Summer 2025      Volume 53, Number 3

Cultivating Sustainable Futures Through Children’s Environmental Literature: Meet Lita Judge, Children’s Author/Illustrator
By Kristine M. Schutz and Rebecca Woodard

Document: Column  

Introductory Paragraph:  This column is the second in a three-part series designed to introduce readers to children’s book authors and illustrators who care about the environment and climate change and are committed to getting texts about these important topics into teachers’ and children’s hands. Last issue, we featured Diana Sudyka, local author/illustrator of Little Land (see Schutz & Woodard, 2025). In this second issue, we will introduce you to Lita Judge, author/illustrator of TheWisdom of Trees: How Trees Work Together to Form a Natural Kingdom. Lita’s book is featured in our professional text, Teaching Climate Change to Children: Literacy Pedagogy that Cultivates Sustainable Future (Woodard & Schutz, 2024).  While working in our teacher inquiry group with elementary educators, we all became fascinated with the concept of the wood wide web—fungi functioning as an underground network that connects trees and plants, thus ensuring all of their mutual survival—after reading Janine Benyus’s (2021) short piece, “Reciprocity.” The wood wide web quickly became a topic that we were excited to talk with others about in classrooms, in professional learning circles, and even at dinner parties! As we endeavored to bring this powerful example of interconnection into elementary classrooms, we began to cultivate text sets to help youngsters see how amazing and awe-inspiring trees were. One of the first books we found was The Wisdom of Trees: How Trees Work Together to Form a Natural Kingdom, which was written and illustrated by Lita Judge. This hybrid text pairs poems about trees working within ecosystems with short informational descriptions of scientific processes and phenomena. Judge’s illustrations are gorgeous masterpieces, painted in watercolor with significant detail and scientific precision. We simply could not (and still cannot!) put this beautiful book down.

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.33600/IRCJ.53.3.2025.54

Page Numbers:   54-60