"Mom! MOM!" my five year old screams with an urgency and intensity rare to him. I instantly freeze and look up to where he is standing over the project I'm crouching to work on. "You're heating up the earth, Mom! You're melting the icebergs! The icebergs are melting, Mom."

I look dumbly down at the can of spray enamel I'm holding. This same son, in one of his frequent entrepreneurial moods, briefly took up decorating flowerpots to sell and use as gifts. Of course, being five, he didn't realize that the tempera paint he was using would wash away the first time the pot got wet. Of the many he produced, only one remains intact, the painting project having been replaced days later by a smashing project. This last pot is actually quite beautiful, a silvery gray interior with deep gradations of blue spilling down the outside. It surfaced as I cleaned off the workbench in the garage, and a few minutes later I happened upon the almost empty can of clear spray enamel. It seemed like kismet, the meeting of the flowerpot and the enamel, the chance to transform a surefire mess into an actually useful piece of kid art. I briefly consider the fluorocarbon issue as I lay out newspaper on which to spray, but I decide that since the spray can has already been purchased and exists, it may as well fulfill the purpose of preserving my kid's creative talents.

So here I am, caught in the act. And unsure which act I'm caught in is worse: the spray paint or the fact that my five-year old is this aware of environmental destruction. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of the most eco-obsessed people that I know, and I sure as heck intend to raise children who are not only well-versed in environmental issues but have a strong sense of responsibility for making sustainable life choices. But I also subscribe to the no-tragedies-before-fourth-grade theory of education, to let them develop a strong sense of their own agency and power to affect change before we throw the really big stuff at them. Big stuff like terrorism, violent crime, and the accelerating death of the planet.

"Oh, you're right, thanks for reminding me, I'll stop," I stutter to reassure him. I try to calm the surprise and anxiety out of my voice when I ask him, as if nonchalant about the whole thing, "Where did you learn that?"

"From the book, the penguin book, you know, with the penguins."

Ah, yes, the penguin book. The book that pushed all my anxiety pressure points. The award-winning, bestselling book that drove me to the brink of raving madness when the kids asked me to read it again, again, again, please, until my partner appeared at the door to the living room, a puzzled expression on her face, just checking in to make sure I'm sane. From her post at the sink washing dishes, even over the muffling sound of running water, she had heard my tone grow more and more shrill. She arrived just in time to see me slam it down on the coffee table and shriek, "NO MORE! I will NOT read that book again, ever." So much for trying to just pretend it was like any other library book and not make a big deal of it. I tried to save the evening by reading a thousand other books to them before they had to go to bed, but it was too late: 365 Penguins was indelibly printed in their minds as somehow Important.

This book, 365 Penguins, is ostensibly a book about math. A family receives a penguin in the mail every day starting on January first. As the weeks and months roll by, they need to decrease the ensuing chaos by organizing the penguins, placing them in rows and stacks and other sets involving simple multiplication. There are hilarious moments when the neighbors complain about the summertime stench, and when the daughter of the family loses it, proposing the simple solution of penguin stew. Honestly, I have no problem with math. Or with penguins, for that matter. What I have a problem with is the didactic yet absurd ending, in which the mystery of who is sending the penguins is resolved by an unannounced visit from the mother's brother, the "ecologist." He explains that the penguins' habitat is being destroyed by global warming and though it's illegal to transport endangered species, he escaped detection by mailing one penguin at a time to suburban America, all in service of his plot to save the penguins by eventually moving them to the North Pole. Huh???

Let me try and break down why this book sends me to the verge of hysteria. I'm okay with the suspension of disbelief involved in the colonization of a single-family home by hundreds of penguins. And though I wouldn't choose it, I'm okay with a passing reference to global warming; after all, it's the reality of my children's world. What irks me so much is the combination of the real scientific tragedy and the totally unreal solution. You can't just say, "So, since the planet is in a major crisis, we'll Fedex the wildlife to another country." Okay, maybe my kids are uniquely unsophisticated, but at five and six they just don't have the critical skills to separate the scary truth from the frivolous fiction. Sure they know the difference between real and make believe, but not when it's all mixed up on the same page.

Perhaps I'm so triggered because the obviously impossible "solution" to the declining penguin habitat is a strangely exaggerated mirror of the irrational "good news" we're all counting on to rescue us. We humans also have a declining habitat, and we are rallying around recycling, canvas shopping bags, and compact fluorescent bulbs as if massive structural changes to the way society is structured aren't needed. We have created our own fictional, irrational solutions that make us feel better about the uncertain and frightening future. Maybe if we were just penguins, someone could simply find us a better home, one that we haven't destroyed yet.

Needless to say, the penguin book was "due" at the library very soon after we checked it out. For education about environmental destruction, we'll stick with Dr Seuss' classic The Lorax. The Lorax is my kind of a book, laying it right out there with pictorial representation of a post-apocalyptic landscape on page one. Now then, shouldn't that be an anxiety trigger? Well, no, and not just because of the rhyme scheme. The Lorax tells the truth, using age-appropriate terms like "gluppity-glupp," about greed and over-utilization of finite resources and the interdependence of ecosystems and how bad it can really get, AND about what it will take to undo the harm that has been done.

The Lorax tells a story of bleakness and of hope, and wisely avoids drawing the picture of the forms that hope takes as it translates into action. The message, that the world's only chance for renewal is "someone like you" who "cares a whole awful lot," both calls the reader to step up and empowers her with the potential for infinite good work. The erstwhile greedy destroyer of the environment, the Onceler, places into a child's safekeeping the last seed of the Truffula trees which once formed the linchpin of an entire ecosystem, the trees which have all been destroyed. One seed, one chance, bidding us to look honestly at even the meagerest resource that we have and figure out how to nurture it.

I'm sad that my child has learned that the icebergs are melting before he has had a chance to learn what an iceberg actually is. I've had to look carefully at how I communicate my values to him. I intend to impart them as guidelines for action, as my directions for making life's many choices, but I'm realizing that just as often, I show him the things important to me as templates for anxiety. "Paper comes from trees, don't use so much. Turn off the water, we'll deplete the aquifer. Close the fridge, you're wasting energy and that's bad for the earth." On and on.

Maybe a healthy dose of eco-anxiety is what's needed to keep us all on our toes and heading in the right direction in this era of rapid climate change, but I somehow feel that my five-year-old could easily be overwhelmed by fear and helplessness. For his sake and probably for mine as well, I must work harder to reframe the fear as hope: we can use less to help the earth, we can save energy, we can do something, even if as adults we know it's not enough. But we must believe that what we can do has meaning, like the child on the final page of The Lorax, reaching eagerly for his precious seed, and imagining a future that will only be possible if someone like him believes he can remake the world.