“I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees,” says the eponymous hairy hero of Dr Seuss’s children’s book after he climbs out of the stump of a truffula tree. An irate orange figure with a bristling moustache, the Lorax is an environmental activist who wastes no time in berating the axe-wielding Once-ler, a shady money-grabbing interloper who lays waste to the environment to produce peculiar knitted outfits called thneeds.
Now researchers say the book may have been inspired by the things Seuss saw on a trip to Kenya, and that the bristly character may have been based on the orange moustachioed patas monkeys indigenous to the area.
Donald Pease, a Seuss expert and professor of English and comparative literature at Dartmouth College who is a co-author of the research, sees a parallel between the relationship of the patas monkey to its habitat and that of the Lorax to his truffula trees.
“The patas monkey is in a commensalist relationship with the whistling thorn acacia trees,” said Pease. “That means that it depends upon the acacia tree as its primary source of nutriment but it doesn’t threaten the survivability of the acacia trees.”
The authors suggest the Lorax might have been similarly dependent on the truffulas, meaning his future and that of the trees are tightly linked, rather than the Lorax simply being an outraged eco-policeman.
“No one is claiming that the patas monkeys and the whistling thorn acacia trees are the actual referents for the truffula trees and the Lorax; the claim is they are plausible inspirations for that remarkable invention,” said Pease.
Writing in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the authors note how a trip to Mount Kenya Safari Park seemed pivotal to breaking Seuss’s – real name Theodor Geisel – writer’s block as he worked on his book.
“[Geisel said] he was able to write about 90% of The Lorax on the back of a laundry list in a very short period of time,” said Pease. “The environment must have inspired crucial missing components of that children’s book and that also is what lends plausibility to the [patas monkey] claim.”
There are also physical resemblances, the authors say. Geisel changed the Lorax from blue to bright orange, while spiky plants left in the wake of the Once-ler’s thneed enterprise seem rather familiar.
“When fully tufted, the truffula tree looks nothing like a whistling thorn acacia,” said Pease’s co-author, Nathaniel Dominey, an expert in primate evolution. “But there is one depiction of the tree without its tuft, and that does very much look like a whistling thorn acacia.”
The team report how they made a composite image of the Lorax’s features from 13 images of his face, and used a machine-learning system computer analysis to reveal that the Lorax is much more similar to patas monkeys than is another orange character from a different Seuss book.
And there is more. “Even the voice of the Lorax (a ‘sawdusty sneeze’) resembles the ‘whoo-wherr’ vocalisation of patas monkeys,” the authors write.
Dominey said: “I think the idea of species interdependency is what informs The Lorax. You’ll note that progressive degradation of the environment drives away species in succession – first the swomee swans, then the bar-ba-loots – [in] something we would now describe as a trophic cascade, suggesting that the truffula tree is a keystone species. There are many artistic embellishments in the final book, but the overall theme of species interdependence within an ecosystem is embodied in the monkey-tree interaction that we think he observed directly.”
But Charles Cohen, a Seuss expert, said he was not convinced by the alleged physical resemblances made by the authors.
“Images clung to [Seuss’s] mind like barnacles,” he said, “so it’s certainly possible that things he saw in Africa could have been incorporated into The Lorax. For example, it might have been interesting to see a correlation proposed between whistling thorn acacias and the prickly grickle-grass in the book. However, the authors focused on truffula trees and the Lorax character, both of which much more closely resemble things [Seuss] drew long before his trip to Africa than they do the vegetation and animals suggested in this article.”
Pease stressed that not all of Seuss’s creations were drawn from nature. “Many of them are completely fanciful, I think – he loved to invent,” he said. “I find it very difficult to imagine a creature in the Arctic or Antarctic that would resemble the Grinch.”
