Dr. Suess aka Theodor Suess Geisel, wrote his famous children’s book “The Lorax” in response to fighting development in his neighborhood. It’s a story we are still living 50 years later, when forests are more needed than ever and more threatened.
To truly speak for the trees, because the trees have no tongues, we have to honor their right to be here in the numbers required to provide habitat for forest wildlife and absorb carbon. Globally there are 10 million hectares (24,2710,541 acres) lost to deforestation every year, with 70 million hectares(172,973,785 acres) lost due to fires, evidence that trees need a lot more Loraxes to advocate for them.
The United Nations has announced that theme for the International Day of Forests this year is, “Forests and Innovation: New Solutions for a Better World,” to be celebrated the 21st of March. This means that according to the organizers, energy will be put toward early fire warning systems, sustainable commodity production for wood products as well as the empowerment of Indigenous Peoples. They also address ecosystem restoration.
These are not bad ideas, but they are woefully incomplete as human overpopulation and population growth is being overlooked once again as a driver of deforestation. Forests are cut down to make room for housing, freeways, agricultural production, shopping centers, airport runways, train tracks, and cul de sacs to name just some of the development pressure which turns forests into lumber and sends wildlife packing. The more people added to a given country, the more the bulldozers are called in to clear the lungs of the earth.
We desperately need to stop deforestation for many critical reasons. We need trees to hold in the soil, make it rain, provide wildlife habitat, produce oxygen, absorb carbon, provide wood products, make shade and provide an aesthetic that makes our neighborhoods more beautiful. Stopping deforestation simply cannot happen when we allow our population to keep growing either through high birth rates or high immigration rates. Deforestation, like all environmental actions, must be addressed where our political power is, within each country. In the US, just since the Lorax was published we have grown from 207,372,00 to a still growing 336 million.
In a perfect world, the UN would encourage each and every one of their member states to address their population in an effort to prevent deforestation, although clearly, they do not have to power to enforce actions within each political entity. Unfortunately, the UN is not taking on overpopulation as the upstream issue it is, which will undermine their success. They need to adopt the theme that population growth drives sprawl and it is the enemy of forests. Statistics prove that population inspired sprawl erases any benefit of conservation efforts of denser living and better planning. ( see www. Sprawlusa.com.)
Until we tell the big truth about how to really stop deforestation, we will not be doing a service to our planet or ourselves. We must speak up and be unafraid to address overpopulation however it manifests. Let’s be inspired by the Once-ler who tells us in the Lorax, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
*From the book The Lorax by Dr.Suess ( 1971)