Save Our Forest! | Review

Save Our Forest!
Writer/artist: Nora Dåsnes
Hippo Park; $24.99

Norwegian cartoonist Nora Dåsnes’ latest graphic novel Save Our Forest! is technically a sequel to her 2023 Cross My Heart and Never Lie, featuring the same group of middle-school girls, although the role of protagonist here shifts from Tuva to her friend Bao. Don’t worry if you missed the previous book; Save Our Forest! stands perfectly well on its own as a complete work.

Bao, Tuva, and Linnea are now about to finish up their final year of middle school and move on to high school. They are growing up…and into the world their parents and previous generations have left them, a world in severe danger because of the climate crisis, which will only get worse and worse the older they get.

In fact, they are already seeing some of the effects of the changing climate, including record rains that lead to dangerous flooding. Headstrong, responsible Bao does what she can for the environment, choosing to walk or ride the bus when she can instead of getting rides in her mom’s car, and, in her role as student council president, sitting in on meetings with the school administration, where she presents a proposal to make various green changes to the school so that it can be certified as sustainable.

But not only do the school leaders patronizingly dismiss the plan by promising to investigate it in the future, they actually have a plan of their own that will have an adverse effect on the local environment: They want to raze about half of the woods adjacent to the school in order to expand the school’s parking lot, meaning fewer trees and more gas-powered cars.

That’s obviously a step in the wrong direction for addressing the climate crisis globally, but more urgently for Bao and her friends and classmates, it’s a personal travesty: The woods are where they regularly hang out and play, seemingly the only true nature they get to experience.

The conflict thus introduced, Bao enlists Tuva and Linnea, who at first aren’t quite as gung-ho about the fight as she is, and begins to attack the problem from all angles, from seeking to address the mayor, to circulating a petition, to increasingly drastic acts of activism, culminating in the occupation of the woods, an act that eventually—Bao might even say belatedly—brings her mom and the other students’ parents around to the cause.

What is so compelling—and, perhaps, depressingly realistic—is that none of the adults are portrayed as bad guys. They just all, almost to a one, seem to be distracted, to have different priorities, or to just not have the appropriate sense of urgency about the climate that Bao does.

It is, of course, that lack of perspective that put the “crisis” in “climate crisis” in the first place and it seems borne in part out of a lack of investment; for far too many adults, global warming’s very worst effects, those that will be truly apocalyptic, maybe even threatening humanity, will occur in the next generation or two, after they’ve died. But for the kids of today like Bao, that’s well within their own lifetime and that of their children.

There is definitely a sense of the activist about Dåsnes in this work. After Bao’s disastrous initial meeting with school leaders (“It sounds like they don’t even know elementary school science,” Tuva says of them), the girls put together their own climate report, and the next nine pages of the book are given over to presenting that report directly to the readers, as Dåsnes explains what global warming is, what causes it, and what dangerous effects it is having on the world.

After the conclusion of the story, there’s a four-page sequence entitled “Bao, Tuva and Linnea’s guide to being HEARD!” which lays out what kids can do to influence their societies to have a positive effect on the environment (or advocate for any cause, really), and then there’s a spread showing the Earth from space, with a heartening, somewhat comforting message from Dåsnes to readers.

As strident as the book might seem, however, it is not a lecture. It’s an extremely effective drama centered on an interesting character dealing with multiple conflicts, interpersonal ones as well as the one driving the plot of the book.

Dåsnes’ construction of the book only adds to the intimate feeling of the drama. The panels each seem to be hand-painted, and the book features hand lettering, giving the proceedings a tactile, warm, almost home-made feeling, even when depicting things like slick, cold technology, as in the many times the narrative gives itself over to depicting the text thread between the main characters.

If the section on the climate report gave the reader the sense that they were directly seeing what one of the young characters drew and wrote, the whole book feels like a more skilled, more accomplished version of that—an artist communicating directly to the reader, with little or no moderating elements providing any friction. It’s pure comics, and it’s great.

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