How children’s books are raising environmental awareness in Indonesia

While these cases could have substantial impacts on the environmental rights of Indonesians and their children, raising awareness about climate litigation has been challenging for environmental campaigners, said environmental lawyer Sekar Banjaran Aji, who is also a campaigner for Greenpeace Indonesia.

“Climate litigation as a topic is very difficult and [complex] even for adults,” Sekar Banjaran told the Eco-Business Podcast.

In response, Greenpeace Indonesia worked with journalist and author Titah Aw and illustrator Sekar Bestari to produce a series of children’s books that simplified these topics into narratives that could be easily understood.

In this podcast, they share:

• How they combined key facts and imaginative elements to tell climate stories
• Why it is important for stories of climate change and litigation to be told more widely
• What parents and children have learned from reading the books
• How the author and illustrator’s own experiences with nature shaped their environmental advocacy

Edited transcript:

Can you introduce the books briefly and how the idea for them came about?

Sekar Banjaran: I’m part of a small project within Greenpeace Indonesia focused on the climate litigation campaign. Throughout the campaign, we met people who inspired us to save our forests and speak up about climate change and climate justice.

But climate litigation as a topic is very difficult and segmented even for adults. We faced the problem of making this campaign [accessible] for everyone. So, we met with Titah and Sekar Bestari to discuss how we could bring this story to a wider audience. We decided on storytelling via children’s books, and we brainstormed ideas to choose from our many stories.

We have five books. The first one is Exploring the Great Forest. The second one is about our super team, One Day as a Forest Firefighter. And the third book is Where Does the Haze Go? – it’s about the transboundary haze that happened across Indonesia, Malaysia, and also Singapore.

The fourth book is Salawaku, Shield of the Forest. It’s about the story of indigenous people in Papua who are saving their forests. And the last book is a very touching story, The Forest is Our Mother, also from the indigenous Papuans.

In October 2024, Greenpeace Indonesia launched a series of five children’s books focused on environmental protection and climate litigation. Image: Greenpeace

Titah, in Where Does the Haze Go?, you personified the Haze. You’ve worked as a journalist for most of your career and this is your first time writing children’s books. What was that process like and how were you inspired to give the Haze a personality?

Titah: For that specific story, Where Does the Haze Go?, we first have to know that haze is a complicated issue. It’s a common experience for most children on Borneo and Sumatra, but not many realise and understand that it is actually a complicated problem.

Here in Indonesia, we often blame the haze itself [for poor health] when at the root of the problem, the haze is actually just a side effect [of wider issues]. I personified the haze in an attempt to compress this complex issue in a kid-friendly way, making it easier for them to understand. When writing children’s books, we have to play with our imagination. In this case, I tried to imagine how it feels to be the haze that is being blamed for so many problems, when actually the haze itself doesn’t want to be there.

Was it difficult for you, as a journalist who usually has to write about facts, to think about it in a more imaginative way?

Titah: Because this climate litigation book series is based on real cases that have been advocated by Greenpeace, using facts as a baseline for the story was not a problem for me.

The real challenge was how to compress complex issues into 20 pages or 24 pages. When one page is only one sentence, we have to compress a lot of things into bite-sized pieces for the children.

That leads me to the illustrations, which I thought told as much of the story as the words did. Sekar Bestari, what was your process of choosing which animals, people or characters to draw?

Sekar Bestari: Compared to Titah, who mostly writes about what happened in reality, I mostly work on my imagination. So, the challenge for me was to stick to reality so that the books were appropriate (and) representative.

When I drew the characters, I had to stick to their characteristic features. Rinai, for example, lives in Sumatra where they are mostly of Malay descent, so they have lighter skin compared to other characters. Tera, who is from Papua in Salawaku, Shield of the Forest would have a darker skin complexion. I need to stick to that simple reality because I don’t want to misinform the children.

The bigger challenge for me was also to represent the animals the right way. They aren’t something that I see every day, so I needed to run a background check with a biodiversity expert. We asked, is this a real insect in that area? What kind of patterns do they actually have? I had to stick to that before I jump to my imagination.

Illustrator Sekar Bestari (left) and author Titah Awe (right) worked with Greenpeace Indonesia to produce a series of children’s books about environmental protection and climate litigation in the country. Image: Greenpeace

There are two books about Papua, one about their relationship with the forest and the other about the salawaku, which is their shield. The latter explores how the Papuans use both national law and traditional beliefs to defend their forests. How practical are the examples in the books – do kids see this practice making a difference in reality?

Sekar Banjaran: That’s a very good question – we actually have a real case of defending the land of the indigenous Awyu tribe in Papua. We wanted people to know exactly how the Awyu live and celebrate their customary law.

We also want children to know that Indonesia doesn’t only consist of people in Java or in the west of Indonesia – we want to show kids that the country is actually very diverse with different cultures. We hope they will save our forests better, because our case actually failed at the Supreme Court [last November]. So we hope to rely on telling this story to more and more people.

How have children responsed to the books so far?

Titah: Since the books’ release, what has been heartwarming is that a few of the readers’ parents told us that some of the children have memorised the books. They said the books have started discussions with their children about the environment, from something as simple as asking what lives on the trees outside their house. That simple question leads to many discussions about the environment.

We’ve heard that some children really like the fifth book, the Mother is our Forest. One kid has memorised it and started to tell their parents and everyone around them, “Don’t hurt my mom! Don’t hurt the forest! If the forest is damaged, my mom will also be sick.” They have that understanding from this book and that response is very heartwarming for me as the writer.

Sekar Bestari: I received a message from a parent that read the books to their kids almost every day, even three times a day, until the books’ bindings have torn apart! It is heartwarming for me to hear that they really like to read it repeatedly, and are obsessed with it, even.

Titah: I think that kind of response shows us that we need more children’s books in the market that speak about real cases. We need more books that not only speak about imaginative things but complicated issues even, because children can understand these kinds of issues.

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We tend to think that children have simple minds and don’t care or don’t understand climate change, but…they do understand and they do care about their environment.

Titah Aw, author

Would you say that you’ve had personal experiences with the environment in your childhood which has helped you become more environmentally aware?

Sekar Banjaran: As someone from Java, I actually practiced Kejawen [a Javanese religious tradition that combines elements of animism, Buddhism, Islam and and Hinduism] with my grandfather. One of the rituals included praying with the trees and plants around us, every morning and afternoon.

Through those experiences, I felt very close to my surroundings, including the land, the plants around me and the animals. That made me acknowledge that I cannot live alone – I must live [in harmony] with the human and non-human beings around me. And that taught me to love and celebrate nature and the environment more.

Titah: It was similar for me because I come from a suburban area in East Java, where I spent more time on the field than on screens. I remember running around with my friends and pets, picking wild fruit and playing under the rain. I barely touched handphones, which were still rare in my housing area.

Maybe the realisation of seeing the Earth as a living thing for me came from when I saw my mom talking to her garden, to her orchids and other flowers. While watering the plants, she would casually say, “Oh, I hope you bloom well; don’t die, please be healthy.” I remember asking my mom, “Can the plants hear that?” And she said, “Of course, plants are living things, as well as everything around us.”

That’s maybe one of the core memories I have that led me to my current beliefs about environmental issues.

Sekar Bestari: Like Titah, maybe I’m one of the lucky ones because my parents love the outdoors so much that my father plants almost everything in our home garden. My brother has haemophilia [a disease in which blood does not clot easily]. So we grew sirih (betel) plants that can be used to stop the bleeding. I watched my father make the medicine from the home garden itself. That’s where I felt connected with the outdoors.

Sekar Banjaran Aji, environmental lawyer and Greenpeace Indonesia campaigner, has advocated for climate litigation as a mechanism for indigenous Indonesians to secure rights to their native lands. Image: Greenpeace

Is there anything you’ve learnt from the process of producing these children’s books that you would apply to your future work as a journalist, Titah, or in illustrating book covers, Sekar Bestari?

Titah: Before I worked on this project, I rarely made work that speaks to children. As a journalist, I mostly produce articles and narratives for adults. During this project, I learned how to speak to children, and I realised that we can’t think children don’t understand these kinds of issues. We tend to think that children have simple minds and don’t care or don’t understand climate change, but from this experience, I learned that they do understand and they do care about their environment.

So one of my biggest lessons from this project was that we need to talk more about these issues with children because they are the ones who will live on this planet and inherit the earth.

Sekar Bestari: I agree – children are often treated as an afterthought for important issues like climate change. But when I read things to my kid, I also learned something.

I guess this is also part of the goal for these books, that when parents read them to their kids, the parents will also learn something from them. It starts with ourselves, from a small organisation like the family.

Titah: I have something to add – during my work as a journalist, I met many environmental activists. I realised a common trait they share is that the reason why they still have the energy and passion to work on defending nature, despite all the challenges they face, is because they have core memories about the environment from their childhoods. These are either experiences they’ve had or what they’ve read as children. So I want this book to be part of the core memories that (children today) can carry throughout their lives. We hope that in the future they can be defenders of nature as well because they carry these memories.

If our listeners are interested in reading the books themselves, how would they be able to get a copy? And are there any future plans for the series?

Sekar Banjaran: These books are part of our efforts to make Greenpeace more (financially) independent, so you can receive the books via donations to Greenpeace via this link.

As for our future plans, since the books are written in Indonesian and English, we are in discussions with our international colleagues on whether we should translate them for more children around the world.