NPR turns 50 this year, so we’re celebrating some of the movies, music and books from the year of our birth, 1971 – like Dr. Seuss’s sadly prophetic The Lorax, which is even more prescient now in the wake of the recent U.N. climate report.
Our own Elizabeth Blair talked to scientists, environmentalists and educators about the book’s legacy – people like Mark Gozonsky, a writer and high school English teacher in Los Angeles whose students have analyzedThe Lorax in the context of global warming. “He kind of says ‘I told you so,’ like, I told you this was going to be bad and now it’s bad,” Gozonsky says. “The book ends on a question mark … 'Well, what are you going to do about it?’ And that’s the very question mark that we land on today.”
