TPP at Mpala: Reading The Lorax (Dayton)

With Community Conservation Day successfully complete, the Conservation Clubs are ready to move forward with a new project. Some schools (including Il Motiok and Naiperere, where we went yesterday) will be doing an “indigenous knowledge project:” next week we will go for a walk with a local Maasai elder who will tell the kids how the landscape has changed over the years. But that’s next week—first we needed to set that lesson up.

Colleen and I accompanied Annelies and Nancy to Naiperere, while Helen and Kate stayed with Alex at Il Motiok. Both schools began with a quick recap of Community Conservation Day; we had the kids write what they liked, what they learned, and what activities from other schools they wanted to try at their school. Predictably, they liked, the poems, songs, games, and dramas. I was somewhat more surprised that several wrote they liked all the speeches (which were mainly by adults and not targeted at the students), but hey, I’m thrilled they had a good time! We also watched a short video about the Clubs made last summer; it seemed super fun for the kids to see themselves on film.

Next we told them about the indigenous knowledge project. To prepare them, we shared a classic Western example of someone old telling someone young how the environment was destroyed: The Lorax! I hadn’t read Seuss’s eco-tract for probably over a decade, though I’d seen—and adored—the recent film adaptation. 43 years after publication, the book still packs a wallop. As Annelies and I read aloud to the kids, I found myself deeply invested. The students, more to the point, also seemed to enjoy it.

The book, in case you don’t recall, is the Once-ler’s account to a young boy of how his greedy younger self cut down all the “Truffula Trees,” filled the air with smog, and dumped “Gluppity-Glupp” into the water (forcing all the local fauna to leave) as he expanded his factory. Specifically, he sewed the Truffula leaves into “Thneeds” (which everyone needs!), multi-purpose sort of sweater-looking things that become inexplicably popular. Inexplicable to both the reader and to “the Lorax, who speaks for the trees,” a fantastical (and fantastically mustachioed) little orange man who tries to stop the Once-ler’s rampage of deforestation. Alas, the Once-ler only stops once he has chopped down every Truffula Tree, leaving the local ecosystem devastated and his own Thneed business collapsed.

This would be a rather dour way to end a Dr. Seuss book, and so the Once-ler ends on a potentially hopeful note: “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” He then gives the young boy a seed—the last Truffula Seed!—and instructs him to plant it, grow it, and protect it: “Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.” Seuss never wrote a sequel so we don’t know if the young boy listened and became the steward of a thriving Truffula Forest, or if he just turned into another doomed-from-the-start Thneed magnate.

In a way, that’s been for us to decide—and results have been mixed. While the environmental movement has gained leaps and bounds since 1971, there are still whole sectors of the economy that, like the Once-ler, are intent on “biggering and biggering and biggering” in the short-term no matter how great the coming crash might be. This is especially relevant in the States: while we certainly remember Seuss’s contagious love for trees and animals, we forget that he also challenged our role as rampant consumers.

In Laikipia County, consumer culture is less the issue than the more direct message: cutting down trees hurts the animals. People here often cut down trees to burn charcoal, and as population booms, deforestation spreads, and the wildlife (not to mention livestock and the people themselves) suffers. The kids definitely understand this part, and to them the parallels of their situation with that of The Lorax were glaringly obvious. The story probably applies more literally here than it does in the US, where we’ve already cut down most of our trees and the public rarely sees deforestation happen directly.

Despite the good Doctor’s linguistic gymnastics, the class seemed to have followed the book well, and we had a productive discussion afterward. Though when we asked if they could say “Truffula Tree,” the class shot back with a resounding “No.”