THE LORAX AND EASTER’S END
According to an article by Sam Martin, “Nearly 4 billion tress or 35 percent of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries on every continent.” Take a moment to absorb that statistic. Trees are one of the most beneficial natural resource that plays a vital role in our everyday life. As of right now, humans around the world are using so much resource from the Earth and we do not even realize it. If we do not learn to conserve and not take our natural resources for granted, then one day our planet Earth will end up in a disastrous outcome like how the “The Lorax” by Dr. Seuss and “Easter’s End” by Jared Diamond did. The two stories share the same theme, which is people taking nature for granted and ended up destroying the environment for personal uses. Although the general theme may be similar, there were several differences between the two stories, other than the fact that one story was fiction and one was historical.
In both stories, several key environmental issues were shown to exemplify the consequence of abusing the environment. In “The Lorax”, the truffula trees were the main natural resource that were chopped down and stripped of their leaves in order to make thneeds, which was everything the humans would need. Similarly in “Easter’s End,” the Polynesian natives, who sculpted statues to express their culture, used a plentiful amount of trees to place the statues on and transport them to the locations of where they would place the statues at. As you may notice, both stories introduce the overuse of trees for personal purposes. Although they used the trees for different personal purpose, they will soon be faced with the consequences of abusing their resources.
The Polynesian people were too careless and ignorant to realize the importance of the trees and the animals that lived on the island. As a result,