“I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects,’ ” he wrote, in “Should Trees Have Standing?,” an article that was cited, that same year, in a Supreme Court dissent, and helped galvanize the environmental movement. In 1972, Christopher D. Stone, a law professor at the University of Southern California, argued for granting trees a legal voice. “Then all of a sudden, / It grew 8 miles high.”

“I planted that seed, / It was so very dry,” Robby Price, a third grader, wrote. Mrs. Pate’s class at the Pepper Pike School, in Ohio, sent the author new endings. Dr. Seuss-Theodor Geisel-deemed it his best book. Like the long-ago banning of E. B. White’s “ Stuart Little,” by the New York Public Library, the rumpus about “The Lorax” is at first bewildering. “I speak for the trees,” the Lorax says, attempting to defend a soon to be blighted forest, its tufted Truffula trees chopped down and knit into hideous thneeds-“a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need”-until there is nothing left but one single seed.

The book is “ Silent Spring” for the under-ten set.

In 1989, the year that Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, for writing “ The Satanic Verses,” American parents in Laytonville, a small town in Northern California, demanded that their children’s elementary school take Dr. Seuss’s 1971 book, “ The Lorax,” off its list of required reading for second graders.

The lorax book