My childhood home, Høgaste, was surrounded by woods and fields. In those woods I grew up with Mowgli, Robin Hood and Asterix. Today much of that landscape lies under asphalt.

That forest was fundamental to my childhood, and like so many people's Hundred Acre Wood or Sherwood Forest, it has disappeared. We often notice loss only in hindsight. Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson describes this as shifting baseline syndrome: each generation receives a diminished reference point for what nature should be.

Researchers like Dag O. Hessen and many others have shown how rapidly we are changing nature and climate. In 2019, the UN biodiversity panel warned that around one million species are at risk of extinction by 2050 due to human impact. That same year I met climate scientist Bjørn H. Samset, who wanted to communicate five future climate scenarios.

Together we focused on three of them, and that became the foundation of the comic book Embla.

At the same time, Bjørn wrote 2070, which I illustrated and learned enormously from. Embla has been published in German as Eva, and the Norwegian edition was acquired by public libraries. Wherever I speak, whether in Leipzig, Oslo or Bergen, I want to give children and young people hope:

that it can still be possible to grow up with forests and fields, and that they can become knowledgeable, creative and wise enough to slow climate change. The future is the one we are creating now, and it belongs to them.

Arild MidthunSon, November 2024