Photo by aeevans on Flickr Creative Commons Stranded inside by the rain and thunderstorms that hammered the East Coast this week, I started wondering how I used to keep myself occupied during bad-weather days as a kid. My mother was a staunch believer that television would rot my brain, so that option was out. There were always card games or Scrabble. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon a tattered copy of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax that I remembered it had been books that kept me busy for hours during rainy summer afternoons. Science, nature, or animal books; pretty much anything that would help minimize the fact that I was stuck inside. The discovery got me thinking: in a culture now enthralled with all things green, how has our new environmental mindset affected children’s literature? Are there more science-themed children’s books today than when I was growing up? How has the subject matter changed? During my quest to answer these questions, I stumbled upon the...