Lynne Cherry

Lynne Cherry (born January 5, 1952)[1] is an American writer and illustrator of nature-themed children's books and a film producer. In 2009 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.[2]

Lynne Cherry

Early life

Born in Philadelphia, Cherry attended the Tyler School of Art and Yale University.

Career

She founded and was director of the Center for Children's Environmental Literature,[3] and has also been an artist-in-residence for the Princeton Environmental Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Smithsonian Institution. One of her best-known books (which has sold over a million copies and was on the New York Times best-seller list), is The Great Kapok Tree, a picture book about the Amazon rainforest. Other books include Flute's Journey (a book about the trials and tribulations of a wood thrush named Flute bird migration) and A River Ran Wild (which discusses the cleanup of the Nashua River in Massachusetts).[4]

Activism

Since 2008, Lynne has focused her attention on abating climate change and highlighting the power that young people have to take action and wake up adults to the climate crisis. She is founder and director of the non-profit Young Voices on Climate Change. Through YVCC she has produced 13 short documentary films - the Young Voices for the Planet film series- dedicated to helping young voices be heard by featuring youth success stories. The films are licensed by American Public Television, are currently being broadcast on 60 PBS stations nationwide and have curriculum on the PBS Learning Media website. The films have been licensed by National Geographic, Earth Day Network and dozens of other organizations and are used widely by educators to help develop youth self-efficacy - their belief in themselves to make a difference in the world.

Cherry's [Young Voices for the Planet] films document California kids getting a ban on plastic bags Team Marine;[5] Florida students saving their school $53,000 in energy bills Dreaming in Green;[6] and 11-year-old Felix Finkbeiner from Germany planting a million trees (Plant for the Planet).[7] When the three 9-year-old girls in Save Tomorrow[8] see the other Young Voices for the Planet films, they are inspired to testify at their Town Meeting where they succeed in overturning a bill prohibiting solar panels on town buildings.[9] (Solar panels were then installed on all town buildings). Olivia's Birds and the Oil Spill[10] features a girl from Long Island, NY who raised $200,000 to help save and clean oiled birds from the BP spill or getting fresh, local, healthy & nutritious cafeteria and calculating the "food miles" that their cafeteria fare travels Longing for a Local Lunch.[11]

Cherry also wrote a chapter for the National Geographic book Written in Water and the chapter "Kids Can Save Forests" in Treetops at Risk (Springer Verlag, 2013), edited by Margaret D. Lowman (Canopy Meg), et al. She has spoken out widely eschewing gloom and doom in climate change education and communication - on an NPR radio show[12] and in book chapters "Teaching Climate Change with Hope and Solutions" in the book Education in Times of Environmental Crisis: Teaching Children to be Agents of Change[13] (Routledge, 2016) and blogs.[14]

Honors and recognition

Lynne Cherry's book How We Know What We Know about Our Changing Climate, written with the late photojournalist Gary Braasch,[15] has won more than 15 awards including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) award for the Best Middle School Science Book of 2009.

Lynne Cherry has been Artist in Residence at Princeton University, the [Smithsonian], Woods Hole Research Center, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. She has been a visiting scholar in the Geosciences Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY; the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY.

References
  1. "Lynne Cherry". Contemporary Authors Online. Gale. October 11, 2006. Retrieved on August 7, 2008.
  2. "Honorees: 2010 National Women's History Month". Women's History Month. National Women's History Project. 2010. Archived from the original on 24 June 2011. Retrieved 14 November 2011.
  3. Kay Johnson. Writing with Authors Kids Love. Prufrock Press, 1989. 50.
  4. "Artist-in-residence Lynne Cherry draws on Princeton for inspiration". January 14, 2002. Retrieved on July 16, 2008.
  5. "Young Voices for the Planet - Film and Video Series - Team Marine".
  6. http://www.youngvoicesonclimatechange.com/youth-climate-videos/dreaming-in-green/%20Dreaming%20in%20Green
  7. "Young Voices for the Planet - Film and Video Series - Plant for the Planet".
  8. "Young Voices for the Planet - Film and Video Series - Save Tomorrow".
  9. http://www.youngvoicesonclimatechange.com/youth-climate-videos/save-tomorrow/Save%20Tomorrow
  10. "Young Voices for the Planet - Film and Video Series - Olivia's Birds and the Oil Spill".
  11. "Young Voices for the Planet - Film and Video Series - Longing for a Local Lunch".
  12. Goldstone, Heather. "Psychology and Social Science Reveal Deep Underpinnings of Climate Change Denial". www.capeandislands.org.
  13. https://www.routledge.com/Education-in-Times-of-Environmental-Crises-Teaching-Children-to-Be-Agents/Winograd/p/book/9781138944367
  14. Revkin, Andrew C. (24 May 2012). "On the Allure of Ostriches and New Paths in Climate Communication".
  15. Revkin, Andrew C. (8 March 2016). "Too Soon Gone - Gary Braasch, Visual Chronicler of Climate Change".
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