Wilderness lessons from Dr Seuss and the Lorax

Remember the Lorax? Dr Seuss’ creation from last century still describes with disturbing accuracy the path we’re on in this verse:

"Mister!, he said with a sawdusty sneeze,
"I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues ..."

As it explains in Wikipedia:

The book is commonly recognized as a fable concerning industrialized society, using the literary element of personification to give life to industry as the Once-ler … and to the environment as the Lorax. It has become a popular metaphor for those concerned about the environment.

Modern day “Once-lers” argue that "we can’t afford to have land locked up in national parks”, and “we can’t afford the luxury of wilderness". They’re appealing to social needs, but they’re always motivated by individual gain.

Whereas the Loraxes still among us would say:

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It's not.

Pre-schoolers see the answer as obvious. They don’t have "conditioned entrepreneurial instincts" so they still see right from wrong with a moral purity that most adults unfortunately lack. They know instinctively that the Lorax is right: of course you have to preserve the wilderness, and all of the other eco-systems, and the precious plants and animals that inhabit them.

But as people "grow up" the answers to questions like that seem to become hazier? Why, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's because we’ve succumbed to manipulated needs and contrived wants, and have stopped asking basic philosophical questions like: what do I really need? And how do I want to live?

Before we open more land up - that is, privatise and exploit it - shouldn’t we scrutinise the need to do so by first asking if we are really optimising our use of the land that we have already “developed”?

What does the wilderness mean to society? Why is it important to protect it for generations to come? What scientific, medical, spiritual and environmental benefits does it hold as it is? And what will we, and the generations that will follow us, lose forever if we don't protect it?

We should also try to tease out what we mean by the idea of sustainability.

Some say it means to "maintain", "support", or "endure". Some say sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. And some say it is the reconciliation of environmental, social and economic demands. Perhaps we need another word, or perhaps another world or three, so everyone can be happy!

CSIRO defines sustainability in this way:

New areas of science examining the behaviour of complex systems and the integration of social and economic systems are also being tackled.

This research seeks to understand how systems interact and feed back on each other causing unexpected shocks, changes and degradation within environments and ecosystems.

This work is critical in a world that relies on non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels, and puts increasing strain on ecosystems and natural resources, such as water and soil.

To plan for a sustainable future, we need to understand which ecosystems are resilient, which are fragile and why.

As you can see, we haven’t even settled on an agreed definition of "sustainability". Everyone claims to be aiming for it, and are selling everything from rubbish bags to housing estates in its name, but there is no objective definition of it, no common clear understanding of exactly what it means.

What we do know, however, is that we aren’t currently achieving it, we aren’t likely to in the foreseeable future and in the meantime we humans are driving many species to extinction far faster than they can evolve.

We also know that we are still learning about sustainability and its importance. Didn't Nancy Newhall say "The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned to ask"? Isn’t the risk of our current experiment - modern human “civilisation” - failing reason enough to preserve what is ours to experience but not to own?

It seems a bizarre contradiction that when humans do care they will spend vast amounts of time, money and effort bringing back species (both flora and fauna) we have pushed to the brink of extinction, but when they don’t they look on as the wholesale destruction of whole ecosystems takes place in front of them.

Wilderness offers humanity the classroom, the teacher and the lessons for an immense bounty. It’s an irreplaceable resource in perpetuity if we can just behave like the Lorax and not like Once-lers, and it will be an irremediable tragedy if we don’t.