Its citizens hadn’t yet relived the fictional Once Ler’s mistake by having their homeland mined from beneath their feet. In 1971 ocean cod catch was peaking at 800,000 tons per year. When The Lorax was first published in 1971, the Pacific paradise of Nauru was a phosphate mining rentier state with the highest per-capita wealth in the world. Thousand year old ecosystems and million year old resource deposits are being converted into a few months profit, leaving environmental and economic wastelands. Forests, minerals, oil, water and fisheries are being consumed much faster than nature can replace them. But his message is surprisingly relevant to the problems of our time. Seuss did stray into the kind of dystopian environmentalism which triggers helplessness at least as often as it inspires activism. The message of the original Lorax was stark. So let’s look back at the book and I’ll try to explain why I believe its message will resonate long after the movie is a forgotten tuft of Hollywood fluff. The 2012 movie loosely based on The Lorax is… well, it’s difficult to know where to begin. This tragic tale was panned by some critics for being too apocalyptic and probably inappropriate for children. His simple message is that when limited resources (such as truffula trees) are consumed without care, entire ecosystems (singing fish, brown barbaloots…) can vanish and paradise is lost.

Seuss) used this question as inspiration for his classic ecological fable, The Lorax. “ I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees.” What would nature’s ambassador tell us? Children’s author Theodore Seuss Geisel (Dr.

The lorax 1971