the well‐ and ‘overeducated’ risks the same end as that of the goose ‘who trades his’: she or he is equally soon ‘a pile of feathers’ (1948/1987, 18). The question is also raised by Cooper’s (2002) recent philosophical and historical meditations on humanism, humility and mystery. We return to some of Cooper’s themes in our endpiece in remarks on how literature‐based ecopedagogies might engage aspects of the (ir)real, but note here that Cooper’s essay is a fine examination of the history and consequences of a lack of humility in humanism and absolutism in the face of the mystery inhering in nature and ‘the Other’. It also offers an account of how this ‘virtue’ for our beliefs and conduct might overturn the default ‘hubris’ of modern‐day encounters with realities independent of the ‘human contribution’, albeit striving via quite different means for something approximating to a ‘harmony with land’ among a people who ‘have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness’ (Leopold 1948/1987, 210).