Ultrawild: An Audacious Plan for Rewilding Every City on Earth

Gr 5 Up–Mushin’s plan to rewild cities paints an honest, unflinching, and hopeful vision for reversing climate change. He proposes and designs five contraptions, backing each up with math and science experts, to demonstrate how extreme rewilding could solve the climate crisis. The book uses comparisons and relative sizes through illustration and text to help kids grasp the scope of climate change with pyramids, Mount Everest, and soccer fields. The complex illustrations are accompanied by arrows and numbers to help inexperienced graphic novel readers navigate the text. The author does not talk down to young readers, who will be drawn in by the intricate illustrations of contraptions and the occasionally gross and gory elements of the inventions. Rather, the book invites readers to join the STEAM design process, encouraging ideas that seem out of this world. Mushin, a New Zealander, also shines a light on the Indigenous people and practices that he draws from in his design work.