by Rita Mcconnell

Created on: December 23, 2008   Last Updated: April 06, 2012

Theodor Seuss Geisel, known to most of us as Dr. Seuss, was ahead of his time not only as a writer of children's stories, but in understanding the world.

In 1971, just as government was establishing environmental policy and many in our country were realizing that human behavior can negatively impact the health of the earth, Seuss published The Lorax. The book was his commentary on less than eco-friendly business practices, translated into the magical Seuss world that children understand far better than adults.

In the story, illustrated in brilliant color and wild imagination, a young boy asks the old Once-ler to tell him the mysterious story of The Lifted Lorax. The Once-ler, himself the catalyst that leads to the fabled Lorax's fate, tells the boy how he discovered the Truffula Tree, and his success in using them to make knitted Thneeds "Which everyone, everyone needs!." The story builds along with the Once-lers greed, leading to a treeless, world, void of its magical creatures and full of air and water pollution. Ultimately, even the Lorax, protector of Truffula Trees, Brown Bar-ba-loots, and Humming Fish, is forced to leave the world destroyed by the Once-ler's once seemingly innocent invention.

Yet even the Once-ler, who now realizes his irresponsible practices caused even the demise of the business he loved, remains hopeful and repentant, and sees in the little boy someone to right his wrongs. He offers the boy the last of the Truffula Tree seeds, and the opportunity to make the world the wonderland it once was. In his moment of clarity, he understands the legacy of the Lorax and tells the boy "UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

Not only has the Lorax been inspiring young people to love the earth for over 35 years, he's hit a few nerves along the way. In 1989, the logging industry, upset that The Lorax was on the elementary school reading list in a California forestry town, invented The Truax, a take-off story illustrating its own principle of reseeding and its environmental efficiencies.

The Lorax originally included the line "I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie," where industrial waste once caused the water to catch fire. Fourteen years after the story was published, researchers from the Ohio Sea Grant Program reached out to Seuss and shared another story that of the revived and cleaned-up Lake Erie. Seuss removed the line from future publications, but it remains in the DVD release of the animated special produced in 1972.

The Lorax has enjoyed a revival of its own, along with the world's growing concerns about global warming, teaching personal responsibility for the health of the planet to a new generation of young people.

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