'The Lorax' Warned Us 50 Years Ago, But We Didn't Listen

Call it fate or an unfortunate coincidence that Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax celebrates its 50th anniversary the same week the United Nations releases an urgent report on the dire consequences of human-induced climate change. The conflict between the industrious, polluting Once-ler and the feisty Lorax, who “speaks for the trees,” feels more prescient than ever.

“Once-ler!” he cried with a cruffulous croak.
“Once-ler! You’re making such smogulous smoke!
My poor Swomee-Swans… why, they can’t sing a note!
No one can sing who has smog in his throat.

“He wanted a book that captured the effects of pollution on ecosystems and I would say it was really ahead of its time,” says anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Nathaniel Dominy, who teaches at Dartmouth. “The different species disappear from the narrative in succession,” he notes. “The Bar-ba-loots leave because they run out of food. The Swomee-Swans leave because the air is polluted. The humming fish leave because the water’s polluted. He’s describing what we would now call a ‘trophic cascade,’ and for me, as a scientist, I just find that genius that he anticipated that concept by a decade or more.”

While it might be a children’s book, The Lorax‘s ominous message of what happens when you harvest nature to death made it an icon of the environmental movement, spawning movie and stage adaptations not to mention a gazillion school projects.

With its mostly gray, scrappy, barren images, the story stood in sharp contrast to other books by Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) such as The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham.

The environmental movement takes root

Geisel began writing The Lorax at a time of growing concern about the environment. Images of an oil-slicked river in Cleveland catching fire in 1969, the first Earth Day in 1970 and other events helped build the movement and put it front and center. According to Geisel biographer Donald Pease, the author believed in the movement but didn’t care for its rhetoric. He thought it was “preachy and bossy,” says Pease.

“He kind of says ‘I told you so,’ like, I told you this was going to be bad and now it’s bad,” says Mark Gozonsky, a writer and high school English teacher in Los Angeles whose students have analyzed The Lorax in the context of global warming. Like Mathai, Gozonsky is struck by the parallels with this week’s report. “The book ends on a question mark … ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’ And that’s the very question mark that we land on today,” he says. So many years later scientists are still warning, “You’ve got … a couple of years to make a difference … Time, as we all know, is ticking away.”

Finding hope in the last seed left

Mathai still believes it’s important to be hopeful. Her mother was a little like the Lorax of Kenya, the very place that so inspired Geisel’s story. Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai founded The Green Belt movement, which is credited with planting more than 51 million trees across the country, part of a campaign to end poverty.

“My mother … always talked about trees as a symbol of hope and so The Lorax in many ways was that and remains that for me. That each of us can be such a potent agent of change. We can be custodians of hope.”

Just as she read The Lorax when she was a girl, Mathai reads it to her two daughters today.