At first glance, it describes a “tragedy of the commons,” coined by biologist Garrett Hardin in 1968. Imagine a village’s unowned commons with sheep and goats grazing on lush grass. But as you herd your sheep over for their dinner, you notice neighbor Bill’s flock of goats following you. And the commons ahead appears overgrazed; there’s some grass left, but bare patches of dirt predominate.

 

Two options present themselves:

 

1—You rush over, even if it means your Molly finishes the last of the grass, making it ecologically extinct, or

 

2—You pause your march to the commons. But then neighbor Bill, in a spate of self interest, passes you and has his Billy finish off the last of the grass, because Greta’s goats are behind him.

 

This calls for the government to step in to regulate that commons, averting a tragedy. Or so said Hardin; years after this, he was so concerned about overpopulation and what he called  the “freedom to breed” that he and his wife committed a double suicide.

 

That macabre point didn’t make it into Seuss’s story.

 

We can at least credit Hardin not only for practicing what he preached, but for illuminating an old idea with a kernel of truth. About 2300 years before Hardin coined the term “tragedy of the commons,” Aristotle wrote, “That which is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common.”

 

But The Lorax inadvertently hints at some problems with this supposed tragedy and its solution of “caring.”

 

How so? The harm done to the truffula trees and various critters wasn’t really a classic tragedy of the commons, because in a true tragedy of the commons (say, overfishing in the Pacific Ocean), there has to be that neighbor Bill behind you acting in his own self interest, oblivious to the ecological harm he will cause. And Bill acts rashly because Greta is behind him!

 

In The Lorax, the Onceler uses truffula trees to make silly “Thneeds,” things that people (supposedly) need, which seem to predate the modern Snuggly, which I think no one really needs. His minions use a Super Axe Hacker to increase their truffula tree trimming, until—smack!—the last tree is cut down.

 

Well. Since there’s no Bill behind the Onceler, one wonders: if he is truly acting in his own self interest and, in fact, “crazy with greed,” why did he kill this leafy goose that lays its daily golden egg? If I were on the Thneed’s corporate board, I would have fired CEO Onceler long before he made truffula trees extinct.

 

It turns out that what commons really need are property rights. And yet it appears both the Onceler and the cute critters have quasi-property rights. The Onceler has no-one interfering with his despoiling of the land, and the critters seem to have actual, if not legal, rights to their forested homes. Regardless, he clearly violates their rights, though a system of land titles and a court system would have helped those barbaloots, and their friends the humming fish and swomee swans.

 

More importantly, what the Oncler does isn’t merely greedy, it is foolhardy, and collapses his thneed business. He makes his money and heads out of town, leaving behind a spoiled and less valued environment and a bunch of sentient animals whose rights have been clearly violated.

 

Where’s Gloria Allred when you need her?

 

Of course, airs and oceans pose a challenge for creation of property rights, which create incentives to steward. The Greek word here is oikonomos, the root word of both ecology and economics. Property rights are pretty easy for anything small and stationary, like land or trees. A naturalist once told me that “the solution for pollution is dilution.” I get it. But the real solution for pollution is capitalism (or, if that is a trigger word, free markets).

 

After all, its production of wealth increases the demand for environmental goods. Its codifying property rights and rule of law creates responsible people who now have incentives to take account of their spillovers, lest they be sued by their neighbors. Its market prices and rule of law steward scarce resources.

 

We certainly can see the results of both good and poor stewardship today.

 

About five years ago, my family took a marvelous spring break trip to communist Cuba, where we roamed the streets of Havana, filled with quaint, decrepit 1950s-era taxis driven (often by doctors) down garbage-filled streets lined by crumbling seaside buildings. Cuba was a petri dish for failed socialist experiments, juxtaposed by successful (especially outside of Havana) Airbnb entrepreneurs renting out tidy homes in places like Viñales, which is surrounded by beautiful tobacco farms tilled by farmers trailing solitary oxen. There, we rented rooms from “Mojito Joe," a former bartender, who constructed a nifty machine that delivered his one dollar mojitos to a second floor rooftop for our family.

 

But my most visceral memory happened early in our trip, as I stepped out of the plane in Havana, where the smells brought back memories of my childhood.

 

It was an old, acrid smell I knew well—emissions from factories belching out black smoke, and exhaust from cars without pollution controls. Socialist Cuba is not only poor; it’s polluted, and its citizens are, at best, resigned to a pretty bleak existence. No wonder we saw curious, Orwellian “2 + 2 =5?” graffiti written on bricks in litter-filled parks. Cuba is a potential Hawaiian paradise; potential, unfortunately for its citizens, because it lacks property rights.

 

While it is good, along with Dr. Seuss, for us to care about the environment—it is surely better, though not nearly as warm and fuzzy, to set up systems that protect property rights and the rule of law.

 

That recipe is one which will, given time, produce real progress, and a future in which we can snuggle in our soft Snuggies, breathe in clean air, and enjoy a world that, while not Edenic, is certainly better than the one my 10-year-old self lived in.