Parts of the poem faded away in my memory, but the message didn’t. So although The Lorax scared me in a way that no other picture book did, I still had my parents read it to me until I knew it by heart. Even my beloved Bollygum, that dazzling quest through Australia’s unique landscapes, ended on a bittersweet note about deforestation, with the sacred healing tree vanished and the city looming where it once stood. Blinky Bill might have been a cute show about a cheeky koala, but he still ran from loggers in the opening sequence. Messages about saving the environment were everywhere in the nineties, as guilty previous generations scrambled to implant care for the planet in our psyches in the hope that we might grow up to fix the damage they created. Behind the colourful drawings and playful rhymes lay a deep and bitter truth about the wild places I loved so much: they were dying. It’s a dark little book, and I was an anxious child. But I did respect The Lorax. It’s for these reasons that I was so fascinated by The Lorax as a spiderling. Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that stories, language and the natural world are some of the strongest threads from which my soul is woven.
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