This Is My Planet: The Kids' Guide to Global Warming

by Jan Thornhill

Reports of global warming’s catastrophic effects are in newspapers, on the nightly news, even on movie screens. The subject can be so overwhelming that young people are often left with the thought, What can I do? In This Is My Planet, Jan Thornhill gives young readers the tools they need to live their own lives more ecologically — and ultimately, to improve the life of the planet. The book takes a comprehensive look at climate change, beginning with basic information about how the planet works and moving through an in-depth look at human societies and three specific environments — polar, ocean, and land. Although she doesn't shy away from the truth, Thornhill offers hope, showing where action can make a difference and providing evidence of the Earth’s amazing resilience and adaptability. Never preachy or alarmist, this amazing book trusts young readers with the facts, allowing them to form their own intelligent opinions. A multitude of full-color photographs enhance Thornhill’s engaging, informative text.

64 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2007

About the author

I was born in 1955 in Sudbury, but spent most of my childhood in southern Ontario where, encouraged by my artist mother and engineer/inventor father, I developed a life-long passion for both art and the natural world. I spent a lot of time exploring the fields, woods, ponds, and streams near where I lived, and was an avid collector of things I found. I brought home all kinds of treasures – skulls and fossils, bird feathers and empty nests, insects, snake skins, fallen leaves. Eventually I labeled everything and made a museum in the basement. I thought I’d get rich by charging a 5¢ entry fee…but my mum was the only one who paid!

After high school, I attended the Ontario College of Art where I had fun making experimental films and videos – not drawing and painting. For about ten years after that, I illustrated freelance for magazines and newspapers, and did odd jobs such as sewing thousands of beads and sequins on Dolly Parton’s dresses. Finally, in the late eighties, I switched to the much richer life of creating children’s books. From the beginning, the aim of these wildlife-based books has been to foster in young readers a love of art, nature and the environment.

I live in the Kawarthas in a house in the woods that my husband and I built. As well as making books, I grow organic vegetables, raise a few chickens each year, make bread from captured wild yeast, and wander around in the woods looking for wild mushrooms, slime molds, beetles and animal skulls. A lot of the things I find – skulls, snake skins, desiccated insects, a mummified bat & hummingbirds, etc. – have made their way into what I call my “museum-in-a-bag,” a collection of natural treasures I share with kids when I visit schools. I’m an obsessive observer of the world around me, so much so that I consider a day I haven’t learned something to be a day wasted.

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