Vote Seuss's Lorax for prime minister

Murray Grimwood takes inspiration from a creation of the celebrated Dr Seuss to warn of the rapidly encroaching dangers of environmental degradation.

Theodor Geisel was one of the most insightful authors of all time.

His short, sharp. entertaining books contain a single, simple, moral message apiece, and all remain evergreen: surely the ultimate test.

He is better known, of course, as Dr Seuss, and ever the most green of them all has to be his 1970 offering, The Lorax.

The story chronicles the activities of an entrepreneur named aptly - the "Onceler".

He arrives in a spot where there are "Truffula trees, mile after mile in the fresh morning breeze", and where bears, birds and fish (or at least, their Seuss equivalents), all live untrammelled, unimpacted, unstressed lives.

In other words, a pristine environment.

He proceeds to chop down a tree, make a consumer product from it, and flog it off.

From the tree stump appears a smallish, brownish, mossy type man, who berates the Onceler, but is told to shut up.

We have met the Lorax.

The story goes on to document the impacts of the Onceler's expanding operation, as the place is gradually rendered unliveable for wildlife. Every step of the way, the Lorax berates, defends and warns.

Every step of the way, he is berated, attacked, and ignored.

Finally, the last tree falls, the redundant workers leave, and nothing is left living under the "smoke smuggered stars". You get the picture.

The Onceler failed to address the true cost of the resource he was using, failed to understand that exponential growth is neither a straight-line graph nor sustainable, failed even to attempt compensation or mitigation. There are important lessons here.

The Onceler should only have been allowed to chop trees on a replacement-programme basis.

A bottom-line figure on his water use (and discharge quality) should have been established, one which guaranteed all existing flora and fauna no debilitating impact.

Air quality ditto.

The most important lesson though, is the appraisal-in-hindsight of social interactions: the Lorax could only fight a rearguard action, so ultimately the only question about his stand was "how long"?

The Onceler was only interested in "biggering" his money, and failed to put a dollar figure on the pristine nature of the environment, the real cost of the trees, or on the impact on the poor old bears, birds and fish.

Both lost, or more accurately, all lost.

Let us apply this to the RMA.

There is pressure to make money from what appear to be free resources - fish, trees, land, minerals, water.

Human nature being what it is, those who extract would prefer to avoid the costs of compensation, mitigation and rehabilitation.

Those should in turn be addressed by rules, caps, quotas, limits and outright vetoes, set as national and local standards.

There should be two parts to establishing those standards, one being that you must rely on science.

The other is more important; if the science is as yet unclear, you must err on the side of caution, and not indulge the action.

Put that another way - if we have to wait until a species is extinct to prove that it was going to be so, I suggest we have not progressed much past the illogic of witch-dunking.