When my son was in elementary school, I took him to a climate demonstration in downtown Vancouver. We marched and chanted alongside one of my oldest friends, a city transportation planner.
Around us, teens hoisted signs about fossil fools. Dads held toddlers on their shoulders, and moms navigated the crowd with strollers and baby backpacks. A few shop owners cheered from outside their stores, and office workers waved from the windows above. My friend, meanwhile, was checking out the bus routes and telling me how they’d had to adjust their stops for the day. Then she was pointing to new bike lanes. We were downtown in a city that had declared its goal to be the greenest in the world. What if all these people got to build the perfect place? With that thought, Our Green City was born. It began with a few scribbled pages about walking and wheeling through the streets, growing food in garden plots, and celebrating at block parties. The drafts went back and forth to my writing group and to my transportation-planner friend. Add more wildlife, said my writer friends. More energy options, said the planner. Once Kids Can Press accepted the manuscript and introduced illustrator Colleen Larmour to the project, she suggested many more additions. A school! A used furniture shop! Ants and hummingbirds! The final version of Our Green City is a collaboration between many imaginative and enthusiastic friends. And I'm so happy with how it evolved. Because isn’t this how a real green city grows, too? Comments are closed.
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