This is the kind of weird artifact I love finding on the internet: a PDF of a children’s book called “Truax”, a take-off of The Lorax produced by the logging industry. It’s a nice bit of propaganda, in which a naggy environmentalist tree spirit named Guardbark is informed of the benefits of the lumber industry by a kind-hearted logger. Its mimicry of Seussian art and doggerel is surprisingly on point, as in this stanza claiming that logging promotes biodiversity:
Cutting the trees sends SOME critters running
but others move in, some cute, and some cunning.
They munch on the leaves. They grow on the bark.
And none loves it more than the Pink-Spotted Lark!
Never mind the fact that those displaced critters will go extinct, or that the adorable Pink-Spotted Lark is, technically speaking, an invasive species: that anapestic tetrameter rhyme scheme is hard to resist!
What I find most fascinating about Truax is that it’s not, as we’d like to think, produced by some evil Captain Planet villain: it was written by Terri Birkett, a woman who works for a midsized hardwood flooring company in Virginia, and who depends on the logging industry to support her and her family. Can we blame her for being a little offended by The Lorax, or for swallowing a few bullshit studies by the Northeastern Loggers Association hook, line, and sinker? Yes, the book she produced is pretty hilarious, but its heart is in the right place — or, at least, in a right place, because it’s clear that she really believes what she’s writing, and desperately wishes that we’d believe it too.
