THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 17
COMMENT
THEFORESTFORTHETREES
I
n 1989, the year that Iran’s Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa
calling for the death of Salman Rush-
die, for writing “The Satanic Verses,”
American parents in Laytonville, a small
town in Northern California, demanded
that their children’s elementary school
take Dr. Seuss’s 1971 book, “The Lorax,”
off its list of required reading for second
graders. The book is “Silent Spring” for
the under-ten set. “I speak for the trees,”
the Lorax says, attempting to defend a
soon to be blighted forest, its tufted Truf-
fula trees chopped down and knit into
hideous thneeds—“a Fine-Something-
That-All-People-Need”—until there is
nothing left but one single seed.
Like the long-ago banning of E. B.
White’s “Stuart Little,” by the New York
Public Library, the rumpus about “The
Lorax” is at first bewildering. Dr. Seuss—
Theodor Geisel—deemed it his best
book. Schools across the country as-
signed it. Mrs. Pate’s class at the Pep-
per Pike School, in Ohio, sent the au-
thor new endings. “I planted that seed,/It
was so very dry,” Robby Price, a third
grader, wrote. “Then all of a sudden,/It
grew 8 miles high.”
There were other Loraxes, too. In
1972, Christopher D. Stone, a law pro-
fessor at the University of Southern Cal-
ifornia, argued for granting trees a legal
voice. “I am quite seriously proposing
that we give legal rights to forests, oceans,
rivers and other so-called ‘natural ob-
jects,’” he wrote, in “Should Trees Have
Standing?,” an article that was cited,
that same year, in a Supreme Court dis-
sent, and helped galvanize the environ-
mental movement.
“I drew a Lorax and he was obviously
a Lorax,” Geisel said. “Doesn’t he look
like a Lorax to you?” But, in 1989, to Bill
and Judith Bailey, the founders of a log-
ging-equipment business in Laytonville,
the Lorax looked like an environmental
activist. “Papa, we can’t cut trees down,”
their eight-year-old son, Sammy, said
after reading the book, in which a “Su-
per-Axe-Hacker” whacks “four Truffula
Trees at one smacker.” Townspeople were
caught up in the so-called “timber wars,”
when environmentalists camped out in
trees and loggers wore T-shirts that read
“Spotted Owl Tastes Like Chicken.”
Logging families took out ads in the
local newspaper. One said, “To teach our
children that harvesting redwood trees
is bad is not the education we need.”
This year marks the fiftieth anniver-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
sary of “The Lorax,” an occasion that
passed with little fanfare, Dr. Seuss
himself having been made into some-
thing of a thneed in the latest round of
book battles. Earlier this year, on Gei-
sel’s birthday, his estate announced that
it would no longer publish six of his
lesser-known books, in the wake of crit-
icism that they contain racist carica-
tures. Books go out of print all the time,
and this decision wouldn’t have been
especially notable except that it began
trending on Twitter. “Buying all the
Dr. Seuss volumes for the kids before
the woke book burners can get to them
all,” the conservative commentator Ben
Shapiro tweeted. Senator Ted Cruz
sought campaign donations: “Stand with
Ted & Dr. Seuss against the cancel cul-
ture mob to claim your signed copy of
Green Eggs and Ham!”
Meanwhile, groups of parents, not
to say cancel-culture mobs, have been
assembling at school-board meetings
to demand the removal of books from
classrooms and school libraries, often
in districts that have been battling over
mask and vaccination mandates. Book-
banning crusaders, waving the flag of
“parental rights,” have particularly de-
cried books about American history and
racial injustice, and books that include
lesbian, gay, and trans characters. In at
least seven states, they’ve objected to
Maia Kobabe’s 2019 book, “Gender
Queer: A Memoir.” Schools in Mis-
souri have pulled Alison Bechdel’s “Fun
Home.” Glenn Youngkin’s campaign
for governor of Virginia believed this
to be a winning issue. “When my son
showed me his reading assignment, my
