Who Lifted the Lorax? Personifying the Environment and Problems of Action

This event is sponsored by the Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature.

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?

Professor Lisa Siraganian is the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (Oxford 2020), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and the Modern Language Association’s Matei Calinescu Book Prize, and Modernism's Other Work: The Art Object's Political Life (Oxford 2012), shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Her scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship that funded the completion of her law degree (J.D.) in 2019. She is the Editor of Volume D (1914-1945), one of the five volumes of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Tenth Edition (2022). Her next book, on the problem of personhood for non-human entities, is forthcoming from Verso.