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This essay explores how nineteenth-century nature study principles inform a twenty-first century New Nature Study movement, and gives examples of a trend toward nature writing in recent picture books. The pedagogical principles of nineteenth-century nature study, ascendant at the turn of the twentieth century and implicit in interwar children's literature, yielded to a model founded on Cold War competition rather than environmental stewardship. In mid-century narratives for children, technological progress prevailed. In the 1990s, the ideals of the first nature study movement reemerged in a call for meaningful conservation to sustain future generations. Like the original nature study, the New Nature Study arises from anxieties about industrial development, habitat loss and extinction, and hazards to childhood itself. The New Nature Study treats children as agents for change and citizens being denied their full human rights when their land, soil, water, and lives are bought and sold.

The article focuses on the graphic works of William Nicholson's Clever Bill. Charles Kingsley composes a poem "My Little Doll" which captivates the book "The Water-Babies" and sixty years after, Nicholson tells a modern story of Clever Bill. The transformation of storytelling and the relations of human to commodity is expressed in literature for children.

Focuses on the picture book "Little Machinery," by Mary Liddell. Background of the book as evidence of developing production techniques in the U.S.; Views of Liddell regarding the balance between the mechanized construction of the industrial world and the natural environment; Acknowledgment of nature's interpenetration with technology in modern times.