“Sometimes humans get it right”

Darcy Pattison’s picture book, Diego: The Galápagos Giant Tortoise, illustrated by Amanda Zimmerman, is a loving account of a place and the story of one species within its complex ecosystem. It’s also the story of a species climbing back into the world from the terrible brink of extinction.

The effect of this book derives from so many of the choices made by the writer in determining how this story should be told.

Consider the span of time. The story begins in the late 1600s with a pirate ship dropping anchor off the coast of Espanola Island. They find “thousands of giant tortoises.” The needs (and the greed) of people at once slam right up against the survival of this ancient animal. To think about the passage of time in this way invites introspection. How much has changed from those pirate days to the present time? What have we humans done to other species and how do we use the knowledge of this history?

By making us go back and forth between the larger historical narrative and the life of a single tortoise, Pattison also gives young readers a character to hold onto and to care about. We see Diego as a hatchling escaping a hungry hawk. We see the number painted on his shell in the zoo he’s named for. We see him play a crucial role in captive breeding programs, enabling the recovery of a viable saddleback Espanola tortoise population. By the time he’s hauled up by rangers to a place with “lots of Opuntia, or prickly pear cactus” we can begin to feel hopeful.

In the midst of unrelenting bad news in the world of animal conservation, here is a story that centers the tortoise, takes us into his world, and offers the possibility that, sometimes, yes, humans are able to “get it right.”