The Lorax, a children’s book by Dr. Seuss, tells the story of the Lorax, a fictional character who speaks for the trees against the greedy Once-ler who represents industry. Written in 1971, The Lorax was banned in parts of the United States for being an allegorical political commentary. Today the book is used for educating children about environmental concerns (see http://www.seussville.com/loraxproject). Even so, some people consider the book inappropriate for young children due to its “doom and gloom” environmentalism.
The book The Truax, by Terri Birkett, involves a forest industry representative offering a logging-friendly perspective to an anthropomorphic tree, known as the Guardbark. This story was criticized for containing skewed arguments, and in particular a nonchalant attitude toward endangered species. Hundreds of thousands of copies of this book have been read by elementary school students across North America.
Read both books. You can find The Lorax at your local public library and The Truax can be downloaded as a pdf from http://woodfloors.org/truax.pdf.
Evaluate the stories and work with the information to answer the following questions: