Strange as it may be to say this of a children’s book, these closing lines are among the most heartbreaking I’ve ever read. The context has some bearing on this, obviously: they’re heartbreaking because I’m reading them to my son, and because the message they convey carries what feels like a generational dead weight. The entrusting of the last seed, and the set of instructions for the revival of nature, must have been onerous enough when The Lorax was first published in 1972, in the very earliest days of the environmentalist movement—before we knew what we now know about climate change, before we understood that the world’s sixth mass extinction event was under way in our time, and that we were the cause of it. Even in 1972, the imperative of those closing lines must have felt like an unbearable burden to place in the hands of a child. (“It’s up to you! We, the previous generations, have fucked up everything, and only you, our innocent redeemer, can do what is needed to reverse the devastation of nature!”) But now, it can feel downright cruel. Because what if it’s too late now, and has been too late for a very long time? What if the Lorax and his friends are never coming back? What if the world my son has been born to, and will have to somehow make a life in, is one where nothing but Grickle-grass grows, and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows?
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I thought about The Lorax a lot during the week I spent in Alladale. Not just because the questions I thought about when I was there were the questions raised by the book, but because the story of the place is also in some sense the story told by the book. It’s a place that was once entirely covered by trees—oak, pine, ash, birch—that once forested the islands of Britain and Ireland. And there were wolves there once, and bears, too, but no longer: the animals left, died out, because the trees were all cut down. The Once-ler, in this particular case, was colonial expansion, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of capitalism.
To spend time in Alladale Wilderness Reserve was to calculate the intimate equation between civilization and environmental devastation. Though it was one of the last wild regions of the British Isles, this vast estate, twenty-three thousand acres of glacial valley and bare mountains in the Scottish Highlands, was in fact the private property of an Englishman named Paul Lister, the heir to a retail discount furniture fortune who purchased it in 2003 with the intention of reforesting the land and reintroducing several animal species—wolves and bears, most controversially, but also lynx and elk—that had become extinct in these islands as a consequence of the deforestation that fueled a history of colonial shipbuilding, industrialization, and retail discount furniture chains. And so while Alladale, in its remoteness and pristine stillness, gave the impression of being entirely innocent of human corruption, it was in fact a landscape stripped bare by the machinery of profit, a place of emptiness and silence: a place where the Grickle-grass grows.
It was out of sad curiosity about the dimensions of the loss we were undergoing as a civilization, as a species, that I decided to spend a week there in the spring of 2017. And I was not alone in this endeavor. There were sixteen of us on this retreat into the wilderness, total strangers who had come together with the intention of discussing the most pressing questions of our time, and of forming in the process a kind of tribe. This was not the sort of explicitly romantic endeavor I would ordinarily involve myself in, what with the unwieldy carapace of cynicism I had allowed to grow around me over the course of my adult life. There was some part of me that considered such pursuits fundamentally self-indulgent and even frivolous, and yet this was in conflict with a deeper sense that nothing could be more important—in, as it were, the end—than the unflinching engagement with the reality that we as a species might be finally and irrevocably fucked.
I had learned about the retreat on the website of an organization called the Dark Mountain Project, who were arranging it in collaboration with another group called Way of Nature, an English group that ran wilderness expeditions in locations around Europe. The Dark Mountain Project was a movement of artists and writers and activists united by the conviction that climate catastrophe was not just real and imminent but also in fact inevitable, a done deal, and that, as such, the entire project of environmentalism was effectively doomed. The group had been founded in 2009 by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, two English former journalists and environmental activists who had begun to see the logic of environmentalism—its insistence that if we change our ways and embrace sustainable development and other eco-friendly practices, we might still prevent or mitigate the worst effects of climate change—as based on a delusion, as willful in its way as the delusion of those who deny the very existence of climate change.
The group’s founders, along with its loose cohort of contributors and associates, were of the opinion that Western civilization was bound for collapse, that the whole vast edifice of interconnecting supply chains and technological infrastructures and political systems was more fragile than we permitted ourselves to recognize. “The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric,” as they put it in the manifesto with which they’d launched the group in 2009. The manifesto was written as the global financial crisis unfurled its devastating effects, and to read it is to sense its authors’ dark and palpable exhilaration at the vulnerability of the systems undergirding our civilization. “There is a fall coming,” they wrote. “We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight, hubris has been reintroduced to nemesis.”
The manifesto’s central contention was that the foundational myth of our civilization—the myth of progress, the understanding of the future as a line on a graph that will soar ever upward and to the right—had been fatally undermined in our time. And this myth, it argued, was built on the foundations of a deeper myth: the myth of nature, the ancient idea that we, as a species, were fundamentally distinct from the world out of which we’d emerged. Climate change was both the most disastrous consequence of the belief in that myth, and the means of its destruction. It was climate change that brought us face-to-face with the instability of the civilization we had built, with how “the machine’s need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name.”
The manifesto was essentially an apocalyptic text, a revelation of what is undoubtedly to come, and in some sense a welcoming of its arrival. It rejected all suggestions that we might negotiate a means of evading this collapse—through political consensus, through technological ingenuity, through pursuing a more sustainable form of consumerism—and that everything might somehow turn out fine. As a species, it argued, we are in collective denial about our way of life and its long-term prospects for survival; even when we face up to the magnitude of the crisis we face, we tell ourselves it is merely a crisis—a difficult but soluble situation, rather than an approaching cataclysm.