“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees,” says the title character in Dr. Seuss’ most controversial, most political book, a 1971 fable for the environment and against industrialization, particularly the logging business.

“The Lorax came out of me being angry,” said Seuss, aka Theodor Geisel, the author of numerous beloved children’s books bearing societal messages, from “The Cat in the Hat” to “Horton Hears a Who.”

“The ecology books I’d read were dull,” he said, as related in “Rethinking Human Need: Seuss’s The Lorax,” a piece in the winter 1994 edition of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. “In The Lorax I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.”

Where they fell, one might argue, is across the globe, as “The Lorax” became one pie

See Full Page