Eco-Tainment #4: Michael Bird-Boy

So far, all of the Eco-Tainment reviews I've done have been for movies and TV shows. but there's a lot more to the world of fiction than that. So today, I'm going to review something very different. It's a book that I read as a child, which I feel manages to tell a very realistic and nuanced explanation of environmental issues without falling into the same traps as Captain Planet did. It was written by Tomie dePaola, and its name is Michael Bird-Boy.
The plot of the book is simple. The titular Michael, who inexplicably dresses in a bird costume, notices a black cloud over the green valley where he lives. The plants wilt, the animals choke. Michael sets out on a journey to find out where the mysterious cloud is coming from. The source turns out to be a factory that produces artificial honey-flavored syrup. Michael brings up his grievances with the CEO, who is both willing to listen and shocked by the (implied) destruction she has caused. He suggests that the company convert itself to producing real honey, which would not pollute.
The beauty of Michael Bird-Boy is that it has no true villain. The boss of the syrup company is not malicious--she does not pollute out of a hatred for nature or a single-minded obsession with money. In other words, Michael Bird-Boy reflects a simplified version of the role real life corporations play in environmentalism. This is both unusual and refreshing for an environmental-themed work aimed at children.
As a final note of comparison between the two, Captain Planet creator Ted Turner once said that he made his villains exaggerated caricatures because otherwise "children might believe that if their parents worked in a polluting industry they were somehow villainous." But as Michael Bird-Boy proves, this is not necessarily the case. Children's stories are capable of depicting environmentalism in various shades of grey, and we will see more examples of this in later reviews.

Despite being a scant 32 pages long, Michael Bird-Boy is a masterpiece of environmental fiction.