Hey Beanpole...Listen Up!

The other day I sent my former boss and friend a link to a new app that alerts residents of Beijing to changes in air quality.  He wrote back "we are all gonna die" to which I replied "that's a guarantee" and then rambled on a bit about the trade-offs involved in living here where I can smell everything and living there where I can't smell anything, after all where ever it is you make your home their are positives and negatives.

Today the kids and I piled into Papa's truck and head over to the local cinema where it seemed every other family also had piled into the family wagon and driven to the same place to watch a movie about the environment...in case you missed it, The Lorax.

The Lorax of course speaks for the trees and wants to prevent the cutting down of his beloved Truffula's and he does his best to save them all but cannot compete with the axe nor the greed.  The sky darkens with smog and the river fill with yuck and all the animals high tail it out of town but the Once-ler remains to regret all his deeds. 

Unless I draw the parallel between Thneedville and Beijing or any other over polluted city in the world; be it Dhaka or Sao Paulo or anywhere else the smog chokes back the blue and takes over the airways (the ones you breathe with) then you may miss that the story is not story but true.  A land built on consumption and greed where everything is disregarded to chase the almighty dollar.

The Lorax provides a happy ending about the power of one, social movements for good and the value of what we have and quite possibly to question everything.