• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 914 0

lack of a Thneed, especially once all of their friends have them. Second, our consumption patterns drive and are reinforced by an unequal and unjust allocation of scarce natural resources, so we consume too much “in an ethical sense.” Americans spend more on cosmetics every year than it would cost to provide basic education to all the children in the poorest parts of the world; Americans and Europeans, counted together, spend more on pet food every year than it would cost to provide basic health care and food to those same children. Dr. Seuss doesn’t really address this issue either, and we don’t hear anything about the other uses to which the money spent on Thneeds might have been put—but it seems to us that the uselessness of Thneeds would mean that just about any other use would have been better, really. Third, our consumption patterns drive production practices that threaten to destroy the natural environment, so we consume too much “in an environmental sense.” This essay was written during the unfolding of one of the worst environmental disasters the world has ever known, the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It seems clear to us that our desires to use more and more fossil fuels are doing more harm than good. Once he sells his first Thneed, the Once-ler immediately hires a work force and builds a factory to make Thneeds on an industrial scale in the middle of nowhere, without any apparent thought for the environmental impact of his actions (to which we’ll return below).

Just before his initial description of the Thneed, the Once-ler assured the Lorax of his good—or at least not bad—intentions: “‘Look, Lorax,’ I said. ‘There’s no cause for alarm. / I chopped just one tree. I am doing no harm. / I’m being quite useful. This thing is a Thneed’” (Lorax). And it’s hard to object, really, to the Once-ler’s claim, since Thneeds haven’t yet had a chance to have a practical impact on the society or to have an ethical impact on the distribution of scarce resources, and the environmental impact of cutting down and using up one Truffula Tree probably really is so small as to be “no harm,” or not enough of a harm to be particularly concerned about. But once the Once-ler brought many of his relatives to his factory, where they all knitted Thneeds, the impact of Thneed consumption begins to be felt quickly.

Now, consumption in and of itself is not necessarily morally problematic, and DesJardins admits as much: “What we might call ‘smart consumption’ or ‘good consumption’ recognizes the many good reasons there are to consume and seeks to distinguish good from bad consumption.”4 Bad consumption, clearly, is the “too much” consumption that we have discussed in the previous paragraphs; what could good consumption be? DesJardins has only a brief suggestion: “One does not sacrifice by consuming less if what one consumes is better.”5 Although DesJardins doesn’t refer to it directly, we think that his drawing this distinction is meant to pick up on the work of Mark Sagoff. In “Do We Consume Too Much?” Sagoff argues that at least some of our worries about our rate of consumption are unfounded: various ecologically minded prognosticators have been predicting impending human and ecological disasters (food shortages, energy shortages, and the like) at least since the seventies, none of which have come about. Instead, Sagoff argues, we find ourselves detached and distanced from one another, from our homes and communities, and from the natural world around us by the impacts of our consumption patterns.6

Rather than urge less consumption, Sagoff (like DesJardins) recommends a smarter approach to consumption:

The alternative approach suggests not so much that we consume less but that we invest more. Environmentalists could push for investment in technologies that increase productivity per unit of energy, get more economic output from less material input, recycle waste, provide new sources of power, replace transportation in large part with telecommunication, and move from an industrial to a service economy.7

In short,