LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 09 - Flotsam and Jetsam

[Encaitare]

Interesting stuff there, davem.

The whole situation is like seeing an old chain-link fence or car sitting there all rusty and overgrown with weeds. There are twisted vines engulfing the metal, and maybe a few flowers growing there, and the grass has grown up so high that you can't see most of the tires anymore. (This is a much less extreme and less violent comparision, though!)

Nature has a slow, steady way of going about things, but as long as it is still present, it will fight back. We see dandelions growing through cracks in the sidewalk, a bit of chaos thrown in to mess with the order. Sometimes tree roots grow under that same sidewalk and displace it.

Our success as a species is based on dominating our environment & wild, uncontrolled nature is a threat to our survival - oh it looks beautiful & is awe-inspiring to visit, but the wilderness is not our home any longer.

The glorification of wild, violent, uncontrolled nature was common in the Romantic period, just as heavy machinery was beginning to make a presence. In order to "rebel" against this industrialization, certain artists and writers used their talents to make nature out to be an untamable force, as we here see it to be. Whether they thought that this state of unpredictability was actually something that humans ought to live among is not made certain as far as I can recall. Then again, half of them were quite mad, although they made some wonderful work.

Fangorn is not a hospitable place for most, and neither is much of nature for the average person. I, for one, am quite sure that I could not get along very well on my own in the woods. The Ents just want to be left alone, it seems, something that sounds easy enough in theory. But, to reflect it to our own society, as davem said, we've oppressed nature for most of our history.

Does that mean there's something of Saruman in us, in our own worship of the Machine & our contempt for the natural world?

To a small extent, I would say yes. Fortunately, I think most of us have some degree of respect for nature. Yet we are a society which loves technology and jumps all over the chance to keep up with the Joneses and get that big-screen TV too. We depend so much on order with all our technology that anything which beyond our control tends to irk us. It's like SpM's sig: "Everyone always complains about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it." We feel like we, as the dominant race, ought to have full control over our environment. What we forget is that there are older things than us inhabiting our world, and greater forces at work, and this was Saruman's mistake too.