The Lorax

In 1971, when the Environmental movement in America still had that new car smell, just a year after the nation held its first Earth Day and President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, Dr. Seuss published an influential book, The Lorax.

The enduring popularity of the book and subsequent cartoon suggest I spare you a retelling, but indulge me. When a greedy, patriarchal capitalist starts logging a forest of Truffula trees to manufacture Thneeds, he not only upsets the delicate ecological balance between Brown Bar-Ba-Loots and Humming-Fish, but he releases the spirit of Wilford Brimley, who exhorts him to stop polluting, as even the Swomee-Swans are driven off the land. The clear cut complete, Wilford Brimley leaves the capitalist alone in his self-made wasteland with one word, “Unless”.

This is the closest thing my generation has to a book like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, or Thoreau’s Walden. Try finding a quote like, “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone,” in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, go on, I dare you. Yet Seuss manages to convey the stakes in language that anyone, young or old, can understand:

Now that you’re here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.

Almost 40 years later, and with a whole different scale to the problem, those words are just as true. The problem at hand isn’t just pollution and degradation anymore, although those threats still exist. Now we face the possibility of human-induced Climate Change, disrupting weather patterns, changing coastlines, causing massive species extinctions, and not in some fuzzy future. It’s happening right now.

On his 80th birthday, March 2, 1984, Dr. Seuss published what he called “the best book I’ve ever written.” A response to the madness of a nuclear arms race during the Cold War, The Butter Battle Book equates the run up to proliferation as a difference in a matter of opinion, do you prefer your toast butter-side-up, or butter-side-down? The conflict erupts on the border between the land of the Butter-Side-Up Yooks and the Butter-Side-Down Zooks, and quickly escalates. Seuss manages to illustrate the way that the defense industry drives conflicts as the Boys in the Back Room have a new weapon waiting for the narrator every time he returns. And it just may be his best book, every page a double spread filled with crazier and more elaborate Seussian contraptions, with double tongue-twisters accompanying the illustrations.

These are the two Dr. Seuss books I had as a kid, not counting My Book About Me, which I could make the case we co-authored. Sure, I read others, but my memories, and perhaps my world view, are formed primarily by these two. And here, looking back, I’ve found a problem. While Dr. Seuss makes a strong case in both books, for the Environmental movement in The Lorax, and for tolerance or understanding to avoid mutual destruction in The Butter Battle Book, I think that they cancel each other out.

It starts with Liberals and Conservatives. Quite simply, the messages in these two books are accepted by Liberals and rejected by conservatives. Environmental regulation, which chiefly exists to limit and remediate pollution, is anathema to the Conservative world view of a free market. Try this entry from Capitalism Magazine. Or witness George W. Bush’s bumbling in the 2007’s Supreme Court case Massachusetts et al v. EPA. The Administration tried to shirk the EPA’s responsibility to regulate Greenhouse Gases under Nixon’s Clean Air Act by appealing to the Supreme Court. A decision that gives the government the power to control how much Carbon Dioxide the nation emits, thereby giving policy a toehold over industry in the fight against Global Climate Change, and they appeal?! Really? When the Supreme Court upheld the district court’s decision on April 2, the Bush Administration punted, calling for the EPA to conduct a study which it issued on July 11th of 2008 with a 120 day period of public comment, ending on November 28th, 2008, effectively preventing any decisions on any report. The outcome of this issue is anything but decided as the incoming Obama Administration is poised to lead on Global Climate Change.

Conservatives tend to view the culture created by tolerance and understanding as an erosion of morals, a chipping away at concrete notions of right and wrong. They paint this issue as Moral Equivalence, or Moral Relativism, and lay it at the feet of Liberal Progressives. Conservatives bristle at the need for context and understanding of positions that they themselves disagree with, saying in essence that there is right and wrong. Here is a quote from Charles Krauthammer’s 1984 “review” of The Butter Battle Book in Time Magazine, taken completely out of context:

If homosexuality is merely a "sexual preference"—if a lover's sex is as much a matter of taste as, say, hair color (or having it butter-side up or butter-side down)—then why the to-do over two men dancing together at Disneyland? But there is a fuss, because there is a difference. One can understand neither with language that refuses to make distinctions.

To throw it in his face, without context Krauthammer becomes a gay-bashing monster. Without context, it’s unclear that in the next paragraph he proposes arguing for gay rights without pretending that it is a neutral moral-free issue. Conservative opposition to Moral Relativism is primarily an effort to reframe debates on their own terms, in stark contrasts of right and wrong, good and bad.

But, what if they’re right? Conservative lens, semantic construction, whatever, Moral Relativism has suffused Western society, and it is just this condition which makes the success of the Environmental movement, particularly in regards to slowing Global Climate Change, a near impossibility. Not only does this culture of acceptance of differing worldviews allow for Conservative opposition to the science of Climate Change, which is just dumb, but it allows for Liberal foot-dragging. On the issue of Climate Change, there is a right and a wrong.

Not just in the realm of policy, but in the homes and lives of everyday Americans, too. Dyed-in-the-wool Liberals, myself included, have no problem, say, buying conventional produce. Conventional Agriculture, with its reliance on fossil fuels and erosion of carbon-fixing soils, is a major culprit in Global Climate Change. Buying Organic Produce, or better yet Local Produce, is seen as an option, something that’s good, but not necessary. It is not seen as a moral choice. Forgive me, but driving a car is seen essentially the same way. Or turning up the heat or the air conditioning. Or shopping at Wal-Mart, for fuck’s sake. Or burning incandescent bulbs. Or not paying the extra 5 bucks a month for wind power. Or whatever it is, a hundred other things. Moral equivalence has become a road block to stabilizing Carbon output and slowing Global Climate Change.

I’ll be writing more about this in the next couple of months. Watching what the Obama Administration does, what decisions it makes. I’m hopeful. I’ll also be writing more about what’s at stake, albeit without the elegance and simplicity of Dr. Seuss. Finally I’ll try to ruminate a bit on how we can break through this gridlock, and offer some thoughts there too. I hope at the very least it’ll be interesting.