A version of this story first appeared in The Last Word on Nothing.

As the parent of a 3-year-old, I spend a lot of time reading kids’ books. Some are wonderful, a lot are so-so, and a few are so frigging annoying that -- I confess -- I hide them. As a science writer, I always expect to like science-themed books -- this is my kind of brainwashing, I think -- but lately, I’ve even packed a few of them off to the thrift store.

In uncharitable moments, I might gripe about these books’ bad artwork or mixed meters. But my real problem is with the way they present science. According to them, science is not, as my colleagues and I humbly remind you, The Last Word on Nothing. It’s an intimidating institution filled with intimidating grownups, all of whom have The Last Word on Pretty Much Everything. “Putting a dinosaur skeleton together takes hard work -- and lots of special knowledge and skill,” one book intones.

If we’re not careful, we’ll end up living in a world that looks like this -- and that is a truly scary prospect.

I was well into an undergraduate biology major before I grasped that science is not a pile of interesting facts, but a process -- not the only way to learn about the world, but a very powerful one. I’d like my daughter to arrive at that realization a little sooner than I did. I’d also like her to know that she doesn’t need a Ph.D. to start thinking like a scientist.

Yes, in the official world of science, credentials do count, and in most cases they should. But kids should know that anyone can make observations, form hypotheses, and figure out how to test them. Anyone can have a eureka moment. Anyone can go on a voyage of discovery, even if it begins and ends in the town park.

I’ve started to think that the best books for budding scientists don’t lecture, teach, or even talk much about science. Instead, they find other ways to celebrate the crooked, fascinating path that is the scientific life. Below are a half dozen that get unanimous approval in my household.

Photo by Kate Mereand-Sinha.

A version of this post first appeared in The Last Word on Nothing.

Late last year, I wrote about the dominance of the tragic “Lorax narrative” in environmental reporting. It made me wonder: How would Dr. Seuss himself tackle climate change? After all, the story of climate change is muddy and complex, and its real drama is both geographically distant (if you’re lucky) and years in the future (ditto) -- in other words, it lacks most of the ingredients that make any narrative memorable.

My guess is that the good doctor wouldn’t try to hide these problems. He wrote for kids, but he wasn’t afraid of complexity. He might even put the scientific, political, and personal knottiness of climate change at the heart of his story.

With apologies to the master, it might sound something like this.

This interview originally appeared in the Last Word on Nothing. Dearest readers, we hope you had a gluttonous, slothful, greedy, and lustful holiday, with only the tiniest touches of wrath. My compatriots and I at the Last Word on Nothing are celebrating the season with a series of posts on the Seven Deadly Sins. I got things started with a conversation with conservation biologist Michael Soule, the founder of the Society for Conservation Biology and The Wildlands Network and a professor emeritus of environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In recent years, in pursuit of an …

Cross-posted from the Last Word on Nothing. I've spent a lot of time this past year thinking and writing about extinction, which means I've also spent a lot of time drinking thinking about the tragic narrative in environmental journalism. There's a lot of genuine tragedy on the environmental beat, and it doesn't take a partisan to see it. There's not a whole lot to like about water pollution, or crop failures, or mass extinction. A lot of these stories lend themselves to the Lorax narrative. You know how it goes: The Lorax speaks for the trees, the rest of us keep buying …

Modern homesteading can be particularly maddening for the ladies. Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing. There are a lot of ways to shrink a carbon footprint. Bike instead of drive. Eat low on the food chain. You know the drill. Where I live, in the boondocks of Colorado, a lot of people -- myself included, but I'll get to that in a minute -- go on a carbon diet by purchasing some cheap land, rigging up a few solar panels, and getting off the grid. Most of these people are well-educated, well-meaning, and idealistic, determined to build and garden …

Photo: duluoz cats Cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing. A few years ago, I interviewed author and social critic James Kunstler about his novel World Made By Hand, his latest portrayal of a post-peak oil future. Kunstler, as one might expect, had plenty of complaints -- about suburbs, Cheez Doodles, Walmart, the American road trip. But when I mentioned that I'd grown up in the Hudson River town of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., he perked up. "Oh!" he said, sounding as if he'd almost cracked a smile. People from Poughkeepsie are not, to say the least, used to this kind of …

It's not easy being green.Let's face it: If you care about the environment, you've got a lot of reasons to be bummed out. Is the sorry state of the planet dragging you into the dumps? John Fraser, a psychologist, architect, and educator with the Institute for Learning Innovation, is one of a small group of psychologists interested in the mental health of conservationists themselves -- how professional activists, environmental educators, and conservation-oriented researchers handle the daily evidence of environmental destruction. Environmentalists, Fraser says, often aren't aware of the emotional toll of their work. "Talking to environmentalists can be like talking …

Lisa's posts about being a GINK (green inclinations, no kids) have provoked some feisty discussion, and that's great -- getting people to talk openly about the childfree option was one of her main goals. But when it gets to the point where parents and GINKs are hurling insults at each other and declaring that folks on the other side of the aisle can't be real environmentalists, then we've got a circular-firing-squad problem. We enviros are all on the same team, remember -- pushing for a cleaner, greener, saner, kinder world. We should be fighting apathy and pollutocrats, not each other. …

The contents of your dog's bowl -- kibble, kibble, more kibble -- may not look that interesting, but to nutritionist Marion Nestle, they're nothing less than a microcosm of the global food system. In her new book Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, Nestle (pronounced NES-uhl, no relation to the multinational) investigates the 2007 pet-food contamination scandal, at the time the largest consumer product recall in U.S. history. Companies withdrew nearly 200 brands of cat and dog foods from store shelves, and while the federal Food and Drug Administration eventually confirmed only 17 or 18 animal deaths, …

Elizabeth Royte.Photo: Rod MorrisonJournalist Elizabeth Royte drinks tap water, but she spends a lot of time thinking about the bottled kind. In her new book, Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, Royte investigates the causes and consequences of the bottled-water industry's astounding growth. With her refillable water bottle in hand, Royte travels to Fryeburg, Maine, where a water-pumping operation for Nestle's Poland Spring label divides the town. In the course of her research, she also tastes fancy bottled waters with a water connoisseur, monitors her eight-year-old daughter's water intake, and conducts an informal poll of …