How bad can I be?
I’m just doing what comes naturally
How bad can I be?
I’m just building the economy
While vacationing on Cape Cod this summer, I took a walk on the Eddy Bay Trail, which proceeds through oak, pine, and holly trees to a high bluff that overlooks the Brewster Flats – the largest tidal flats in North America.
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| The Brewster Flats at low tide |
The Brewster Flats cover about 12,000 acres. At low tide, the waters of Cape Cod Bay recede over one mile from the high tide mark, revealing clam and oyster beds and tidal pools teeming with life.
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I didn't know when I started my walk that day that the Eddy Bay Trail was temporarily the home to a "StoryWalk" featuring Dr. Seuss's book, The Lorax.
The StoryWalk is the brainchild of a Vermont librarian. At a StoryWalk location, laminated pages from a children's book are attached to wooden stakes, which are installed along an outdoor trail. As you walk on the trail, you're led past each page in the story in turn.
After walking the trail, I went to the local library to check out The Lorax. I read it to my four-year-old grandson when he and his family came for a visit a couple of weeks later, and took him hiking on the trail the next day – he remembered the story well enough to know what was going on in the illustrations on the 60 laminated pages that were posted along the trail without me reading the words on those pages. (That was good, because the pages were at a height that was perfect for a four-year-old, but too low for an adult to read without bending over.)
It was a hot and humid day, and I doubt that my grandson would have hung in there for the entire hike were it not for the pages from The Lorax – as soon as we came to one page, he eagerly began to look for the next one.
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The Lorax – which Seuss said was his favorite among all the books he wrote – is usually categorized as an environmental fable.
The villain of the book is the Once-ler, who once upon a time arrives in a beautiful valley containing a forest of Truffula trees and many animals. The Once-ler cuts down one of the Truffula trees and uses its silk-like foliage to knit a Thneed, an impossibly versatile garment. ("It's a shirt. It's a sock. It's a glove. It's a hat.")
The Lorax, an odd little creature who claimed to speak for the trees, confronts the Once-ler. The Lorax had no head for business – he scoffs at the idea that anyone would pay good money for a Thneed, but the first person to pass by offers to pay $3.98 for it. That inspires the Once-ler to build a factory and invite his brothers and uncles and aunts to join him and get rich manufacturing and selling Thneeds.
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The Lorax confronts the Once-ler once again, condemning his unsustainably aggressive logging operation. But the unapologetic Once-ler just keeps on "biggering" his business until he eventually chops down every single Truffula tree in the forest.
No Truffula trees means no raw material to make new Thneeds raw materials, of course, so the Once-ler has to close his factory and send his relatives home. The Lorax says farewell to him, and flies away – leaving behind a small pile of rocks that spell out the word "UNLESS."
Years later, a boy wanders by the Once-ler's decaying home, and the Once-ler explains to him what the Lorax's message means: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better."
He gives the boy the last Truffula seed and tells him to use it to grow a new forest. If that forest is protected "from axes that hack," then the Lorax and his friends will return.
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Most readers of The Lorax would likely condemn the Once-ler as being selfish and greedy.
But let’s be fair. The real reason that the Truffula trees disappeared was that no one owned them.
Here’s what law professor Jonathan Adler has written about The Lorax:
Viewing the tale of the Lorax through an institutional lens, ruin is not the result of corporate greed, but a lack of institutions. The Truffula trees grow in an unowned commons. (The Lorax may speak for the trees, but he does not own them.) The Once-ler has no incentive to conserve the Truffula trees for, as he notes to himself, if he doesn’t cut them down someone else will. He’s responding to the incentives created by a lack of property rights in the trees, and the inevitable tragedy results. Had the Once-ler owned the trees, his incentives would have been quite different — and he would likely have acted accordingly — even if he remained dismissive of the Lorax’s environmental concerns.
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| Harvesting Truffula trees four at a time |
The story ends with the Once-ler giving a young boy the last Truffula seed. He tells him to plant it and treat it with care, and then maybe the Lorax will come back. The traditional interpretation is simply that we must all care more for the environment. If we only control corporate greed we can prevent environmental ruin.
But perhaps it means something else. Perhaps the lesson is that this boy should plant his Truffula trees, and act as their steward. Perhaps giving the boy the last seed is an act of transferring the Truffula from the open-access commons to private stewardship. Indeed, the final image — the ring of stones labeled with the word “unless” — could well suggest that enclosure, and the creation of property rights to protect natural resources, is necessary for the Lorax to ever return.
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Imagine that the Once-ler made his living as a fisherman. What would he do if he stumbled across a particularly rich fishing area?
The common-law “rule of capture” says that no one owns fish until they are caught. That means that any other fisherman who stumbled across the same fishing area would have just as much right to catch the fish there as the Once-ler does – it would be first-come, first-served, and the devil take the hindmost.
So the Once-ler would fish the hell out of that area, trying to catch all the fish he could before word gets out and other fishermen started to show up.
Which is pretty much why the Earth’s oceans are overfished. No one owns the fish who live in our oceans, so everyone is free to catch as many as they can. (Or at least they were until relatively recently, when countries began to enter into multilateral agreements limiting the right to fish.)
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The same principle applies to the Truffula trees. The Once-ler may be the one that discovered the valuable Truffula forest, but he doesn’t own it. Once he’s built that big Thneed factory, word is probably going to get out about how profitable chopping down Truffula trees can be. The result will be a gold rush of sorts – everyone and his brother will grab an axe and head for the Truffula forest.
As Adler points out, if the Once-ler owned the Truffula forest, others wouldn’t be able to cut down his trees – at least not legally. If he owned the forest and could keep other from chopping down Truffula trees willy-nilly, the Once-ler would likely realize that it was a bad business strategy for him to cut down all his trees lickety-split.
Instead, he would harvest only a certain number of Truffula trees each year – and he would plant new trees to replace the ones he cut down. That way, he would never run out of them.
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| No more trees = no more Thneeds |
Instead of having to shut down his factory when the last tree was cut down, the Once-ler’s Thneed business could continue indefinitely. He would make a lot more money by managing his Truffula forest responsibly.
Whether the Once-ler gives a d*mn about Truffula trees and Bar-ba-loots or the environment in general, he probably gives a d*mn about making money – and what’s good for his bank account here is good for biodiversity, and carbon sequestration, and wildlife habitat et al.
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I didn’t attempt to explain to my four-year-old grandson how private stewardship would have not only prevented the environmental disaster that resulted from the extinction of the Truffula trees, but also preserved the jobs of the Thneed factory work force. I’ll wait a few years to have that discussion with him.
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Today’s featured song was taken from the soundtrack of the 2012 movie adaptation of The Lorax – which grossed a healthy $349 million.
The Hollywood crowd is all for movies that promote protecting the environment – assuming they make a lot of money at the box office.
Of course, the Hollywood crowd is all for the rest of us doing as they say and not as they do. Case in point: Taylor Swift, who is one of the stars of The Lorax.
Ms. Swift currently holds the top spot on this year’s “Celebs with the Worst Private Jet CO2 Emissions” list. Her private plane logged 170 flights in the first seven months of 2022, producing a mind-boggling total of 8293 metric tons of CO2 – which is over a thousand times more CO2 than the average person is responsible for.
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Taylor Swift’s private jet |
A spokesperson for Swift told a Washington Post reporter that “Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals. To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect.”
I’m not sure that really addresses the issue. If my big-ass Hummer is driven 100,000 miles a year – which would likely burn at least 10,000 gallons of fuel – should I get a pass for my excessive gas guzzling because most of the mileage was piled up by my wife and teenaged kids? I don’t think so.
Click here to listen to “How Bad Can I Be?”
Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:
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