Teaching Climate Change With The Lorax and The Jungle

It used to be that what I wanted more than anything was for my high school students to read independently. This was a month ago. Now, they’re doing much better. All it took was asking them what they wanted to read, then letting them read it.

It wasn’t like they could read just anything; they had to choose from the Lit Hub Climate Change Library.  Teens like boundaries, so they made their choices: 1) The Lorax  2) The Jungle, and 3) everything else—then started reading in book groups, assiduously.

At first. They’re always assiduous the first day of book groups. If you ever want to see the universe tending towards entropy, check out an in-class book group by Day Three. Kids say they can’t read because they don’t have the book when the books are neatly piled near the milkweed plant. Kids have the book but instead of discussing how the way the slaughterhouse treats animals is like the way humans treat the earth, they instead argue over what is the worst Beastie Boys song, or whether the last syllable of the word l-a-v-e-n-d-e-r is pronounced “ur” or “are.”

This is high school.

Nevertheless, about half the kids are indeed reading or discussing a climate change-related book, mostly The Jungle but also Sand County Almanac, Ill Nature, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, and both Asian and Latin American folktales. Overall, my students are as focused as any grown-up book club I have ever experienced. Yes, I want more from the seemingly off-topic kids, but you can’t force it. This latitude enables them to reach Day Four, when they were back to reading so assiduously you could hear a pin drop. I dropped a pin, to make sure. It sounded like this: click, softer click, almost inaudible click.

Whether they are independently reading or independently not-reading, what I want now is for them to ask their own questions, research them, and use their findings to generate new questions. This is not how it’s usually done in school. Usually, you read the assigned text, then answer the questions at the back, and that’s it: question, answer, done. This provides a semblance of order at the price of killing creativity, which seemed fine until we broke the planet. Now The Answer—eliminate carbon pollution—is all but written by a bloody finger in the sky. That’s why I think it would be good for my students to pursue their own authentic questions in response to the imperative of reinventing how we live.

Thus, while I was all for us reading The Lorax, we paired it with Alan Weisman’s survey in The New York Review of Books of The Uninhabitable Earth and the latest manifesto from Bill McKibben. Take a kindergarten book, pair it with the NYRB and it averages out right about at high school level.

Their questions about these texts fall into three main categories: scientific, economic, and political. The scientific questions tend to start out adorable and end up horrible. For example, the story of The Lorax is told by a failed industrialist named the Once-ler, who is living as a hermit in the ruined landscape of his former factories. He charges a fee to tell his tale, and the fee includes the whimsical “shell of a great great great grandfather snail.”

This got Harmoni wondering “if a snail could even live long enough to become a great great great grandfather.” She looked it up online and discovered that, in her words, “a snail can live to see a whopping 52 generations.” The bleak prospects laid out in Weisman’s gloss on The Uninhabitable Earth caused Harmoni to wonder further, “If a snail born today will live to see their 52nd great grandchildren, would a human born today have a chance to see their own children before our world becomes uninhabitable?”

That’s one way to defuse the climate bomb: turn it into a parody of a math test word problem. Technically, this doesn’t remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but it’s funny. Funny reduces fear and fends off hopelessness.

Many students feel emboldened, at this point, to question the economics of climate change. Zipporah asked, “Why is money deemed more powerful than the environment?”

“Why” questions are notoriously hard to answer, but Zipporah was totally down to borrow Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. I had splurged for a teetering pile of climate economics books as soon as I read her question, fantasizing that even though I am whelmed with grading papers, my homework/rehearsal/college applications/being teenagers-whelmed students would read all the books I wish I could read.

Zipporah, for example, is a bright, good-natured kid. It is my fond hope that by honing in on some Naomi Klein, she will figure out a way to combine what is best in human nature with what is fair and just in economics, and tell the world, and the world listen and act, so that instead of a mere book report the result of her reading will be a global picnic with the theme, “Whew, That Was a Close One!” featuring a tug-of-war, three-legged race, and proper commemoration of all we have already irreparably lost.

Yes, I have high expectations of my students. Should the results of Zipporah’s reading prove less than messianic, I’m confident she’ll learn some good SAT words and gain useful background knowledge to bring to the written portion of the AP English Lang exam. Something good will come of this climate study, even if my 150 students are not collectively responsible for saving the world like a hero snipping the yellow wire on the infinity bomb with .01 seconds to go on the timer. Climate change doesn’t even work like a bomb, and we aren’t going to save the world all at once. It will happen one question at a time.

Portia questions the utter ineffectiveness of The Lorax, a woodland sprite who claims to speak for the trees clear-cut by the Once-ler. Speak he may, but the Lorax does nothing to stop deforestation other than tell the Once-ler that he’s destroying habitat. “Why was it all just preach?” Portia asked. “Why was the Lorax all talk, no action?”

These teenagers know this is their time. Elias gave a call to action while dismissing the glimmer of hope offered at the end of The Lorax. He says it’s just a silly sliver of Seuss, whose whimsy can’t save the real world. Because of a lack of a rambunctious rhymer as humanity’s author, Elias concluded, the time has come for young people to be their own authors.

That’s where we’re going from here. Specifically, we’re going on literary road trips in a collective quest for climate-related questions, answers, and further questions. Eleventh graders will head north on the 101, driving straight into Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, which questions what people are even doing living in the Southwest. Good thing teens love existential dread! We’ll pack those lessons into the Sierras with John Muir, then go to Oakland to hang with Native American youth in Tommy Orange’s There, There. “The land is everywhere or nowhere,” Tommy Orange says. What does that mean? We’ll make our best guesses and learn what we can. Then we’ll consult Gary Snyder in Seattle, Alice Munro in Vancouver. Finally we’ll head as north as north can go with Barry Lopez to seek living truth from muskoxen, polar bears, and narwhals in Arctic Dreams.  

Seniors will head east on the 10 toward the Utah desert for a rendezvous with Edward Abbey and haul cross-country with William Least-Heat Moon as far as Virginia, where we’ll sit with Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Then, we’ll cross the Atlantic with Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, coming ashore in Nigeria for Things Fall Apart, lingering in West Africa to consider What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. It will not escape our notice that the direction of our journey is is the reverse direction of the slave trade, and we’ll consider climate in the context of the 1619 Project.

In both classes, we’ll make the literary voyage home, to tell our tale. How to tell it: that’s another question for this journey. I do know that along with existential dread, these art school teens love set design. The time has come for us to be our own authors; we can be actors, too.