'The Lorax' may have been inspired by a tree

In the early 1970s, Dr. Seuss was struggling.

Amid the growing environmentalist movement in the United States, punctuated by President Richard Nixon's creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the establishment of the now-beleaguered Endangered Species Act, Dr. Seuss -- otherwise known as Theodore Geisel -- wanted to write a conservation-themed book for children.

But stricken with writer's block, he couldn't.

"He struggled and struggled to do it," Nathaniel Dominy, an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist at Dartmouth College, said in an interview.

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That is, until Dr. Suess made a journey to Kenya.

In a new study published Monday in the journal Nature, Dominy and his team make a compelling argument that after Seuss spied the rarely-seen patas monkey in Kenya, his writer's block lifted, and he wrote his famed book, The Lorax.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The patas monkey "just looks like a Seuss character," said Dominy. "The resemblance is striking."

The Lorax is mustached character who rails about the destruction of the fictional Truffula trees, as they're chopped down for their silky foliage. It's an environmental disaster, replete with logging, factory pollution, and the trees' depletion.

In reality, the Lorax-looking patas monkeys largely depend on a tree -- the whistling thorn acacia -- common in the Kenyan area Suess visited. What's more, the Lorax character has a "signature mustache" and orange coat -- just like the patas monkey.

Suess struggled to write a conservation-themed book in California, where he also happened to be resisting attempts by developers to chop down trees around his San Diego home, Donald Pease a study coauthor, said in an interview.

But when Suess visited the Mount Kenya Safari Club in 1971, he suddenly became inspired to write The Lorax.

"He wrote 90 precent of it in an afternoon on the back of a laundry list," Pease, a famed literary historian said, noting that Suess likely watched a patas monkey eating the hardened sap from a whistling thorn acacia. (Eating that sap won't harm the tree.)

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"The relationship of inimitable dependence disclosed something to Dr. Seuss that created a kind of eureka moment," said Pease.

"We think Dr. Seuss created the Lorax, through inspiration, by seeing the patas monkey," added Dominy.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

To further bolster the argument -- and test if the Lorax may have simply been modeled after another Seussian cartoon character -- the study's authors employed sophisticated facial recognition technology to see if the Lorax identified more with local monkeys in the area Suess visited, or other Seuss cartoons.

"We found that the Lorax is better characterized by primate face space than even the most similar-looking Seussian character," write the authors, specifically referrencing a blue monkey and patas monkey.

"There's something not random about this, from the perspective of the computer," said Dominy.

"It really could have a happened," Trudy Turner, a primate anthropologist at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who had no involvement in the story, said in an interview.

Turner has seen patas monkeys in Kenya, and said Seuss could very well have seen a patas, or two other closely related species, ultimately inspiring The Lorax.

"The idea is absolutely delightful," Turner admitted.

A prophetic tale?

Almost 50 years after The Loraxwas published, the patas monkey "species as a whole is okay," said Dominy, even though they're rarely seen.

But in Kenya specifically, the patas monkeys are not okay. Their populations in Kenya have plummeted by half over the last few decades, said Dominy, because the tree they depend, the whistling thorn acacia, is struggling.

A rendition of Dr. Seuss' Lorax from the 2012 Universal Pictures film, "The Lorax." Credit: UNIVERSAL/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

"This tree has been getting hammered in recent years," said Dominy.

This area of Africa has experienced a decline in rainfall more severe than any time in the past 1,000 years, tied to human-caused climate change.

Animals here, like rhinos and elephants, are forced to graze more on the drought-tolerant trees' leaves, which in turn makes the trees more susceptible to drought. The trees are also chopped down and used to make charcoal.

These are obvious environmental struggles in Kenya, perhaps reminiscent of the depletion of the Truffala trees in The Lorax.

"Such findings suggest that we are witnessing a prophetic example of life imitating art imitating life," write the authors in the study.

And perhaps a quote from The Loraxitself best explains why all of us should care about the future of the environment:

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

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