I quite liked Obernewtyn...and still like it as an adult.
I think dystopian future scenarios just reflect that the world has gone wrong: global warming, sea levels rising, bird flu epidemics....putting these things into fiction where things are overcome somehow makes facing the future less scarey.
Kids can influence decisions but are still regulated and limited as to what they can do about these problems. Try arguing with your parents about paying for a water tank that isn't in the budget.
While an adult will look at global warming as a scientific theory with some scientists as advocates and some who are not and find a level at which they can make choices and decisions that give them some level of empowerment: kids are far more vunerable to fears for the future.
I remember when the French released the nuclear explosion on some island, there were dust storms around the school and this boy started bawling...he really thought the nuclear holocaust had come for him. I imagine that the kids of today will be creeped out over an extreme low tide: tsunami footage.
Disassociation and rationalisation are adult coping strategies...
How many kids refused to eat beef with mad cow disease? How many adults decided not to eat jelly that was made in the U.K? The ability to select implications and actions that fit problems that are appropriate to the level of concern... is less developed in YA.
Probably because they haven't undergone the multiple crisis that adults have: AIDS, Halleys Comet scenarios, Gulf War, Y2K bug...we've been overloaded. Toad invasion...seems the native animals have discovered ways of eating the little buggers. Disaster looms all of the time. Some man-made, some natural. Some politically, market and media generated but non-existent. Heck we'd stop eating and breathing if we listened to everything we heard.
The short term and immediate problems of the adult world involve mortgages, work place reform, job loss and divorce, to getting a dinner on the table that the family will eat...the long term problems are there...reducing water useage and electricity useage, buying local produce and so on...simple choices for catastrophic problems...these don't really meet the fear that kids have to cope with.
When the media says a comet is about to hit the Earth..we understand the distances involved...kids don't. When they say in 70 years time Sydney will be uninhabitable due to lack of water, we know there are deserts people live in and that drinking recycled waste water is an option, even mining water from air and that there's an ocean next to us and desalinating water can help. We understand that when the news reports communities upset about the govt piping water away that it is linked to trying to solve the water problem. Kids can't cross reference all the information around them.
The economics of just banning petrol overnight, kids say great/adults say social infrastructure collapse.....yep change is slow...lots of silly rabbit-proof fence solutions are on their way. We see the building blocks ....light solutions increasing to harder ones...bucket watering to no watering gardens at all. We see the change as quick. They see the change as slow and useless.
No wonder kids panic.
Kids need these books.