02/20/2025
You are invited to attend:
Professor Lisa Siraganian: "Who Lifted the Lorax? Personifying the Environment and Problems of Action"
Location: Jackman Humanities Building, Room 100
Time: Wednesday, March 19, 4:00-6:00 pm
The event is sponsored by the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature.
Talk Description:
After a river in New Zealand was granted legal personhood in 2012, related movements blossomed around the world. But giving human-like rights to the environment has also faced serious problems and challenges. To begin investigating them, this talk zeros in on Dr. Seuss’s [Theodore Geisel’s] The Lorax (1971), the celebrated illustrated environmentalist book, which was written and published virtually contemporaneously with legal scholar Christopher Stone’s groundbreaking 1972 essay, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” The basic dialectic of Dr. Seuss’s children’s story shares some of the same challenges of the personification of the environment that Stone advocates. Is the “Lorax” who “speak[s] for the trees, for the trees have no tongues,” a “who” with intention and agency or an “it” without interests or the capacity to act? This question continues to weave its way through later environmental personhood debates, often as the challenge of anthropomorphism and property rights. Perhaps other forms of representation might be more effective—for the environment—than personhood?
