The call of the Lorax was never more relevant. And never more ignored. Never was there a better time for The Lorax ( http://www.theloraxmovie.com/index.php#/splash ) to hit the big screen.
Who can say why animations in particular seem to be braver than other genres in taking important issues to the mainstream. (Happy Feet: the threat of over-fishing to penguins. Disney’s 2008 WALL-E ( http://adisney.go.com/disneyvideos/animatedfilms/wall-e/ ): Set in 2085, a trash-strewn earth, ravaged by consumerism, has been abandoned.) But thank God they are.
Watching the animated version of Dr Suess’s 1971 fable in a Tasmanian cinema had particular relevance though.
The Lorax obviously and hopefully designed as a wake-up call to those people who think there’s nothing wrong with having whatever you want whenever you want.
But what does it say to those like me who already believe that the Lorax is right? What if you’re already (upper or lower case G) green, what do you think of the “hairy little peanut” and what he says for the trees?
Tasmania’s heightened environmental awareness explains in part why the Greens here are celebrating their 40th anniversary as the world’s first political party with nature at its heart. Big Bob has resigned when the party is performing well nationally but here, in the cradle of the revolution, things are more ambivalent.
My wife and I, a signed-up Green, took my three year old son to the The Lorax, his first ever cinema outing. (No, not an early if welcome indoctrination into the ways of righteousness – The Pirates: Band of Misfits wasn’t showing.)
There were scenes where I could hardly stifle my environmental smugness. Had I been watching the movie at home, I probably would have shouted “Exactly! Exactly!” at the TV. In particular, the scene where the curly-wurly multiple axe-wielding machine slices down the last truffula tree, leaving a barren landscape.
The Once-ler, the greedy industrialist who has made a fortune from felling the truffula trees, is amazed to realize the destruction his manufacturing of his multipurpose ‘thneed’ has wrought suddenly means he no longer has the resources to make the product. Cue: financial, social, spiritual bankruptcy.
Sound familiar?
The impact of the GFC is strong in the kiddie flick, with the Once-ler walking past a self-portrait titled “Too Big to Fail”. The GFC is the biggest market failure in a generation but is, in my opinion, a smaller corollary of the biggest market failure ever: climate change and global warming.
(I could go even bigger picture if you want: At the end of the animation, Ted and Audrey, representing Adam and Eve, plant a seed of the last truffula tree, which grows, watered by not a beneficent male god but by Ted’s Granny Norma, representing a female deity who has replaced the male sky god with a sympathetic earth goddess. Cue Donavan’s This is the Age of Aquarius. Okay, that might be too big a picture…)
But never was the call of the Lorax more needed.
And by ‘climate change and global warming,’ what I really mean is global ecocide.
Global warming is perhaps the most intractable aspect of humanity’s wholesale degradation of the natural environment, which also includes record biodiversity extinctions and endangerments, collapsing ecosystems, marine acidification, environmental pollution and deforestation.) This is the natural environment which underpins our very existence and, for the Libs out there, also underpins our jobs and wealth.
Ignoring the consequences of destroying the natural environment, the very thing we are dependent on, is what the Lorax is warning us about.
Common sense would suggest that most people understand that humanity’s current modus operandi is folly. So too would the commonly sensible accept that sustainability should be the bridge between human wants and needs, and those of the natural environment upon which we subsist for mutual benefit and long-term health, wealth and happiness.
‘Fraid not. There are plenty of examples out there of just how difficult translating common sense into political action is. Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency (http://www.iea.org/ ), wrote in the UK Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/25/governments-catastrophic-climate-change-iea?intcmp=122 ) this week:
“The world’s energy system is being pushed to breaking point, and our addiction to fossil fuels grows stronger each year. Many clean energy technologies are available, but they are not being deployed quickly enough to avert potentially disastrous consequences.”
In Tasmania, the Lorax would also have his work cut out, such is the tortured status of the ongoing ‘peace talks’ between the representatives of the Once-ler, the logging industry, and the representatives of the Lorax, the eNGOs, aka a large part of the Tasmanian conservation movement.
Resolving a 30-year dispute was never going to be easy. But the frayed and twitching loggers and environmentalists sitting around the negotiating table still have a chance to drag the timber industry away from logging truffula trees, I mean, old-growth native forest and put it onto a sustainable footing like the more prosperous but plantation-based timber industries on the mainland.
Resolving Tasmania’s forest wars is fundamental to broadening the state’s economy from a too-narrow over-dependence on a few industries – forestry, mining and manufacturing – to boosting a stronger, diversified economy, based on more sustainable enterprises such as beef, dairy, cool-climate wine, horticulture, aquaculture, tourism and sustainable timber.
The Minister for Regioinal Development, Simon Crean MP, and one of his special advisers, Professor Jonathan West, have predicted that (http://www.examiner.com.au/news/local/news/business/apple-isle-is-ripe-for-the-picking/2483859.aspx ), if peace breaks out in Tasmania’s forests, leading to economic diversification, the state could expect a $5 billion boost between now and 2025.
A scary prospect is that the Once-lers pull the state backwards, put the peace talks in the ‘too-hard’ basket and favor short-term wealth a political gain instead.
If the Tasmanian Liberals form government at the next election, which is a distinct possibility, their forest policy, as far as anyone can tell, is to send in the chainsaws; business as usual, with a 19th century business model and attendant 19th century mindset. I wonder what their leader, Will Hodgman, thinks of the Lorax? And the Once-ler?
(Humour my parenthesis but why have the Australian Liberals been let off so lightly over the GFC? As the US Government’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (http://fcic-static.law.stanford.edu/cdn_media/fcic-reports/fcic_final_report_conclusions.pdf ) into the causes of the GFC found:
“The sentries were not at their posts, in no small part due to the widely accepted faith in the self-correcting nature of the markets and the ability of financial institutions to effectively police themselves. More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe.”
Faith in the markets and deregulation: two pillars of the Australian Liberal economics which the GFC has demolished. So the Liberals are essentially economically naked but no one is pointing this out.)
The Liberals also want to increase Tasmania’s population to increase the wealth of the state. Imagine if their economic policy was globalised: They’d be boosting the global population past the projected 10 billion people by 2050 and chopping down our remaining world-wide native forests. That’s Once-ler economics.
The Greens are regularly – and wrongly – accused of putting trees before people but the Liberals put the empty pursuit of wealth ahead of everything else, people and trees.
As the Lorax makes clear, the choice isn’t between trees and people because trees and people are mutually self-reliant. Humanity is the natural environment, we’re an indivisible part of it not somehow separate from it. Problem is, we are currently living as if we were.
In a ramshackle a tree house 60 metres above the ground, which could have come straight from one of Dr Suess’s books, sits lone Tasmanian activist, Miranda Gibson ( http://observertree.org/ ), on a mighty old-growth eucalypt which is due to be logged. She’s been up there 132 days and counting.
Global warming, ecocide, the GFC, Miranda and now the big-screen Lorax. They’re all warning us but we’re still not listening. And we are surely doomed if we continue the delusion. Unless…
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
Dr Suess wrote that in the original book of The Lorax.
