Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971) is argued as one of the most important pieces of environmental children’s literature, with educators expressing the work, “as a powerful story for teaching and learning, as a story that can promote transformational ideas in educational practice,” (Henderson, 2004). This high praise begs the question: why is The Lorax so successful at reaching out to the child reader? This essay will indentify the use of certain literary characteristics that Seuss incorporated in The Lorax, which stemmed from successful environmental children’s literature from the late seventeenth century to the twentieth century. It will establish the success of each work due to the theme or agenda it had that reflected the social and environmental issues of its time, and will then establish to what extent Seuss’s The Lorax stands as a strong example for ecocritics and educators alike, of an environmental children’s story and its impact on the child reader.
To further understand the position of this paper, it is important to identify the nature of ecocentricism and the development of the interdisciplinary field. Ecocentricism is an ethical practice that “decenters humanity’s importance in nonhuman nature and nature writing and instead explores the complex interrelationships between the human and the nonhuman,” (Buell, 2011). The practice, in the last twenty years, has become a field of inquiry in response to “growing academic concern about the response of literature and literary theory to the global crisis of environmental degradation,” (Sigler, 1994). Using an ecocentric lens, this essay explores the characteristics and social and environmental agendas that children’s literature has had from the early eighteenth century, to the nineteenth and early twentieth century, up until the 1970’s with Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. The Lorax begins with a boy (described as a ‘Who’ but