Earth Day with The Lorax

The Lorax was one of my favorite top three books as a child, and I suspect played a large role in my interest in the environment as an adult. With Earth Day on my mind, I searched YouTube for The Lorax not expecting to find anything (someone keeps the Internet fairly scoured clean of Cat in the Hat text…), but I actually found this wonderful television version circa 1972:

View the 6-part playlist on YouTube

Here’s Part 1 of 6 to get you started:

The narrator is Eddie Albert, who I know best as the photographer in one of my favorite films Roman Holiday. Earth Day shares it’s birthday, April 22nd, with Eddie Albert, who was a very active environmentalist . He spoke at the inaugural Earth Day ceremony in 1970! Wikipedia states "Despite rumors that Earth Day was designated to occur on Albert’s birthday, April 22, sources suggest that the date was coincidental."

The upbeat cartoon soundtrack by Dean Elliot seems incongruous with the sobering environmental reality we face today. Of course, this was intended for young audiences, as was the original book, first published in 1971. The tone of the television piece seems a bit silly now, yet the stark imagery of deforestation and industrial wasteland (Part 5 especially) is chilling and saddening in its Suess-styled, visionary accuracy.

I searched around for detailed statistics of forest cover throughout time, but it wasn’t easy to find useful information. I thought I’d find more readily available content. More data appears in the form of annual deforestation rates and snapshots of statistics taken out of context. Where’s the impact without a point of reference? Here’s an scary animation of deforestation on the island of Borneo. This site exploring reforestation possibilities has a very detailed downloadable map of historical and present global forest coverage. A sampling of tangible statistics I uncovered:

• "Since 1600, 90% of the virgin forests that once covered much of the lower 48 states have been cleared away. Most of the remaining old-growth forests in the lower 48 states and Alaska are on public lands. In the Pacific Northwest about 80% of this forestland is slated for logging." ^[1]
• "The loss of 26,000 sq km means almost a fifth of the entire Amazon has now been cleared." ^[2]
• "Just one fifth of the world’s original forest cover remains in large tracts of relatively undisturbed forest." ^[3]

Forty years after the first Earth Day, and nearly as long since The Lorax was published, have we at all averted the grim future predicted by the Lorax? Or have we accelerated down that path? What will it take for humanity as a whole to start taking this stuff seriously? Environmental protection, biodiversity, sustainability, climate… Will our children read The Lorax not as a warning of the future, but as an explanation of the past?

1. Global Deforestation, University of Michigan
2. "Amazon destruction accelerating" by Steve Kingston, BBC News
3. The World’s Forests from a Restoration Perspective