December 5, 2025
Mark and Emily Turner Memorial Library
Presque Isle, Maine

The Secret of the Catapus book talk

My inspiration for writing The Secret of the Catapus is the children of this generation – and their concerns about climate change.

I, too, have been concerned about climate change ever since a day in 1991, when I paused at a sales table in Barnes and Noble and picked up a book by Senator George Mitchell entitled World on Fire, published the same year.

The book described the serious threat posed by the “greenhouse effect” and climate change around the globe. It covered the various environmental challenges of the day, such as the destruction of the ozone layer, acid rain, and the depletion of the rainforests. Senator Mitchell recommended specific steps and conservation strategies to curb the environmental damage, as well as the role he believed the US should play in international conservation efforts.

In 1991, as the mother of a two-year-old and four-year-old, I found the book very interesting, but felt it would be many years before I needed to worry about climate change. Time has wings, as they say.

In 1988, three years before Senator Mitchell’s book came out, Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, published his “hockey stick” graph. His graph showed that the average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, which had been relatively stable for centuries (from around 1000 AD – 1900), were followed by a sharp, sudden increase in the 20th century. The “stick” of the graph was a long, flat trend, followed by an abrupt spike, the “blade” of the hockey stick. 

Time passed too quickly, and our little boys became big boys. During those years, I never lost interest in climate change and continued to read as many books as I could find. For a while, between 2000 and 2014, climate change was at the forefront of the news. Senator Susan Collins was involved in a number of congressional efforts to address climate change. More recently, the state of Maine has taken a “Maine won’t wait” approach to the climate crisis. The past few years, however, have shown varying levels of concern about climate change with the public and our elected officials.

Michael Mann presented his “hockey stick” findings to Congress in 2006, 2009, and 2017. His findings, which used “multiproxy” data from tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments combined with instrumental records, have provided strong visual evidence to support the argument that human activity and the increase in greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant cause of the observed warming. Almost all scientists in the world agree.

In 2009, the emails of some climate scientists in the UK were hacked, resulting in the “Climategate scandal”, in which they were accused of doctoring the data. But at least eight different official investigations found no evidence of fraud or misconduct. The hacking job was part of an international effort to dispute the findings of climate change. Many climate scientists had arrived at the same conclusions as Michael Mann, using the graph of rising CO2 emissions alongside the hockey stick graph of rising global temperatures and other data, to project twenty-five, fifty, and one hundred years into the future – without very good news.

Through the years, I also began to read books and articles by Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University and an advocate for climate science and climate communication. She is also an evangelical Christian who doesn’t see any contradiction between her religious beliefs and science. Her first book, A Climate for Change, was published in 2009, and her second, Saving Us, was published in 2021. Using a fund of well-established scientific evidence and common sense, she makes the case for climate change and what it means for the future of our planet, if left unchecked.

As Hayhoe sees it, the problem with educating people about climate change is that knowledge of the facts inspires fear and dread, which causes people to turn away and do nothing. But instead of despair, Hayhoe offers fresh hope. Her message is that we already have the solutions to the climate crisis – we only need the will to employ them. The first and most important step is to simply talk about it, something that we don’t do very much.

Hop into the wayback machine – back to 1961, when I was in first grade. Most American homes had a TV by then, and I have a few recollections of the era – prayer in the schools and the decision to remove it, JFK’s inaugural address, John John and Caroline, Nikita Khrushchev, Boris and Natasha, John Glenn and Rachel Carson. We had a small, square TV with rabbit ears in our living room, and I remember seeing the grainy images on the screen and listening to my parents talk about the news.

I don’t think they knew her, but my parents must certainly have known of Rachel Carson, the environmental writer. Once a year, we packed up the station wagon and drove up old Route 1 to spend a glorious week on Southport Island, Maine, where Rachel Carson lived. My parents loved the sea, and it’s likely they read The Sea Around Us, her best-selling book published in 1951. Another book, Silent Spring, came out in 1962, the same year my father died. The following year, Rachel Carson gave her testimony before Congress about the effects of man-made pesticides, particularly the insecticide DDT, which was very harmful to the environment and human health. She described how pollutants are carried aloft in the atmosphere, as well as in “the earth, the rivers, and the sea”.

I first became aware of air pollution when my father emphatically told me not to eat the snow. He said that harmful particles travel on currents of air, like rivers in the sky. Sadly, he died when I was eight. I have memories of playing with the weather balloons he brought home from work. He was a chemical engineer, and one of his projects was designing and deploying the high-altitude balloons used at White Sands, New Mexico, to carry instruments and take pictures of the atomic tests, where that nasty, invisible stuff in the snow came from.

I remember my mother saying that if my father had lived, he would have belonged to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization that uses independent analysis to advocate for practical solutions to problems like climate change, nuclear weapons, and sustainable food systems. During the war he had worked on the development of synthetic rubber when the supply lines to natural rubber were cut off. Later on, he perfected the Ball canning jar with the intact rubber ring and brought home enormous test runs of Saran Wrap before it went on the market. All of these inventions, and the wonder of modern chemicals, made life easier in the 1960’s. But like Rachel Carson, I believe he was highly aware of releasing harmful industrial chemicals into the environment.

In the early to mid 1960’s, during “the cold war”, I was part of the “duck and cover” generation, where we practiced civil defense drills in the classroom by ducking under our desks. One day, when I was in the fifth grade, a well-meaning lady came to talk to us, saying we had better go straight home and ask our parents to build a bomb shelter, with stacked newspapers to line the walls of the basement, if that’s all we had. That day I ran home as fast as I could, afraid of what might fall on my head.

Despite my childhood fears, I survived to adulthood. Flash forward again to years of teaching school and raising kids, and an undeniable sense that many of our children are as keenly aware of gloom-and-doom scenarios as I was, at an early age. They know about climate change, and are afraid.

So, how to acknowledge their feelings and help them to deal with fear and dread? How to give them a fundamental understanding of climate change and help them to apply what they know? How to enable them to find a voice, so they will feel they have a say in their own future? And how to do it in an age-appropriate way, so as not to overwhelm them? 

A story, that’s how. Hopefully one that would entertain and delight. With at least one enchanting character (the Catapus). Katharine Hayhoe is an advocate for stories. She says stories are far more effective than facts in educating people about climate change, because they speak to the heart and bridge the gap between concern and action, fostering a deeper understanding. In The Secret of the Catapus, the main character, Ellie, experiences the same emotions about climate change as many other children of her generation, and finds her way to becoming a climate activist like her grandmother.

I simply had to find a way to put Rachel Carson in the story, so I included a scene where Ellie learns that her grandmother and her high school “chums” drove to Washington, DC, in 1963 to hear Rachel Carson’s testimony in Congress, which is important to understanding another character in the story, Ellie’s neighbor, Joe, the clam digger.

Kids are important in the story, of course. There’s Ellie, the main character, and her circle of “misfit” friends – Freddy, Judy, and Katahdin – the kind of friends that every child should have. Grandparents are important, too. There’s Ellie’s late grandmother, Eleanor, for whom she was named, the “grandfather” seal, a.k.a. “the Catapus”’, and Joe, who becomes a surrogate grandparent to Ellie.

Grandparents and grandchildren – perhaps a takeaway is that together, they would make a formidable force in addressing climate change. I would love to explore that idea some more.

The Secret of the Catapus is imbued with friendship, family, a love of nature, and a touch of magical realism in the character of the seal, the Catapus. I hope it will empower young readers to become part of the solution instead of becoming overwhelmed by the negative impacts of climate change. And I hope they will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!