Stock photo of The Lorax, aka Larry, noted American environmentalist, nudist, and spokesman for trees. ????-2009.TRUFFULA FOREST—Police confirmed today that the Lorax, beloved spokesman for the trees and noted radical environmentalist, has been pronounced dead. While the authorities are awaiting lab results, the death has initially been ruled a suicide.
The nude, mustachioed, hairy creature, once believed to have been nigh immortal, came to prominence during a 1971 journalistic expose by one Theodor Geisel, who chronicled the creature’s struggle against the logging industry, as we ll as its efforts on behalf of endangered species indigenous to the Pacific Northwest that had been threatened by the Onceler Corporation's textile manufacturing concern.
The suicide, in which the Lorax grabbed himself by the seat of his ‘pants’ and hurled himself off the top of Globodyne Systems new Rem Koolhaas-designed 100-story mega-tower, came at the end of what friends and confidants had said had been a time of great mental struggle, hardship, and increasing isolation.
“Larry, as we all called him, was going through some shit. You know, with the trees,” said friend and fellow political activist Theo LeSieg. “The little guy had devoted so much of his life to the environment. Christ, he actually was hired by trees as a spokesman. Larry just got down when he saw that he was being outdueled by corporations and marginalized as an extremist, nut, or some sort of granola fascist. It probably didn’t help that he was nude, covered in hair, and got a little preachy sometimes, but the man was just keeping it aaaaaaaall natural. Eventually the trees had to fire him because so-called captains of industry had made him into a political liability in the eyes of the media.”
Pushback against the Lorax's message began in earnest during the late eighties when several logging companies banded together to release a book called "The Truax," a pro-business screed against activism and conservation. The counteroffensive culminated with the Lorax being banned from continuing his school speaking tours over concerns that his contact with minors was a corrupting influence. According to the ruling in the landmark case U.S. v Lorax, the demonized conservationist, "Needed to put on some damn clothes or at least ditch the porn star mustache, not to mention this environmental talk, anti-capitalism polemic, and pro-union speeches, which are harmful to the economy and business community at large."
“What really drove him over the edge were the so-called new renewable sources of energy,” said a daisy headed woman unwilling to identify herself for fear of retribution. “There was finally some traction for moving the country off foreign oil and the three biggest solutions were drilling for more here, opening up national parks to more drilling and logging, and for using clean coal. Pumping toxins into the ground instead of the air is good for the environment? I swear he almost put a gun in his mouth the second he heard that.”
Others close to the creature point to a recent spate of polling showing that, despite a recent uptick in environmentalism and activism campaigns, nearly 41% of the country believed global warming was exaggerated and Americans placed the environment and global warming among the least-important issues facing the country. Similar global studies had seen the world community at large place the environment first.
“Money well spent, it seems,” a shadowy elephantine figure, known only as H, said in response to news of the suicide. “First you discredit the…man…like….creature…thing…and then you drive him crazy with a corporate controlled media countering near universal scientific consensus with one political party of pro-business ‘skeptics’ and oil company funded ‘research’. The problem takes care of itself. Everyone hear that? It’s the sound of money being made.”
The Lorax’s suicide note, a thirty-page-long rambling dissertation involving animals, lands, objects, and races entirely conceived of by the creature, showed what a local clinical psychologist described as a “…complete mental break from reality. I mean, what in God’s name is a ‘thnadner’, ‘wumbus’, ‘sneech’, ‘oobleck’, or a ‘grickily-gructus’? Plus the whole damn thing’s in trisyllabic meter. Total nut-job who cashed his crazy ticket to pancake town.”
As per his wishes, the Lorax will not be given a public funeral. He instead will be stuffed and mounted, touring national forests as a gruesome, hectoring display against the evils of environmental destruction. Friends hope the cadaver tour will shock children out of their sense of moral complacency, at the very least increasing national parks’ attendance and revenue.
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