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Originally Posted by Hot, crispy nice hobbit
It is hardly rampant technology that encroached upon the environment. It is simple economics. .
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How one can divorce technology from industrialism is beyond me, for they have walked together in lock-step -- these twin sons of different mothers of invention --from Blake's Satanic Mills to the current denuding of the Amazon. Tolkien's aversion to technology is directly linked to the industrial pollution that billows in its wake (in his letters he often complains of fumes and reek).
In letter #328, Tolkien describes
"the horror of the American scene...polluted and impoverished to a degree only paralleled by the lunatic destruction of the physical lands which Americans inhabit." Don't worry that Tolkien had only disparaging words for the U.S., he also described Britain as
"this polluted country of which the growing proportion of inhabitants are maniacs."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hot, crispy nice hobbit
It is doubtful, however, that Tolkien had such things in mind when he described the devastations in "the Scouring of the Shire".
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Perhaps not, but I think his description of the ugly brick mill belching forth smoke, the defoliation of Hobbiton and the mean shacks erected in place of traditional Hobbit holes bears a striking resemblance to any shift from agrarian, pastoral lifestyle to a more industrial, 'technologically advanced' society.