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And Tolkien's idyllic Shire was a place of green fields and well-tilled earth: in other words a man-made landscape, even if organic. Bucolic rural England is (or was) the product of millenia of human habitation, clearing, ditching, draining, hedging, introducing species (the oh-so-English Peter Rabbit is a descendant of immigrants).
What Tolkien really objected to was industrialization, not anthropogenic change in general.
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it.
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