1923: THE VOYAGES OF DOCTOR DOLITTLE by Hugh Lofting
I was nine and a half years old, and, like all boys, I wanted to grow up— not knowing how well off I was with no cares and nothing to worry me.
"We are killing this planet as a life-support system with the poisons from all the thermodynamic whoopee we're making with atomic energy and fossil fuels, and everybody knows it, and practically nobody cares."
-Kurt Vonnegut, writing in A Man Without A Country (2005)
Near the beginning of this series, I wrote an essay on a novel by Katherine Applegate, and spent a fair amount of time discussing the legacy of one of Applegate's most famous works, the Animorphs science-fiction series. I even included a link if you wanted to download every single Animorphs e-book for free (here it is again) and, since publishing that essay a few months ago, I did download all of them and began re-reading them myself, in parallel to the books I'm reading for this newsletter, to see if Animorphs really was as good as I remembered.
Turns out it's better than I remembered. Great characters, great action, an engaging sci-fi mythology that was fully realized even in the early books, and some surprisingly heavy themes. There's a key turning point four books into the series, as the stakes of the Animorphs' resistance to the alien invasion start to become clear. Yes, the invading Yeerks are trying to covertly enslave humanity, and yes, they are already secretly controlling many of the citizens of the California town in which the novels are set, but the Yeerks' ultimate goal isn't just to conquer humanity. It's to strip-mine the Earth bare. As an alien ally who has seen this devastation before explains to these junior high students:
"The Yeerks would take our world and make it as barren as their own. As they will to your planet unless they are stopped…The usual Yeerk pattern. Once a planet is under their control, they alter it to suit their own desires. They will leave enough plant and animal species to keep the host bodies fed - humans in the case of Earth - and the rest they eliminate…They will make Earth as much like the Yeerk home world as possible. They will destroy most of the plants and all of the animal species except those they eat…the Yeerks are more than that. Yeerks are killers of worlds. Murderers of all life. Hated and feared throughout the galaxy. They are a plague that spreads from world to world, leaving nothing but desolation and slavery and misery in their wake."
The Animorphs' stomachs all start to sink as they realize what could happen if they lose the war. They don't just lose their freedom and the people close to them. They lose everything on Earth; the oceans, the forests, and, of course, the animals. The Yeerks have no interest in conserving any of that. And, as Applegate reinforces throughout her novels, primarily through the way she writes so reverently about the animals that her protagonists morph into, animals that are marvels of strength and finesse with deep emotions and instincts, these things are beautiful and worth fighting for. She wanted young people to know this. Another alien ally gazes at the savannahs and the jungles and pronounces it “lovely”, joining in the fight against the Yeerks to defend “in all the universe, no greater beauty. In a thousand, thousand worlds, no greater art than this.” And this praise of what the Animorphs are trying to defend gives the reader just that much clearer an idea of who the Yeerks really are as villains. This planet is a thing of beauty, and they want to destroy it for no other reason than that it's there and it doesn't belong to them. Such evil is truly unfathomable to us humans here in the non-fictional world. I'm pretty sure.
Exxon, the company that used to be Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and would eventually become ExxonMobil, was one of the most aggressive and innovative researchers into the potential impact of man-made, carbon-driven climate change, until, let’s say, 19891. As early as 1978, Exxon’s own in-house scientists were telling the board things like “there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through the carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” which immediately led the company’s leadership to commission some of the most robust scientific studies and models in the world at that point on how rising temperatures could affect things like the food supply, rising sea levels, and Arctic permafrost. They invented machines to put on their tankers to measure the carbon in the ocean. As one executive put it, “this may be the kind of opportunity that we are looking for to have Exxon technology, management and leadership resources put into the context of a project aimed at benefiting mankind.” Exxon’s concerns were obviously practical in the long-term - they weren’t going to keep making money if the world boiled - but there was this view, internally, that this was an issue that a company as big and as rich as Exxon could help the world with. The U.S. Department of Energy even called their research “a model for research contributions from the corporate sector” and “truly a national and international service,” because these scientists, who got their paychecks from Exxon, were publishing peer-reviewed papers explaining that, yeah, we were going to have to make fossil fuel consumption a thing of the past, because rising temperatures at our current levels of consumption were going to have catastrophic consequences in just a few short decades. Exxon was willing to tell the hard truths, even if it hurt their business in the short-term. The whole world was going to be saved because of this.
You might already know the second half of this story. Again, this was an issue that a company as big and as rich as Exxon could help the world with, and beginning in the early 1990s, executives at Exxon started to ask “what if, instead of that, we just decided to become more big and more rich?”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its first report in 1990, saying basically everything that Exxon had been saying for the past twenty years of climate modeling. But the people who ran Exxon had a responsibility to their shareholders to keep saying big numbers every quarter, and carbon regulations threatened to make them say slightly smaller numbers every quarter. So Exxon made a hard right turn on climate policy, and actively worked to undermine their own decades of expensive and innovative research, and spread the message of “okay but who actually knows if the ice caps are actually going to melt anyways?” Through aggressive lobbying with other corporations, a comprehensive public relations campaign, and throwing unimaginable sums money at politicians who were willing to loudly proclaim that nothing bad was ever going to happen because we burned every drop of oil in the earth, Exxon basically wired climate denial into one major political party and, at best, climate apathy into the other. They successfully got President George W. Bush to pull the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, the first international agreement - from 1992 - to try and reduce global carbon emissions. Lobbyists for Exxon went to work for the Bush administration, and former members of the Bush administration went to work for Exxon (although they weren’t the only oil company to work with that administration to undercut anything that would have cost oil companies money; one of Chevron’s tankers was literally named after Condoleezza Rice). In 2013, ExxonMobil’s shareholders proposed a resolution to call for emissions reductions, and the company’s CEO literally responded with “what good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?” That CEO was Rex Tillerson, who would go on to become the first Secretary of State under Donald Trump.
I think it’s important to summarize this in as clear terms as possible. There is a company called ExxonMobil, which still exists, that makes profit by destroying the Earth. The more quickly they can destroy the Earth, the more quickly they can bank that profit. They are aware that they are destroying the Earth, and have known that for half a century. Their strategy is to continue destroying the Earth and invest tremendous resources into trying to convince people that they are not destroying the Earth, and even if they are, that nothing can really be done about this.
As a result, the Earth is dying. We are now witnessing, as an Exxon scientist predicted in 1982, “significant changes in the earth’s climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the Earth’s biosphere.” The changes in the climate are currently driving famines and natural disasters and refugee crises and political upheaval. Through it all, ExxonMobil continues to alter the world to suit their own desires.
“Their own desires” is profit, profit for themselves and for ExxonMobil's shareholders. Shareholders are institutions like banks and hedge funds, and then more generally people who have money, spare money on top of the money that they need to live comfortably, money that they decided to invest so it could become more money. Those are the people that ExxonMobil decided needed to be taken care of. They decided that we didn't need the oceans or the rainforests or the ice caps as much as those people, who already have enough money to survive needed to get their extra money to turn into more money.
Nobody involved in doing this has faced any meaningful repercussions. Nobody has gone to jail. ExxonMobil has not faced any penalties that would have prevented them from doing this in the future, or even doing it right now, because they are still doing it, they are still destroying the Earth, and they are still making profits for themselves and their shareholders by doing it. ExxonMobil is still a company and all of this story is out in the open, and they are continuing to melt the icecaps and poison the air, knowing what it is doing to the Earth, knowing that it could lead to civilizational collapse in our lifetimes, and nobody with the power to stop them is doing anything to stop them. We are just all watching them do it, we are all just watching the Earth die, knowing who is killing it, knowing that they don't have to kill it, knowing that the Earth doesn't have to die this way, knowing that this can still be stopped. But we all just watch.
The people killing the Earth all take turns being the richest and most powerful people alive, and they see that not all of the Earth is explicitly Theirs yet, so they destroy everything that's left.
"I’ve been involved with the climate issue for thirty years, off and on. We wasted decades. Everyone knows that Exxon knew decades ago how serious this was. To know and not act on that knowledge, to know and to deceive the public, to know and to obstruct the science from getting out. That’s some kind of crime."
That above quote is from Raffi Cavoukian, as in Raffi, as in the children's singer, as in the guy who sang "Baby Beluga", in a 2020 interview with socialist magazine Jacobin. In addition to singing "Bananaphone" and other hits, Raffi spends a good chunk of his career railing against evils like racism and greed, and how they're preventing us from creating a world where children everywhere in the world can properly thrive. I'm including a lot of his summary of his "child honoring" philosophy here because I find it very powerful:
"Do I want a planet where clean water and clean air, which are entitlements because they are needs, is available to everyone? Well, yes, that’s what I want. I think things through like that very simply…I’d been thinking about what would a society look like that honored its young. I held that question in my mind for a couple of years and was doing some readings to support that line of inquiry. And suddenly I get this vision in which child honoring is just kind of in the air. And I’m just sort of like — “Oh, my!” It was a luminous moment, in which I knew that this was a philosophy that I was being given, one that connected person, culture, and planet with the child at its heart. Because how often are children considered seriously in strategic thinking about how to make this a better world? Not very often. Sometimes marginally. No, I’m talking about the child being at the heart of a compassion revolution, by which we all might thrive…My activism, if you want to call it that, has been exploring how we might conceive of a society that is a just and caring society. How might the universal needs of young children inform the priority needs of such a society? Because young children have universal and irreducible needs, and therefore, what we can say, are their entitlements. That’s not a political word when it relates to young children, because what they’re entitled to is their physiological needs, that they be healthy and grow, be creative and productive."
The world is beautiful and worth defending, worth making into a place that honors our children. Raffi wanted young people to know this. But nobody who runs the world gives a shit about whether children can "be healthy and grow, be creative and productive", about whether my daughters will grow up on a habitable planet. They don't care about anything besides turning one dollar into two by this time tomorrow, besides draining as much of the world as they can as quickly as they can and destroying anything left. And that was a throwaway joke in a children's novel that was written a century ago.
The Voyages Of Doctor Dolittle is the second-ever Newbery medalist, and the second of Lofting's novels about Doctor Dolittle, an enduring character who has been played in major studio films by three different big-name actors, to sharply diminishing artistic and commercial returns. Presumably, the reason that Doctor Dolittle keeps getting adapted is the same reason Sherlock Holmes keeps getting adapted: both characters are now so old that they are in the public domain2. This novel is even in the public domain; here it is on Project Gutenberg. While Lofting's first Dolittle book was a brief and breezy story about the kindly naturalist who learned to speak animal languages, Voyages is over 400 pages long and overstuffed with scene changes and new plot points, in the same way that James Cameron's stripped-down Terminator was followed by the maximalist T2: Judgment Day.
In this novel, ten-year-old Tommy Stubbins apprentices himself to Dolittle, starts learning the animal languages (which are apparently something that humans can learn with enough time and study, and it’s not really clear why Dolittle is one of very few people in human history that bothered to try) and accompanies Dolittle on his adventures, including a perilous trip to an island off the coast of South America. Unlike K.A. Applegate, Lofting isn’t especially skilled at writing from the perspectives of animals: basically, every animal in the book talks with the same pleasant and gently witty voice as Dolittle himself. Ultimately, the book, while pleasant and a good choice to fall asleep to, is just kind of long, and there’s not much that’s really going to stick with you, not even a murder trial where Dolittle has to translate the testimony of a dog who witnessed the crime.
There is one passage that absolutely will stay with you, though. It’s when Doctor Dolittle reveals to Stubbins that he’s met polar bears before because he had, in fact, discovered the North Pole back in 1809 (this was about a full century before real expeditions were even close to reaching the North Pole). But he kept his discovery a secret, as he explained:
"Yes, I discovered the North Pole in April, 1809. But shortly after I got there the polar bears came to me in a body and told me there was a great deal of coal there, buried beneath the snow. They knew, they said, that human beings would do anything and go anywhere to get coal. So would I please keep it a secret. Because once people began coming up there to start coal mines, their beautiful white country would be spoiled— and there was nowhere else in the world cold enough for polar bears to be comfortable. So of course I had to promise them I would."
100 years ago, Lofting wanted young people to know this. 100 years after this novel was published, somebody owes the polar bears an explanation.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1979 medalist, The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin.
Much has been written about this in many outlets; most of the links and quotes in this essay are taken from a series of pieces that ran in Inside Climate News in 2015.
This does not explain why a post-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. felt a need to pick up extra paychecks by playing both characters.