Where the Roots are Long
The Lord of the Rings is a story about fellowship, hope, and a struggle against overwhelming odds. It is also a story about environmentalism. Elves struggle to preserve their forests unstained, Hobbits restore degraded ecosystems, and Men dream of a white tree in bloom. In “The Roots are Long”, author Derek Caelin compares the themes and events of this twentieth-century story with the Environmentalist movement of the twenty-first. Like the characters in Tolkien’s book, we all must come together and strive to protect our world from destruction.
The following is an excerpt from a chapter focusing on resisting destruction and restoring degraded lands.
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The Breaking of Isengard [resisting destruction]
To Isengard!’ the Ents cried in many voices.
‘To Isengard!’
To Isengard! Though Isengard be ringed and barred with doors of stone;
Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone,
We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door;
For bole and bough are burning now, the furnace roars – we go to war!
To land of gloom with tramp of doom, with roll of drum, we come, we come;
To Isengard with doom we come!
With doom we come, with doom we come!
With a roar, a helicopter sweeps over the Urupadi National Forest in Brazil. Armed men look down as the vehicle sweeps around a large, bare pit, a strange outlier in the forest. The trees have been cleared and the soil thrown violently aside by excavators. It is an illegal gold mining operation, one of hundreds despoiling thousands of hectares in the Amazon. It is February 2023. The armed men are federal agents participating in a massive enforcement operation ordered by newly-inaugurated President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. They belong to Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade, an organization named after a renowned murdered environmental and labor rights activist. Their mission today is to break up one of the many mining operations that are contributing to the destruction of the Amazon.
Departing the helicopter, they quickly move to capture equipment and the miners who have not yet fled. They seize fuel, mercury, dredging equipment, tents and excavators. In most cases, they burn or destroy equipment so they could not be used again. Fires from the burning diesel billow black smoke into the sky. Most of the wildcat miners, called garimpeiros, in this raid are released, but the managers are taken into custody. (Reuters)
By the end of 2023, thousands of miners will be expelled from the forest, 150 backhoes and 600 dredgers will be destroyed, and deforestation from mining will be cut by 30% compared to the previous year. (Mongabay)
This is an episode in a wilderness battle that has lasted for decades, and the garimpeiros are just one source of deforestation and environmental degradation. Recent chapters in the story have been the darkest. The degradation of the forest accelerated under the regime of Lula’s predecessor, President Jair Bolsonaro, who encouraged resource extraction from the Amazon. (e360) In keeping with his augural promise to “take the scythe to the neck of the agency (Reuters) he slashed the budget and created administrative barriers for the Funai, the federal agency charged with protecting Brazil’s indigenous population, inviting activities by miners and loggers. (Indigenous Peoples Major Group for Sustainable Development)
Under Brazilian law, mines in indigenous territory are illegal (Mongabay). This did not stop 20,000 miners from operating with Bolsonaro’s verbal encouragement in the Yanomami people’s territory, a reserve the size of Portugal. Their activities cleared land equivalent to 1,500 soccer fields. (Mining.com)
In addition to the destruction of trees, the miners contaminated the rivers and animals and people that rely on them. The mercury used to separate the gold from other materials while mining entered the water system, killing many animals and causing famine in the Yanomami population.
The effects upon the community have been devastating. Famine and poisoning have wracked the Yanomami people. Hundreds of children died of preventable diseases caused by malnutrition and dangerous mercury levels. (Mining.com) In one Yanomami village, 92 percent of the residents were found to have unsafe levels of mercury in their blood. “This is a very severe humanitarian crisis. The worst in my lifetime,” says Junior Hekurari Yanomami, head of the Yanomami and Ye’kuana Indigenous Health District Council. “Everyone is sick. There are severe food problems. The miners have contaminated the water.” (e360) For the indigenous people who rely on the healthy ecosystems of the Amazon to survive, the forces destroying the land have materially impacted their lives and well-being.
By a razor-thin margin, Bosonaro lost the most recent election and was replaced by former president, Lula da Silva, who vowed to eliminate deforestation in the Amazon by 2030. The work is challenging. Many of the evicted miners return to their operations, driven by the lucrative gold trade. The destruction of mining equipment and the arrest of the leaders continues apace.
What is the role of violence in the environmental movement? For most people who are not leaders of a state or a member of that state’s armed forces, violence is not an option. Indeed, most of the leaders encourage people to participate through non-violent, democratic means. As Erika Chenowith and Maria Stephan describe in their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works”, nonviolent movements are much better at mobilizing the requisite number of people to affect change. Through an extensive examination of revolutionary movements of the 20th century, Chenoweth and Stephan find that broadening the base of resistance is key to achieving success. “The moral, physical, informational and commitment barriers to participation are much lower for nonviolence resistance than for violent insurgency.” (Chenoweth and Stephens, pg 10). Simply put, if your movement is only made up of the young fighting men, you’re missing out on the force of everyone else in society lending a hand.
That narrative has been contested in recent years. In his 2020 book, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” Andreas Malm makes the case that more violent action in the name of environmental activism is warranted, given the crisis we face, the limited steps the powerful have taken to address the problem, and the rapidly diminishing time we have in which to address it. “At what point do we escalate?”, he writes. “When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands?” (Malm, pg 8) He concludes that violent actors must complement the work of nonviolent actors as they did in the civil rights movement, the suffrage movement, and the end of slavery. Malm argues that the destruction of destructive infrastructure is justified – and increasingly an imperative – for activists who lack the monopoly on the use of force belonging to a state.
The Ents have watched without action for some time as the orcs have felled trees and taken them away. The time for debate is now over. Isengard’s destruction of the forest is an existential threat. As the furnaces roar, the forest of Fangorn is slowly consumed, and the voices of their beloved trees are lost. The Ents, who have remained quiet and forgotten for centuries, are at last roused to action. They gather their remaining people and march on Isengard, the hobbits in tow. Merry asks Treebeard about their prospects.
‘Will you really break the doors of Isengard?’ asked Merry.
‘Ho, hm, well, we could, you know! You do not know, perhaps, how strong we are… We are made of the bones of the earth. We can split stone like the roots of trees, only quicker, far quicker, if our minds are roused! If we are not hewn down, or destroyed by fire or blast of sorcery, we could split Isengard into splinters and crack its walls into rubble.’
The Ents march through the night and witness Saruman’s armies departing to attack Rohan. Treebeard withholds his attack until their departure, knowing his opportunity has come to destroy the root of Saruman’s power in Isengard. After the armies have left, he strides up and pounds upon the doors. When he and the other Ents are attacked by the remaining guard, they fly into a rage and tear Isengard down.
Reclining afterwards in the ruins of Isengard, Pippin describes the scene to his friends. The Ents descended on the industrial infrastructure and disintegrated it, breaking it as trees break up stone, throwing fragments into holes like the natural process of erosion, drowning it with waters. He depicts the ents as a literal force of Nature, long patient in the face of destruction, finally responding with fury.
“An angry Ent is terrifying. Their fingers, and their toes, just freeze on to rock; and they tear it up like bread-crust. It was like watching the work of great tree-roots in a hundred years, all packed into a few moments.”
Saruman is nearly captured early in the battle. He is discovered by an Ent, Quickbeam, who races to capture him.
“…and suddenly Quickbeam gave a cry ‘‘The tree-killer, the tree-killer!’’ Quickbeam is a gentle creature, but he hates Saruman all the more fiercely for that: his people suffered cruelly from orc-axes. He leapt down the path from the inner gate, and he can move like a wind when he is roused. There was a pale figure hurrying away in and out of the shadows of the pillars, and it had nearly reached the stairs to the tower-door. But it was a near thing. ”
Once protected by his fortress and with his hands on the levers of technology, Saruman strikes back with a flammable liquid resembling petroleum.
“… it was not long before he set some of his precious machinery to work. By that time there were many Ents inside Isengard: some had followed Quickbeam, and others had burst in from the north and east; they were roaming about and doing a great deal of damage. Suddenly up came fires and foul fumes: the vents and shafts all over the plain began to spout and belch. Several of the Ents got scorched and blistered. One of them, Beechbone I think he was called, a very tall handsome Ent, got caught in a spray of some liquid fire and burned like a torch: a horrible sight.”
The scene evokes the real world climate crisis in the form of a battle. Here is Nature, slowly degraded by human intervention, finally changing and harming the industrial power. Instead of Ents attacking, it might have been an intensified hurricane, or a monsoon flooding a coastal city. Like we see today, the response of the industrial power when confronted is to double down, to redouble its attacks on the environment. Nature strikes back with increasing force.
“I thought that they had been really roused before; but I was wrong. I saw what it was like at last. It was staggering. They roared and boomed and trumpeted, until stones began to crack and fall at the mere noise of them. Merry and I lay on the ground and stuffed our cloaks into our ears. Round and round the rock of Orthanc the Ents went striding and storming like a howling gale, breaking pillars, hurling avalanches of boulders down the shafts, tossing up huge slabs of stone into the air like leaves.
Ultimately the battle is brought to a close when the Ents harness another force of nature, the nearby river Isen, which they divert from the mountains and crash down to drown the ring of Isengard.
“It must have been about midnight when the Ents broke the dams and poured all the gathered waters through a gap in the northern wall, down into Isengard.
“Isengard began to fill up with black creeping streams and pools. They glittered in the last light of the Moon, as they spread over the plain. Every now and then the waters found their way down into some shaft or spouthole. Great white steams hissed up. Smoke rose in billows. There were explosions and gusts of fire. One great coil of vapour went whirling up, twisting round and round Orthanc, until it looked like a tall peak of cloud, fiery underneath and moonlit above. And still more water poured in, until at last Isengard looked like a huge flat saucepan, all steaming and bubbling.”
Saruman is defeated. Instead of conquering, his fortress city is besieged and drowned, the pillar of Orthanc evoking a flooded city when the tide has come in. His home, the source of armies, weapons, and explosive materials, is converted back into forest and wilderness. Later, after Sauron’s defeat, the Company rides to Isengard, and sees how the Ents have accelerated the return to nature.
…they rode to Isengard, and saw how the Ents had busied themselves. All the stone-circle had been thrown down and removed, and the land within was made into a garden filled with orchards and trees, and a stream ran through it; but in the midst of all there was a lake of clear water, and out of it the Tower of Orthanc rose still, tall and impregnable, and its black rock was mirrored in the pool.
We know that if we fail to live within the natural limits of nature, humans will ultimately be destroyed. In the case of Brazil, it is the Yanomami who most directly bear the impact of the illegal Amazon mining operation, but unless force is brought against the deforestation happening there, we will all experience the loss of this critical ecosystem. The Amazon has lost so much tree cover that it may soon change from a rainforest to a savannah (CNN). Zooming out, we see the warning signs of our own destruction as clearly as the Ents. We are witness to the flooding of our cities, the powerful hurricanes that destroy infrastructure and reduce homes to rubble. We are witnessing the collapse of species upon whom we rely to pollinate our crops.
Before we are destroyed, we must take action. Unlike the Ents, the environmental movement has more tools at our disposal beyond force. Our tools are political, social, and economic. We must wield all of them to dismantle the destructive forces of our times, and build a greener world.
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