Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life

Written by Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm
Illustrated by Molly Bang

AAAS/Subaru SB & F Prize for Excellence in Science Books 2010

First published in 2009

About the Book
Penny Chisholm, a close friend and professor of Ecology at MIT, has watched me work on children’s books throughout our friendship. We talked for years about writing a science book together, but were not able to arrive at a narrative that pleased both of us. So I worked on some books that incorporated a few of the ideas that had percolated up from our brainstorming over the years. The most recent was My Light, the first book in the Sunlight Series. Once launched, the series started to take shape as a collaborative effort. We agreed that the next book in the series should be about photosynthesis, or how plants catch sunlight and use that energy to build themselves out of air and water. Once we had decided on this, we were off and running, and Living Sunlight emerged.

We think photosynthesis is so important that everyone should understand its fundamentals—and we were convinced we could do this even for young children.

Photosynthesis is carried out only in plants—they catch light with their green pigment, chlorophyll. Every day, not only are we eating the food that photosynthesis makes—the plants themselves—but we are breathing the oxygen plants make, and we are using the soil they make when they die, and we are burning the fossil fuel they made eons ago.  We are sharing atoms with plants, and they are giving us the Sun's energy in a form that we can use.

It is difficult for two very different people to work together. I am an artist who has an odd jumble of scientific knowledge and will happily give my opinions, usually wrong, about how things work. Penny is a scientist, who is uncomfortable writing anything down as fact without checking and double-checking, and even then she worries about the tradeoffs between necessary oversimplification and scientific integrity. Above all else, she values knowing what you don’t know.

So this is how we worked together: Penny would tell me what is important about photosynthesis. I would try to put that into language children could understand and relate to. But a lot of what I said would be slightly wrong. So Penny would correct it. So then I would have to change it again, and then Penny would add or change or suggest words that might be better. This took a great deal of time. We were often confused about what the other person was trying to say. But, by the end, we were both very happy with the text.

Then I began to make the pictures. Pictures take much more time than words do, especially when most of the pictures have about a thousand yellow dots in them. And especially when you have to go over the dots a second or a third time to make sure they show up against the blue background. So I would make pictures and Penny would look at them and make suggestions about how they might show the words better, or how they might show something that wasn’t in the words but was still very important.

The hardest two pages were those that show how photosynthesis works. We played with several versions of showing the process. None of the versions quite worked. Then Penny and my husband Jim—who taught middle school and high school science for many years—came up with an idea we all thought would help children understand the process. But these were the last two pictures in the book. They were very difficult and complicated, and I had to finish them in two weeks. I also was about to go on vacation with my family—to the beach in Costa Rica, a country in Central America.

So when we got to Costa Rica, I would get up at 4 A.M. and work at the desk in our hotel room while everybody slept and then we’d have breakfast together, and then, when they all went to the beach, I would stay back in the room and paint. In the evenings, we’d all walk along the beach together.

By the end of the vacation, the pictures were done. The whole book was done!

I emailed the two final pictures to Penny. As we looked at them and discussed them from opposite sides of the country—she was in Massachusetts, I was in California— we both saw that the two new pictures were confusing and did not fit in with the rest of the pictures in the book. I would have to change them completely. How do you show a chemical reaction that nobody can see and that happens in an instant?

So I called my editor, Bonnie. Could I possibly have another two weeks to do the last pictures? Yes, she said, but if I handed them in after that, the book would be delayed for another six months. So Penny, my husband, and I talked back and forth about new ways to show the process, I did sketches and talked and we revised and talked some more, and I finally painted what we felt was something close to a representation of what goes on.

This time, we think we got it right.

By the way, there's a DVD of Living Sunlight available from Nutmeg Media.