Reddit mentions: The best children literary criticism books

It's up to you to decide. This guy's exaggerating this case. JKR has always been fully supportive of fan art and fan fictions and fan sites, and people generally exploring her world with each other. Here's an overview of the trial, though I'm linking it more so you can click this site's sources at the bottom of the page.

The long and short of it is, the HP Lexicon was a huge fan encyclopedic site that I and everyone I know used for reference. The site owners wanted to publish it as a book for-profit. Rowling herself wanted to publish an encyclopedia. This was not the first encyclopedia or similar book JKR prevented, it's just the most publicized, she also stopped Mugglenet from publishing a for-profit encyclopedia.

I think the most important thing to remember is JKR/WB had been through a strange phase where ultimately they decided they were fine with original fan works for-profit. For more info, I'd read Harry, A History, by Melissa Anelli (if I had it in front of me, I'd find quotes, but I'm at work). She explains that when the internet was still fairly new, tons of kids with HP fansites were getting cease and desist letters. WB just didn't realize the consequences of what they were doing and did a 180, apologized and allowed the sites (if I'm not mistaken, this was known as Potter Wars, but I forget). A few years after that was the issue of Wizard Rock bands (you read that right). The pioneers of this genre were Harry and the Potters in 2002. They were also told to stop performing and selling merchandise, but eventually after a relatively undramatic battle, WB decided they were okay. So for years, JKR/WB had experienced their fair share of fan works for-profit. I'm not in JKR's head, but she seemed to love and support all of it.

What makes the HP Lexicon book different is that it was not original work, it was "just" a re-organization of JKR's work, and perhaps more importantly, had the exact same purpose of what JKR was planning on publishing. The reason I use the quotes is because it's obviously a ton of work to organize that information into an encyclopedia. Also, it looks like RDR (the publishing company that was sued) acted a bit shady and probably didn't help their case, but I'm not a lawyer and can't really judge their actions as one, this is just the impression I get reading the links I sent you.

Also, the HP Lexicon book was still published, meeting the guidelines of the suit, but after all that, is exactly like an encyclopedia anyway. ??

Personally, I wish they hadn't sued. I would have known the difference and still bought both, but I guess less massive fans might have been confused which one to buy, which was the main point of the suit in the first place.

As a huge huge fan of Rowling, if there's anything I've learned admiring a human like a god (which I can now see I did with Rowling) is that she isn't a god. There's things she's done or said (not to mention plays she put her name on) that I wish she hadn't, but she's human. She also started her own charity, Lumos, to bring light to the mis-used funds for third world orphanages that have poor conditions for the kids, most of which are not even orphans and have families that want them. She pays all her taxes to her country because she appreciates what they did when she needed them. She is an advocate for equal rights, and ultimately does a lot of good. Nobody is completely embodied in their wiki pages, and nobody is perfect either.

For fairy tales, I recommend the following:

• The Victorian Fairy Tales Book
  
• Norton's The Classic Fairy Tales
  
• Norton's The Great Fairy Tale Tradition
  
• The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales
  
• My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
  
• Any and all of Andrew Lang's Colored Fairy Books (the first two focus on collections of well-known tales, but most of them are sort of themed/grouped geographically and have fairy tales from all over the world)
  
• The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald
  
• The Names Upon the Harp: Irish Myth and Legend
  
• I'm a big fan of the various "Annotated" Fairy Tale collections, like the Annotated Brothers Grimm, Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, and Annotated Hans Christen Andersen, though I don't always agree with the editorializing. It's a whole series, so I'm only going to link to a couple.
  
• On that note, look for book collections put together and/or edited by Maria Tatar and Jack Zipes. They're the two most prominent fairy tale scholars at the moment and basically have an unofficial duopoly on the fairy tale academic criticism market.
  
• Also, a special shout-out to P.J. Lynch's illustrated version of East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and really all of the fairy tales books that Lynch illustrates. They're beautiful.
  
  
  For mythology and classical studies, there are a couple that are basically required reading for any Mythology or Classics class. Since several people have already recommended anthologies of Greek myths, I'm going to err more on the "Classics" side of the conversation:
  
  
• Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
  
• The Odyssey, Homer (I recommend the Fagles translation due to its prominence in academia and its status as one of the best translations of the work)
  
• The Illiad, Homer (again, Fagles translation)
  
• The Aeneid, Virgil (again, Fagles has a translation that's very good). My bias as a Latin student, however, leads me to also recommend Pharr, which has no real use to you if you don't know Latin but it's the most popular all-time textbook version of the Aeneid)
  
• Metamorpheses, Ovid
  
• You also probably want to look at some Greek plays like the Sophoclean Tragedies/Three Thebian Plays

It's interesting of how you're using this idea that somehow since the book is for kids, it can't have significant implications in it as well. If we actually choose to look beyond the first 3 inches, one can find an awful lot to examine.

1. Lets start with werewolves. Remus Lupin is outed by society for having a crippling health condition that he can't help. Yup, it's a metaphor for the aids epidemic. "But that's so obvious!" You exclaim. Fine.
   
   
2. Rowling uses a ridiculous amount of references from classic mythology, not only in creatures, but in her names and plots.
   Minerva McGonagal? Minerva is the Roman Goddess of wisdom. Fluffy, or cerberus, happens to guard the place which contains the key to eternal life? I'm sure Orpheus would be Jealous. All the latin, describing the function of spells (and a mirror)? But I mean all kids know latin, right?
   
   
3. Rowling thought the books through well in advance: While there are many points that she didn't have entirely fleshed out, there are tons of factors that show she was thinking about the overarching plot as a whole. For instance, Rowling always knew Sirius Black was one of James Potter's best friends. Sirius Black is mentioned in chapter one of book one. The horcruxes are obviously not mentioned until book 6, but rowling had the general idea in mind by book 2 (7 years before book 6 came out).
   
   
4. Authors smarter than either of us think that Harry Potter is more than just a children's book.
   Steven King:
   > The fantasy writer's job is to conduct the willing reader from mundanity to magic. This is a feat of which only a superior imagination is capable, and Rowling possesses such equipment. She has said repeatedly that the Potter novels are not consciously aimed at any particular audience or age. The reader may reasonably question that assertion after reading the first book in the series, but by the time he or she has reached ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' it becomes increasingly clear that the lady means what she says. Nor can there be any question that her stated refusal to dumb down the language of the books (the current one is presented with such British terms as petrol, pub and cuppa unchanged) has lent the stories an attraction to adults that most children's novels simply don't have.
   
   
5. Theres been an [awful] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003NSBDYI/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) Lot
   ofLiterature written about Harry Potter for a series that's only 3 inches deep.
   
   That's my two cents anyways.
   
   

I don't necessarily disagree that this would be a copyright violation of the official maps (I haven't seen them, and don't know how much OP lifted); but just to add some thoughts re: fan-fic works: just because a work is licensed doesn't mean it needs to be, and they are certainly not always licensed. The trademark ("Star Wars") most certainly would need to be licensed, but fan spin-offs wouldn't necessarily need to be licensed unless they centered around, e.g. a character with a developed personality from the original. So, say, a fan fiction about young Ned Stark would probably need to be licensed (Salinger v Colting), but a fan fiction of an unrelated family from Mole's Town (that doesn't otherwise infringe the trademarks of GoT) would probably not be. A recent Star Trek universe case that might have put some finer bounds on this was settled this year; the defendants didn't survive summary judgment (meaning it wasn't clearly fair use) and they would have had to go through a lengthy trial to determine whether the accumulation of copied elements constituted infringement. Not fun.

Also looking at the official map alone doesn't make it a copy- if he did all the individual city artwork himself, picked and chose what cities to include, took artistic liberties with shading, borders, the compass rose, etc., then it's a pretty gray area whether he infringed the copyright of the original maps. I see that his map does have "A Song of Ice and Fire" at the top, which he would obviously have to scrub to sell.

On the other hand, methinks if the fine borders of the map, which obviously can't be derived from the stories independently of other copyrighted maps, were copied from those maps, that would weigh pretty heavily against OP. But then, see The Lexicon, whose authors all but won a suit against J.K. Rowling (she "won" but they were allowed to publish their book with some directly copied passages removed).

Here's a list of sources, in English translation, for the stories I discussed in this video. All of them are public domain, and readily available in at least one edition on Wikisource. All of these stories can be found in their original languages as well.

Grimm's Cinderella, from a 1952 edition translated by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_Household_Tales_(Edwardes)/Ashputtel

Grimm's Hansel and Gretel, from a 1952 edition translated by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_Household_Tales_(Edwardes)/Hansel_and_Grethel

Grimm's Sleeping Beauty, from a 1952 edition translated by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_Household_Tales_(Edwardes)/Briar_Rose

Perault's Cinderella, from a 1901 translation by Charles Welsh:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tales_of_Mother_Goose/Cinderella,_or_the_Little_Glass_Slipper

Perrault's Sleeping Beauty, from a 1901 translation by Charles Welsh:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tales_of_Mother_Goose/The_Sleeping_Beauty_in_the_Wood

Giambattista Basile's Sun, Moon, and Talia, from an 1850 translation of the Pentamerone by John Edward Taylor:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Pentamerone,_or_The_Story_of_Stories/Sun,_Moon_and_Talia

I had a much harder time tracking down the original, 1812 edition of the Grimm's stories along with the original introduction. The best I could find digitally was an edition translated by Oliver Loo and published in 2014. It's currently available on Amazon for just $3.00:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MMX1Z5W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

If anyone would like a hand finding alternate translations of the sources, other versions of the stories, or the medieval art that inspired my drawings, feel free to send me a PM.

Notes

• These notes (dating from 1990) were first shown by JK Rowling in the 2001 documentary Harry Potter & Me. It's two pages of a notebook with a list of forty student names, each followed by three symbols to indicate their gender, blood status, and house. Unfortunately a lot of it was hard to read, and the entire second page besides the last names was cut off.
  
  
• Shortly after the documentary aired, a fan by the name of Trond Michelsen stitched together an image from the different frames which became the goto image of the list. (Not sure the exact date, all that I know is that this was before 2003.)
  
  
• A clearer HD image of one of the frames was tweeted by the documentary's director in December of 2014. As far as I can tell, the documentary was never released in that quality.
  
  
• On August 15th 2011, this essay about the list was published on Pottermore as part of their content for book one in their initial beta launch. It was hidden inside the moment for chapter 11 (You had to click on the open book to unlock it.)
  
  >You've unlocked 'The Original Forty' by J.K. Rowling
  
  >J.K. Rowling shares details of her early notebooks that hold the names of the first forty students she created
  
  
• The essay published on Pottermore included a transcription of the whole list, but only the names, not the symbols. Some errors were present in her transcription, like Runcorn was omitted (so we still don't know his/her first name), and Su Li was spelled Sue Li.
  
  
• After the 2015 Pottermore redesign it can be found at https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-original-forty.
  
  
• J.K Rowling briefly mentioned the list in a 2007 interview with Melissa Anelli.
  
  >Of all my notebooks, in my most treasured ones, I wrote the names of all the teachers and the names of everyone in Harry’s year with little symbols beside them saying if they’re half-blood, pure-blood, Muggle-born.
  
  
• This list has been subject to a LOT of fan analysys over the years, here are some examples.
  
  
• "Harry's Year" by Troels Forchhammer (2003)
  
• "Secrets of the Class List by Diana Summers (2006) (Later updated in 2008 and 2013.)
  
• "What Happened to each of the Original Forty" by DVK (2015)
  
• "The Revised Forty" by hpboy13 (2016)
  
• "Hogwarts Class of 1991-92 The Original 40 Analysis" by punkpoet182 (2016)
  
  
• Some names on the list seem to be brought in the books unchanged, some were modified a bit, and some seem to have been dropped altogether.
  
  
• Susan Bones, Mandy Brocklehurst, Lavender Brown, Millicent Bulstrode, Michael Corner, Vincent Crabbe, Justin Finch-Fletchley, Seamus Finnigan, Anthony Goldstein, Gregory Goyle, Hermione Granger, Neville Longbottom, Draco Malfoy, Theodore Nott, Pansy Parkinson, Sally-Anne Perks, Harry Potter, Lisa Turpin, Ronald Weasley, and Blaise Zabini all appear in the Harry Potter books as they are mentioned here. (The symbols don't always line up though. Michael Corner and Anthony Goldstein were Ravenclaws in the books, and a lot of these characters either have their info cut off from the picture or not mentioned in the books, so it might not necessarily match.)
  
  
• Stephen Cornfoot, Tracey Davis, Kevin Entwhistle, Wayne Hopkins, Megan Jones, Roger Malone, Su Li, Oliver Rivers, Sophie Roper, and [????] Runcorn are never mentioned as students in any of JKR's writings, and no one with similar names appears. (Su Li might have been an earlier incarnation of Cho Chang. She also might have become Lee Jordan, who seems to have been in Harry's year at some point; Megan Jones might have morphed into adult characters Gwenog Jones or Hestia Jones; Oliver Rivers may have morphed into older student Oliver Wood; [????] Runcorn may have morphed into adult character Albert Runcorn. It's also worth mentioning that there is allegedly an "Annabel Entwhistle" and a "Carl Hopkins" in some of the videogames.)
  
  
• Abbott, Hannah Written as Muggle-born here, but implied to be pure-blood in the books. In a post-DH interview, JKR arbitrarily decided to make her a half-blood.
  
  >MA:There’s a line in Deathly Hallows when Harry (SU: Yeah.) see someone that he thinks might be Hannah Abbott’s long-lost relatives. What’s her deal? Is she a Muggle-born? Is she- Did she lose her family?
  
  >JKR: Oh, you mean the grave?
  
  >MA:Yeah.
  
  >JKR: No. She’s not Muggle-born. She’s- No, I’m pretty sure Hannah’s a pureblood. I know her mother died.
  
  >MA:In an old documentary, you showed a picture that had like all the family associations, and Hannah appeared to be Muggle-blood in the (JKR: Did she?) fan’s carefully constructed image of that picture.
  
  >JKR: Because I’ll tell you what. If that’s the- I’ve got that notebook, and that’s one of my cornerstone notebooks. In that case, then I’ve been mis-remembering that, because I thought she was pureblood. Hm, interesting.
  
  >MA:Hm.
  
  >JKR: Beause I’ve certainly (MA:Okay.) written about her, and thought about her for years now (MA:Mm-hm.) as pureblood, so that’s interesting. (laughs) Maybe we’ll just split the difference and call her half-blood. (MA and JN laugh) Yeah, that’s how decisions are taken in the fairly random world of J.K. Rowling. (MA and JN laugh)
  
  "PotterCast Interviews J.K. Rowling, part one." PotterCast #130, 17 December 2007
  
  
• Boot, Trevor Likely split into Terry Boot and Trevor the Toad. Terry attended Hogwarts during book seven, so he cannot be Muggle-born like shown here.
  
• Greengrass, Queenie Likely became Daphne (or Astoria) Greengrass. "Queenie" was eventually used in Queenie Goldstein
  
• MacDougal, Isobel likely became Morag MacDougal, who was sorted in book one. Isobel was later used for McGonagall's mother's name.
  
• Macmillan, Ernest likely became Ernie Macmillan, (unless Ernie is just a nickname)
  
• Moon, Lily JKR: "first intimation of Luna Lovegood, this name was never used, but gave me an idea for a fey, dreamy girl. She was named before I decided on Harry’s mother’s name." That said, there was someone with the last name "Moon" sorted in the first book
  
  
• Madhari and Mati Patel almost certainly became Padma and Parvati.
  
  
• Thomas, Gary became Dean Thomas
  
  >As you can see, Dean originally joined Harry, Ron, Hermione and Neville for the adventure. As you can see from the written caption, Dean was called "Gary" in those days.
  
  >JKR describing an old sketch posted to her website in 2004
  
  
• Smith, Sally may have become Zacharias Smith

I haven't read that one, but I did pick up "Harry Potter and History" which was actually quite a good read. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Kind of went through history and talked about how this or that may have influenced these characters, or inspired JKR etc. So if it's from the same series, it could be good!

Now looking at the one I got, it doesn't seem to be the same series. But still: http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-History-Culture-Series/dp/0470574720

Paul's description of "the third heaven": C.S. Lewis (in The Discarded Image) and Michael Ward (in Planet Narnia) deal a lot with ancient and medieval cosmology - very interesting stuff. Nutshell version: there were seven layers of the heavenly realm, each ruled by a "planet" - beginning with the first heaven ruled by the moon, the second heaven ruled by Mars and the third heaven ruled by Venus. Here's where it gets interesting...


...ancient Jewish cosmology says that the realm ruled by Venus is where God removed the Garden of Eden to, after the Fall. So, when Paul says he knew a man (himself?) who was "caught up to the third heaven...to paradise..." he is speaking in the framework of the then-current cosmology. Fascinating reading for those interested.

I read the "How to Write Children's Books for Dummies," but I didn't think it was very useful. However, this looks like a good resource and it's at a reasonable discount right now. Good luck!

A few thoughts:

At one point Lewis and Tolkien were going to write companion novels about space and time. You can see echoes of this in the last chapter of Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in CSL's Space Trilogy when he mentions that space has been cut off from human travel and now any future voyages would be through time. There's also echoes of what might have been in JRRT's Notion Club Papers, which has a time-travel element, but was never published.

In addition, JRRT did not care for the Narnia series because he felt it lacked a coherent theme. However, in the controversial Planet Narnia, Michael Ward posits that CSL actually did have a theme: the medieval view of the planets (The Seven Heavens). There are definitely intriguing arguments made in the book, especially as he combines information from Narnia and the Space Trilogy into his thesis. I wouldn't say it's iron-clad, but if I was still in education, or had the luxury to write papers, this is an area I'd love to explore in depth - specifically the influence of Charles Williams on the evolution of CSL's thought.

If you're interested in aspects of their backgrounds that influenced their worldviews, I would recommend The Discarded Image from CSL (on medieval literature - my favorite CSL book) and The Road to Middle-Earth by Tom Shippey (on the philological undergirding of Middle-Earth). The Humprey Carpenter books are also good (JRRT Letters, Tolkien bio, Inklings bio) as are CSL's letters.

ISBN: 978-0-470-57472-0, the editor is Nancy R. Reagin (it has many authors as it is a collection of essays). If you're looking in a book store, my friend found it in the 'History' section at a Barns and Noble. Here is the Amazon link for anyone looking to order it online: Harry Potter and History. It was a really good read paralleling the magical world of Harry Potter with actual events, people, places, and things.

*Edit: it looks like it is also available on Kindle. So there is a digital copy out there too for anyone who is reading on a kindle, nook, or something else.

Just to add some Potter stuff here...
The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us about Moral Choices by Edmund Kern

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

amazon.fr

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

I would look into Beckett's work. I just picked up two of her books at the library this week, so I haven't read them, but they are about her research on versions of Red Riding Hood. I suspect the bibliographies would be helpful for you.

Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts

Revisioning Red Riding Hood around the World: An Anthology of International Retellings

Both are apparently part of a "Series in Fairy-Tale Studies." The back cover of the second has comments from Vanessa Joosen, author of Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings; and Christina Bacchilega, author of Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder.

Relatively recently, people have begun suggested that The Chronicles of Narnia also take a lot of inspiration from medieval cosmology.

Also free; Heralds of Empire Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade

I've got this in my Amazon wishlist, so I figured I'd check the index and it has quite a bit of stuff listed for "board books". Might be worth looking into.

Yeah it was a great class haha.

The class was primarily discussion based, and of course the 7 books were mandatory readings, but we also looked at essays from A Wizard of Their Age: Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation and Wizards vs. Muggles: Essays on Identity and the Harry Potter Universe

Here, just use my Christmas list:

NIV Zondervan Study Bible

The Goldsworthy Trilogy

Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

Perspectives on Israel and the Church: 4 Views

Tough Topics

Tough Topics 2

God's Design for Man and Woman

Planet Narnia

Paul and the Law

Covenantal Apologetics

The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism

There's plenty more I'd recommend (like anything from John Piper), but that's a decent start.

White supremacy might be over stating it. There are lots of articles talking about this and even a book

Anyone know anything about the "Oliver Loo" version which is also out?

http://www.amazon.com/Original-1812-Grimm-Fairy-Tales-ebook/dp/B00MMX1Z5W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416438807&sr=1-1&keywords=grimm+oliver+loo

https://www.amazon.ca/Lexicon-Unauthorized-Fiction-Related-Materials/dp/1571431748

Check and mate.

This one?

You could try the Opies.

It's a little more than that, actually.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Annotated-Brothers-Grimm-Bicentennial/dp/0393088863/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1411078972&sr=8-15&keywords=grimms+fairy+tales+original

This is the one I currently own.

I would want that handsome annotated bicentennial edition.

Any of them that say "complete" will have all of the tales. Some of them are broken into volumes. Get her any complete edition. Like this one.

I think there's a plausible theory that says the Aliens franchise is in fact built on the Babar children's books. Notice that:

• Herbert Kohl, in "Should we Burn Babar" argues that Babar is essentially an argument for French neo-colonialism. The Alien franchise can be interpreted as extended argument against inter-planetary colonization
  
  
• Adam Gopnik, in his New Yorker article, Freeing the Elephants makes the point that "while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park." Is it a coincidence that the Aliens (most directly in Cameron's interpretation) seek the comfort of the LV-426 mining colony?
  
  
• In Episode 59 of Babar, the animated series, Arthur convinces the family that aliens are invading the planet. Does this foreshadow the inter-species conflict between space jockeys and xenomorphs as the Prometheus trailer suggest?

Everybody pretty much covered it from the top-down data-driven side. Specifically for me I focus on local-level conservation efforts and teaching people how everything is intertwined with our everyday. I highly focus on environmental empathy, because how are we going to get people to make a concerted effort to go green, much less keep up with the information, unless they care about the environment (related, I also focus on green actions that are good for the wallet, like making homemade cleaning fluids, not idling your modern car, and turning off lights you're not using).

For example throwing a cigarette on the ground could

• a) individually cause a local fire if it's not out and blows closer to some brush
  
  
• b) many discarded cigarettes can pile up and poison the ground or water. The plastic filters can be eaten by animals and the chemicals leech into systems.
  
  Note how the ground near roads in general doesn't fare well, but especially where you see a lot of cigarette butts at red lights. Ground erodes there as less plants are able to grow. More and more pollution ends up going down the drains along roads. Our natural water filters (aka marshes) work overtime and eventually cannot support life as well. Animals die of accidental ingestion or getting trapped in litter and no longer exist to fill the niche they served, and nothing evolved fast enough to fill that niche instead (this is the problem with exacerbated climate change in general-- nature can't replace itself fast enough). This causes the marsh to die off even faster. Eventually either local citizens end up with unsafe to drink water, or their taxes/water bill goes up to account for the increased filtration needed.
  
  My favorite three books to explain at its most basic level this issue as well as how to teach yourself and children conservation efforts:
  
  
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Well known book that really birthed the environmental movement. It's a little harsh, but hard hitting in a way that adults need to see how everything connects in local and global environmental policy)
  
  
• Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv (focuses on the physical and mental health benefits spending time in nature has, especially for children)
  
  
• Beyond Ecophobia by David Sobel (discusses how many environmentalists go too far with the fire and brimstone attitude about climate change, and how that's turned people off to the issue and spawned more climate denial or misunderstandings. This cliff notes version was largely what caused me to shift to teaching almost exclusively local-level conservation issues)
  
  
  Not really sure how being an independent is qualifier for anything....everyone should do their research and climate issues should not be a partisan thing. I am too independent but even if climate change were not a real and dangerous issue, I'd still rather switch to things that will produce less pollution so my lungs can breathe easier and my water taste better. I'd still care about saving an endangered species that's dying due to our own actions of overhunting or deforestation, tenfold if it is the sole provider of a niche.
  
  PS- Sorry you're getting downvoted. :(