About the importance of taking care of nature in the words of Tolkien
Isengard depicts in the world of Tolkien what happens when people lose the love for nature. It becomes a mess, one loses the connection and for some more important: one will eventually lose the battle against nature. From my perspective, that’s actually a good thing, but for Saruman it was clearly not a good thing when the ghosts of the forests, the Ents, were finally at his doorstep when nature hit back against the one who destroyed their place.
Nature is one of the most important things we got. My blog is full of things I find in nature and in general I love all there is there. Nature has one big enemy: men. As humans, we want the world to be as cleaned up as possible. And that is nice, when it involves trash. The whole world is full of trash, plastic soup and other mess that people have dumped in the nature. Last summer I saw this.
At the side of the road, was the trash dump of some towns. Of course, the trash spread through all of the surrounding, including the nearby sea. Swimming there was hardly possible because of all the trash, but also: collecting trash was actually useless because it would end in nature no matter what. But in Europe we also ruined a lot by wanting to regulate things like nature. Or pour trash over it from the sky, killing vulnerable plants. Or worse, in cities, where garden change into stone desserts because ‘it takes less work.’
In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien lets Gandalf say:
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.’
A painting by Alan Lee, depicting Gandalf and a tree.
He wrote this in the 1940′s - speaking of course from the perspective of Gandalf, but the message is clear. We who are at the earth now, have to make sure the generations after us still have an earth to live on, and one that’s actually livable. But it’s interesting what he says. We cannot master all the tides of the world. This implicates also that we have to do the best as we can now. Some people claim that we should wait to protect the environment until there are new technologies. Tolkien clearly disagreed. Every generation has to do their best for the world and to keep it clean and beautiful.
A not so well known book of Tolkien, is ‘The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.’ In this book, you can follow Tolkien from his time at the front of the First World War to literal days before his death, when he goes to a house to rest a bit and dies there. The Letters show a lot of the person Tolkien was (It includes for example a letter to The Third Reich, saying that he is sad to say that he has no Jewish blood, because they are talented people - quite brave in the time that Hitler ruled) but also show his chaotic personality, his way of dealing with things he did not like (such as movies) that he could write into pieces, but also his deep love for nature. A great letter he wrote in 1962..
There was a great tree – a huge poplar with vast limbs – visible through my window even as I lay in bed. I loved it, and was anxious about it. It had been savagely mutilated some years before, but had gallantly grown new limbs – though of course not with the unblemished grace of its former natural self; and now a foolish neighbour was agitating to have it felled. Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. (...) This fool* said that it cut off the sun from her house and garden, and that she feared for her house if it should crash in a high wind. It stood due east of her front door, across a wide road, at a distance nearly thrice its total height. Thus only about the equinox would it even cast a shadow in her direction, and only in the very early morning one that reached across the road to the pavement outside her front gate. And any wind that could have uprooted it and hurled it on her house, would have demolished her and her house without any assistance from the tree. I believe it still stands where it did.
Tolkien did not mean he hated the neighnor: in a sidenote he wrote that she was a nice person, except from this. But Tolkien does find a true problem here in this letter.
‘Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate.’
It’s maybe the most powerful quote of Tolkien that I know, because it’s so true. We all know the examples of trees going down, sometimes being replaced by a small tree, sometimes not being replaced at all. Often because it creates a mess (or, actually, that what keeps forest growing forever and is a perfect circular system), because it creates shadow (very much needed in the world that keeps getting hotter and makes cities livable in summer) or because there needs to come a new road (making the city even hotter). This particular tree survived a lot of things, but the neighbor in question wanted it down because it could fall on her house. Tolkien writes it amazingly: any wind that could have unrooted it, would demolish her house as well. He clearly shows by that how ridicolous it is to remove trees: they give so much to us. And trees will die at some point and than give way to new trees.
Tolkien’s love for trees went deep. So deep that he wrote the Ents in the Lord of the Rings as guardians of nature, and presented them as some of the wisest creatures in the books. He wrote them as protectors of the forest. They had to defend the forests against other creatures, and in particular dwarves, who would try to cut down trees. The Ents were literally meant to defend the forests against deforesting.
But another clear sign we find in an little book of hardly 50 pages that Tolkien Wrote: Leaf by Niggle. Niggle is a painter, who is really busy painting a tree, but never finishes it. Until he dies and goes to another world, where he can live in his painting and enjoy the true majesty of his tree.
Source: https://ar.pinterest.com/pin/691935930228115781/
But it also becomes clear in the Scouring of the Shire, the last Chapter of The Lord of the Rings, in which the Hobbits return to the Shire and find that it has been changed. The agricultural area has changed into an industrial area, full of smoke and machines. Tolkien clearly uses that to show that this industrialisation is a bad thing - and in particular industrialisation for the cause of industrialisation. Sam get’s the chance to restore the Shire.
All in all, we can still learn a lot from Tolkien about trees. His love for trees and the forest, but also on how to deal with them: with respect. If the books of Tolkien should teach us anything, it’s respect for the woods, respect for the tree and the love for nature.
