The Biggest Footprint: Eight billion humans. One clumsy giant.

By Author / Illustrator

Rob Sears, Tom Sears

Genre

Information books

Age range(s)

Publisher

Canongate Books Ltd

ISBN

9781838853495

Format

Hardback

Published

30-09-2021

Synopsis

Meet the mega human: colossal, clueless... and the biggest hope for life on earth

There are eight billion of us humans.

All breathing, eating, fidgeting and thinking deep thoughts.

It's an unimaginably large number. Or is it?

The mega human is the result of smooshing all the people in the world together into one spectacular giant (don't try this at home). Even though the mega human is not the smartest of creatures, it is slowly beginning to understand the problems it has created for Planet Earth's future... and how it might be able to fix them.

Making use of brain-bending stats and smoosh theory, The Biggest Footprint is a journey of self-discovery suitable for anyone and everyone identifying as human.

Reviews

Imagine all 8 billion humans all smooshed together into one giant mega massive human... This is such a clever, engaging and thought provoking way to look at the impact and damage that the human race, in its entirety, is causing the Planet Earth.

Creating one huge human (3km tall and weighing 390 million tonnes) we follow some amazing illustrations and learn some startling facts about our combined effect on the environment. With mega eyes as big as football pitches, the huge human can jog around the planet in 3 hours flat.

The illustrations are a visual delight and crucial to helping the reader comprehend the amount of space we take up, waste we create, resources we thoughtlessly use (a swimming pool worth of natural resources every day) and destruction we bring (chopping down 15 billion trees a year). ALOE (All Life On Earth) shrinks as man and our man made belongings take up more and more space.

It is a beautifully creative and enlightening book- telling an important message with a lovely sense of fun and wit. It very much makes its point without preaching to its readers and ultimately offers a positive sense of hopefulness that all those 8 billion individual parts of the mega human will be empowered to know each one of us can make a change and a difference. I think, in school, Y5 and Y6 in particular are going to be obsessed with this book.

96 pages / Reviewed by Jennifer Caddick