I just heard about this great conference: Children's Literature and the Environmental Imagination held in Toronto this March.
From the website:

Friday, March 5 8.00 p.m.
Saturday, March 6 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. 2010

Presented by the University of Trinity College

What makes the imagination in children’s books “environmental”? What do climatologists and botanists, children’s writers and artists, and the playing child have in common? Examining the stuff of which children’s books are made — words and pictures — some of the world’s leading children’s writers and experts on literature will look at the way children’s books create and critique the environment and environmental issues. Why is wilderness as necessary in writing as in the natural world? How do miniature characters change a child’s sense of environment? What happens when fantasy takes on the climate? What do “affluence, effluents, dancing cows, and forty-two pounds of edible fungus” have to do with the child’s relationship to the natural world?

It will feature writers David Almond, M.T. Anderson, Sarah Ellis and Tim Wynne-Jones. I wish I could go. It sounds really interesting. Thought I'd pass the info along!