Letters to the Earth

Overall Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★

Why this book?
I must confess, I bought this book based on the front cover. Of course, I’d been told repeatedly as a child to ‘never judge a book by its cover’ but this had to be an exception: the colours were too beautiful to leave untouched on the shelf. A collection of letters from parents, children, politicians, poets, actors, activists, songwriters and scientists, this book is an invitation to act with regards to our planetary crisis. The letters are divided into chapters titled ‘Love’, ‘Loss’, ‘Emergence’, ‘Hope’ and ‘Action’ and thus, despite the severity of the message, by the end of the book you are left feeling hope and inspired to make change.

For teachers:
There are too many exceptionally powerful letters and poems to summarise here. Indeed, to give only short quotes from the poems seems, in a way, to be doing the poems an injustice. Aside from the obvious use of this book as a resource in geography lessons, I can also see it as a tool in other subjects where the power of poetry and letter writing is discussed. After all, the book was born following a call out to the public to write a letter in response to the climate and ecological emergency. Could students do the same and compile their own anthology?  

Finally, it shall undoubtedly join my collection of ‘assembly books’- those with thought-provoking, evocative and emotive short extracts to read aloud.

For more info, click here to see the website. Link: https://www.letterstotheearth.com/