by Andrea McLoughlin
•
03 Nov, 2021
The beginning of this fascinating book offers the staggering fact that there are 8 billion humans on planet Earth. This number is inconceivable to our poor brains, even though we could all crowd into an area the size of Greater London, standing up! So writer Rob Sears and illustrator Tom Sears, turn that on its head and create a mega human in a Smooshing Machine! The reader is taken on a journey of self discovery with this incredibly original idea. The imagined human giant is approximately 3km tall and weights 390 million tonnes. Add into the machine animals of the planet such as the 80 remaining Sumatran rhinos in the world and they create one rhino the size of a double decker bus that could easily hide, undetected in the mega human’s eyebrow! The sense of proportion in the illustrations very cleverly helps the reader to see this. Once you’re fully immersed into the concept of this book, you cannot stop digesting the facts and figures being presented to you in such an understandable and engaging way. The Sears brothers cover so much including the extinction of species, our food usage and wastage, deforestation and plastic waste, our continual mining for gold and minerals to go inside our precious Smartphones and constant digging for sand and gravel for cement, concrete and glass, to build, build and build! And of course those fossil fuels, which we burn, burn and burn, until we can no longer breathe. At this point in the book, the mega human catches a nasty virus (see what they did there?) and falls into a dream like sleep where another creature ALOE (All Life on Earth) appears and teaches the giant human a pretty important lesson. Although this is a book which ultimately presents to us our failings as humans and how we are creating a huge carbon footprint on our beautiful planet, it also provides positive solutions to our selfish impulses. As the global leaders at COP26 wrestle with critical decisions about climate change, π§π΅π² ππΆπ΄π΄π²ππ ππΌπΌππ½πΏπΆπ»π made me sit up and listen to its message. How can I be more responsible for my family’s footprint here on Earth? This book would be such a valuable read in schools from KS2 and beyond. Publisher @canongatebooks has produced learning notes go alongside this book which I have shown. #thebiggestfootprint #COP26KidLit #KidLitCOP26 #togetherforourplanet #climateaction #childrensbooksforCOP26 #COP262021