When I was in high school ("it all started way back, such a long, long time back...") my classmates and I made a movie for advanced placement English. It was the Lorax. We filmed on the vast lawn at Joanne Presper's house. We used their riding mower for a Truffula tree cutter. Some of us were Truffula trees. (one of us came close to losing a limb to the tree cutter). The Lorax is in the top ten of books I would read to my campers.
"At the far end of town, where the Grickle-grass grows
and the wind smells, slow-and-sour when it blows
and no birds ever sing, excepting old crows...
is the Street that a creature named the Lorax knows
It is here, deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say,
Where you’ll discover you can still see, today,
where the Lorax once stood
just as long as it could
before somebody lifted the Lorax away."
And like a good future poet I had memorized it:
"I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues..."
I love that book so I won't be seeing the movie. I take A. O. Scott on his word that it is "a noisy, useless piece of junk."
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| Beaver Creek, Tipton, Tennessee |
Today's environmental justice movement is very much like the Lorax, it speaks for those whose voices are ignored. We have to take control of the narrative of what is being done to all our communities but especially low-income and communities of color in the face of oil spills, mountain top removal, illegal dumping and fracking.
We must be the Lorax, and speak for our peeps, who are sickening and dying as quick as the trees.
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