Years after the orange, mustachioed guardian first appeared on the big screen, his world of Truffula Trees, artificial air and corporate greed keeps resurfacing through memes, TikTok edits and, most notably, the infectious refrain of “Let It Grow.”
The song, which closes the 2012 animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ environmental classic, has already lived several lives online. After becoming a meme through remixes, it returned to TikTok in 2023 through the “If it has a screen, the Lorax can be seen” trend, where users played the film on increasingly absurd devices. Now, the song is finding another life through edits of people planting trees and inspiring environmental action.
In the film, “Let It Grow” arrives after Thneedville has been stripped of nature. The Once-ler’s pursuit of profit has turned a thriving forest into a wasteland, leaving Ted with one last Truffula Tree seed and the chance to start again.
It is a simple message. More than a decade later, it remains difficult to dismiss.
More than just trees
When “The Lorax” arrived in 2012, critics were divided. Rotten Tomatoes currently gives the film a 53 percent critics score, while Metacritic gives it 46 out of 100. Critics generally praised its colorful animation and environmental message but argued that the Hollywood treatment made the original story too noisy and commercial.
The irony was hard to miss. A film warning against consumerism was itself promoted through commercial partnerships, including an SUV campaign.
But the environmental warning has aged differently. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 420 million hectares of forest were lost to deforestation between 1990 and 2020, with around 10 million hectares still being lost annually between 2015 and 2020.
And in Cebu, the consequences of environmental pressure are hardly abstract.
Recent SunStar Cebu reports on flooding have pointed to clogged and narrowed waterways, rapid urbanization, concrete expansion and degraded upland areas as factors worsening the city’s ability to absorb and move rainwater. In one July downpour, Cebu City received rainfall equivalent to roughly nine Olympic-sized swimming pools in two hours, overwhelming drainage systems and flooding communities.
The city has since looked at measures including floodwater reservoirs and stronger protection for upland watersheds. But it has also reported that despite billions spent on flood-control projects, several major interventions identified years ago remain unfinished or unimplemented.
That is where “The Lorax” was about understanding that natural systems have limits.
Let it grow
The book was published in 1971. The film arrived in 2012. More than a decade later, “Let It Grow” is back on our screens, this time attached to real people planting, restoring and making change.
The animated film asks us to reconsider what growth costs. Today, that question extends beyond forests and into the rapid expansion of industries built around our increasingly digital lives.
Data centers, which power everything from cloud storage to artificial intelligence, are expanding worldwide. But their growth has also raised concerns over their enormous demands for electricity and water, as well as the pressure they can place on local resources and infrastructure.
The question is not whether we should grow, but how we grow and what that growth leaves behind. Before asking what we can build next, we need to ask: What do we still have left to grow? S