My daughter reminds me that this Dr. Seuss movie made her cry when she first saw it.
This story helped teach kids about environmental stewardship. It’s a cute reminder of why we try to seek balance between development and environmental protection.
My daughter reminds me that this Dr. Seuss movie made her cry when she first saw it.
This story helped teach kids about environmental stewardship. It’s a cute reminder of why we try to seek balance between development and environmental protection.
Fear De Jour and Childhood
Every generation of children has some sort of neurosis that the adult world likes to push on their little minds.
For me, it was the nuke scare of the ’80. For recent children, it was AIDS and now “climate change.” These scares and fears are certainly fads.
If we believed the hype, we be pregnant communist starving African AIDS infected druggies teens, living in a bombed out litter infested island where the sea level was inching up by the minute.
Sorry to see that the pandering things like the Lorax made such an inappropriate effect on your child. While childhood should not be censored polyana-ville, overblown propaganda designed to foist adult troubles on children is not right as well.
I understand it’s “just a movie” – but I encourage parents to help their kids plant a tree instead of helpless wallowing in adult neurosis.
Re: Fear De Jour and Childhood
To an extent, I agree with you on this. Like you, I’ve also noticed that there seems to be a frightening end-of-the-world scenario presented to each generation of kids. in addition to the pollution scare when I was young, the other big one was “overpopulation”. At first we would be experiencing scarcity and ruin, and soon we would have scoops picking us up like rubbish and we would be eating each other as in Soylent Green. Of course, it turns out that highly developed nations are losing population, and doing all they can to try to get their young adults to have babies. Countries in Europe are extending tax breaks and incentives to would-be parents, and Singapore is sending their young married couples on romantic get-aways to procreate. So ya, you make a good point.
At the same time, I think that the pollution scare of the 60s and 70s actually had some positive impacts on our society. We learned to recycle, and now 60 % or Renton’s household waste is recycled. We learned to leave some trees where we can when we develop, and this has helped maintain a Northwest look to our neighborhoods, keep air conditioning costs down in summer, keep erosion down, and keep our air more healthy. We also added additional cleaning stages to municipal sewage systems, which helped clean up Puget Sound. And we worked with industry, to make sure their processes were sustainable and sensible, and they filtered waste streams to the best extent technology would practically allow. So Dr. Seuss may have helped in some of this…even if the fish walking out of the lake was a little over done.