Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
This is a story about the Once-ler, an entrepreneur who discovers a land with diverse creatures
and beautiful Truffula trees. He chops down a tree and with the tree's tuft, sews a thneed,
a mysterious product that can transform into several cloth-based products.
The Lorax appears, a small creature who claims to speak for nature. He confronts the Once-ler
about chopping the tree, saying that no one will buy a thneed.
However, the Once-ler quickly sells the thneed and seeing that a profit can be made, calls
his entire family to help build a business.
Over the course of time, as the thneed business grows bigger and bigger, more and more trees
are chopped. This creates a food shortage and air and water pollution in the area, forcing
the native creatures to leave.
Eventually, there are no more Truffula trees, which shuts down the business, leaving the
Once-ler alone.
Yes, this story is about the environment and resource conservation, but it's also about
capitalism. From a pure business standpoint, the Once-ler does nothing wrong. He creates
a product, ironically organic by today's standards, and makes money on his own ingenuity and hard
work.
However, he is a little short-sighted for not planning ahead for the longevity of a
business that relies on natural resources. In hindsight, he needed to plant trees to
farm for future use.
Also, what exactly is a thneed? In the story, the Once-ler claims that a thneed is something
that everyone needs, but is it?
A thneed does have many advantages in that it can be a lot of things and that versatility
can be quite useful. Instead of a consumer buying several different products, potentially
draining more natural resources, the purchase of one product that can become several others,
in a way, saves resources.
The ending is quite dreary. It isn't the typical "happily ever after" ending. In fact, the
end of the story really becomes the beginning of another - a real life story that the reader
is encouraged to begin. In the gesture of presenting the child with a Truffula seed
at the end, a lot of responsibility rests on the reader.
In fact, a lot of the storytelling conventions that children typically understand and expect
are ambiguous in this story. Are readers supposed to hate the Once-ler? Is he even the bad guy?`
Well, no. In a lot of ways, the Once-ler is the tragic hero trying to make things right
that were turned wrong. He really doesn't know what to do, but hopes that the child,
or reader, can help. And although he directly causes the potential extinction of the Truffula
tree, indirectly the society that bought the product is responsible as well.
And so there is no "one bad guy" that's to blame, but a societal paradigm that needs
changing.
So unless someone like you cares a whole awful, nothing is going to get better. It's not.