Conservation

Primary category

The Lorax

By Dr. Seuss

The Lorax is Dr. Seuss's 1971 rhymed picture book about what happens when a business grows faster than the living world can bear. A boy visits the reclusive Once-ler, who recalls how he found a valley of colorful Truffula Trees, began cutting them to make a product called the Thneed, and brushed aside a small, orange, mustached creature who spoke for the trees. As the factory expanded, the animals left, the air and water fouled, and the forest vanished. The story ends with a single seed and a direct challenge to the reader. Written at the start of the modern American environmental movement, it remains one of the best-known books for kids about ecology, consumption, and personal responsibility.

Related category

The Song of the Dodo

Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

By David Quammen

David Quammen uses islands—both literal and ecological—to explain how species originate, spread, persist, and disappear. Moving between evolutionary history, field reporting, scientific biography, and conservation debates, he traces island biogeography from the observations of nineteenth-century naturalists to the mathematical theories and reserve-design controversies of the twentieth century. Alfred Russel Wallace occupies a central place in this history, while later figures such as Robert MacArthur, Edward O. Wilson, Daniel Simberloff, and Jared Diamond show how island patterns became a framework for modern ecology. The book’s crucial shift is from oceanic islands to fragmented continents: forests, parks, and reserves surrounded by altered land can function as ecological islands. Their isolated populations become vulnerable to genetic decline, demographic accidents, invasive species, and habitat disruption. Expansive and cautionary, the book connects the intellectual history of evol…