A movie which I considered nominating for the Film Festival but didn’t was the 2012 depiction of Dr. Seuss’ book The Lorax. In this movie, a young boy named Ted is searching for something which his crush Audrey desires—a Truffula tree. Unfortunately, Ted and Audrey live in the polluted town known as Thneedville where no trees and no flowers grow. The young boy is curious about the tales of the Lorax—a forest-dwelling creature—and the only person who knows about this creature is the Once-ler. The Once-ler is an old, antisocial inventor that tells the tale of the Lorax to Ted for a small price. He tells the tale of the greedy developer who destroyed his natural environment—which was in fact him. The Once-ler arrived in a beautiful and fertile environment with colourful “Truffula Trees” and creatures such as the “Hummingbird Fish”, “Swomee-Swans” and “Brown Bar-ba-loots” and decided to settle down in this town as he was fascinated by its beauty. He decides to chop down one of the Truffula Trees to build his shop and sell “thneeds” which were some sort of knitting invention that he believed would gain him a lot of attention. This would soon prove to have consequences because once he cut down the tree, the Once-ler conjured up the Lorax—the guardian of the trees who speaks for them as they cannot speak for themselves. The Lorax warned the Once-ler that his action of cutting down the trees would have consequences. Overtime, the Once-ler’s thneeds business had flourished as he continued to chop down these trees for raw materials and had a factory which was constantly pumping out smoke and fumes. This caused the entire town to become extremely polluted and all these creatures which were there began to die and become extinct as their habitats were becoming destroyed. Eventually, the Once-ler kept chopping down the Truffula trees until the very last one before realizing that he had destroyed the environment and without these trees his business was in jeopardy. Before the business ended, the Lorax left a message for the Once-ler that read “Unless” which he had only realized when telling Ted the story suggested that unless people cared about the environment they would continue to face the consequences. Telling this story allowed him to realize the importance of trees which prompted him to give Ted the last Truffula seed so that he could plant it and regrow. This would then allow all the trees and creatures to return back to Thneedville.
Essentially, this is a story about the environmental destruction of a town due to the greed of these contractors and business owners and this is why it relates to Plant Ecology. The Lorax in this tale symbolizes the environment as he is the speaker for all things that cannot speak but are destroyed for the making of raw materials. Eventually, what we end up with is polluted areas and many species end up dying due to a loss of habitat. Deforestation occurs all over the world for the purposes of money and it is unfortunate to say that many species go extinct because of this deforestation. The town of Thneedville represents the harsh reality of what our world will come to if we continue to destroy our environment to make factories and raw materials. We should not have to go that far before realizing that what once was is rapidly leaving us and we are working towards a mass extinction.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 