Derek Caelin 🌱
OK! I'm at ~13,000 words and I've got loads more to say about environmentalist themes in the #LordOfTheRings. I really think this could be a book!
Today I looked at building with living nature. Real world indigenous peoples such as the Khasis in India use living trees as bridges. The elves of Lothlorien live in a city in the branches in the trees. Nonfiction, fiction; these are both visions of a world in which we live more in harmony with the world.
Derek Caelin 🌱
Thinking about #conservation of the Elves in the #LordOfTheRings The elves want to preserve things as they were in the elder days. They don't really have a vision for future - some hope to use the power of the three to heal the world, but the wisest, like Galadriel, assume that their time is coming to an end even if Frodo succeeds in his quest.
In the real world, the environmental movement brings together people with many different motivations, and different degrees of hope for the future.
Derek Caelin 🌱
I went looking for a recent long-odds climate struggle and found the #StopLine3Pipeline protests.
I had forgotten Tim Walz was governor of Minnesota during the protests.
Derek Caelin 🌱
Have you heard of the Te Urewaera Act of 2014? It's a pretty cool law from the Māori that recognized a New Zealand forest as its own legal entity.
"The key principles of the new Act are:
- Te Urewera ceases to be a national park and is vested in itself as its own legal entity; and
- Te Urewera will own itself in perpetuity with the Board to speak as its voice to provide governance and management in accordance with the principles of the Act"
https://www.environmentguide.org.nz/regional/te-urewera-act/
Derek Caelin 🌱
I want to find a real-world equivalent to the Ents breaking Isengard.
I am tempted to draw parralels to incidents of eco-sabotage, but the comparison is imperfect. The ents are a nation, for one thing. The fight in Isengard is more of a seige of an army than an incident of monkey-wrenching.
Derek Caelin 🌱
@dynamic It's a good example, but the anology breaks down because the ents were violent and destroying infrastructure. It feels odd to make a 1:1 comparison for nonviolent protestors, or even for people who commit sabotage.
dynamic_hubzilla
Derek Caelin 🌱
@dynamic In the case of some sabotage events I've found, the damage is temporary. The ents completed destroyed Isengard and returned it to forest.
dynamic_hubzilla
Derek Caelin 🌱
@dynamic Thanks for sharing! I'll take a look.
dynamic_hubzilla
Derek Caelin 🌱
@dynamic
the Niger Delta Avengers are an interesting case. They attacked oil infrastructure. Interestingly, they wanted to have a greater portion of the wealth from oil platforms go to host communities. It was an economic issue (although obviously economics are relevant when you have oil facilities poisoning the local environment).
Derek Caelin 🌱
Here's an interesting example of state violence against mining infrastructure.
How Brazil is taking the fight to destructive illegal mining
https://www.ft.com/content/5eb64108-3181-4352-804e-aca76e1be505
Derek Caelin 🌱
@dynamic Reuters link: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-cracks-down-wildcat-miners-amazon-shift-their-operations-2023-12-28/
dynamic_hubzilla
Derek Caelin 🌱
I spent much of my early career thinking about peacebuilding. But in this book, I can only reference in a few paragraphs what I spent years trying to learn about nonviolent civil resistance.
It makes sense. It's a book about Tolkien and trees, not arguments and efficacy peaceful nonviolence.
It just feels like I'm exercising a ghost limb.
Derek Caelin 🌱
@dynamic I think so. This analogy isn't perfect either, but I'm beginning to realize that I can let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
dynamic_hubzilla
Derek Caelin 🌱
What a line from Tolkien. I actually teared up a little in reading it. I think about the things we lose daily.
"Well, cheers and all that to you dearest son. We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water."
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/j-r-r-tolkien-from-a-letter-to-christopher-tolkien
Derek Caelin 🌱
I have a pretty good excerpt of my book on Tolkien themes and the modern environmentalist movement. I'm mixing together the Ents destroying Isengard with the Brazillian government breaking up illegal mining infrastructure in the Amazon. I'm going to publish it soon - hope you folks are interested.
Derek Caelin 🌱
There's a generation-long restoration project in Qianyanzhou. This auto-translated article probably has some errors, but the poetry of the language comes through.
"A piece of copper on a sunny day, a bag of pus on a rainy day. Looking from a distance, it's all yellow, looking closely, it's all water and soil."
https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1684292712024495264&wfr=spider&for=pc
Derek Caelin 🌱
"A proverb that was circulated in Qianyanzhou at that time revealed the harsh environment at that time. Soil erosion in the hilly areas of Qianyanzhou was becoming increasingly serious, and the fertile red soil was washed away, resulting in a decline in crop yields."
Derek Caelin 🌱
20,000 words. ✊
Derek Caelin 🌱
I've finished part 2 of my book on environmental themes in the Lord of the Rings. Next up... the role of hope and despair.
Derek Caelin 🌱
In addition to being gorgeous, funny, and devastatingly intelligent, my beautiful partner @mara is a talented editor. She's helping me polish my pitch sample, which I'll be sending to publishers (and maybe sharing with you lovely people.)
Feels like this is happening.
Derek Caelin 🌱
Read an excerpt from my upcoming book, "Where The Roots Are Long": https://derek.caelin.cloud/where-the-roots-are-long/
What do #Ents have to do with illegal miners in the Amazon rainforest? What do water protectors share with Hobbits traversing the wastes of Mordor? "Where the Roots are long" explores environmental themes in the Lord of the Rings and how they resonate in the modern environmentalist movement.
Derek Caelin 🌱
☝️ FYI above message: @dynamic @Br3nda @Virginicus @Zumbador @RhinosWorryMe
Tagging you because you engaged with me on this topic before.
Derek Caelin 🌱
@benfulton Something that surprised me to learn is that Tolkien didn't consider the Shire to be an ideal that we should strive for.
"...Hobbits are not a Utopian vision," he wrote, "or recommended as an ideal in their own or any age. They, as all peoples and their situations, are an historical accident - as the Elves point out to Frodo - and an impermanent one in the long view."
Ben Fulton
@derek Tolkien idealizes a pastoral existence which today only our elites can really aspire to. Will you be considering how middle-earth would fare with five billion hobbits? 🙂
Derek Caelin 🌱
‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
Derek Caelin 🌱
“He turned to the Company. ‘We must do without hope,’ he said. ‘At least we may yet be avenged. Let us gird ourselves and weep no more! Come! We have a long road, and much to do.”
Derek Caelin 🌱
The third section of my book is going to talk about the role of hope in climate action - how do people keep moving when...
/waves hand at the situation.
The big takeaway, for me, is that hope is not a prerequisite for action in LoTR. It is a reward.
Sam gives up hope on the slopes of Orodruin, but resolves to carry on regardless. Faramir fights even though "it is long since we had any hope". Gandalf gambles everything on a what is admittedly "a fool's hope".
They act, even so.
Derek Caelin 🌱
The big difference between Denethor and the Company is actually not whether they have hope. Most of the company agree that it is unlikely that they will succeed.
Denethor is different because he loses hope, and decides to give up. Not only does he decide to kill himself - he is willing to bring down others who depend on him. He tries to kill Faramir. He gives up on the defense of Minas Tirith, and the people who rely on him.
Giving up hurts other people.
Derek Caelin 🌱
Rebecca Solnit has some great things to say here:
"So, what do we do when the world is ending? The same things that so many of the giants on whose shoulders we stand did when their worlds were ending. We choose to face our despair—to walk toward it and through it—choose to take action, choose to build movements. We do it because we don't know how it ends, because there are possibilities out there that we simply can't see from here."
Derek Caelin 🌱
"We do it because every person organized and campaign won and fraction of a degree of global warming prevented will save lives. Because movements that believe are far more powerful than movements that don't. And, yes, we fight because fighting is one of the ways we get to nurture our courage and generosity and hope and all those other fundamentally human traits that we treasure most—because our lives will be infinitely richer in that struggle than outside of it."
Derek Caelin 🌱
Saying it again in video form: hope and action in #TheLordOfTheRings. If you're not feeling very hopeful right now, that's understandable. We see a lot of the characters in LoTR acting without hope.
Derek Caelin 🌱
“Come, come!’ said Gandalf. ‘We are all friends here. Or should be; for the laughter of Mordor will be our only reward, if we quarrel.”
Derek Caelin 🌱
“We may stand, if only on one leg, or at least be left still upon our knees.’
‘Rightly said!’ cried Beregond, rising and striding to and fro. ‘Nay, though all things must come utterly to an end in time, Gondor shall not perish yet.”
Derek Caelin 🌱
"I have not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a serving-man till the lightning falls."
Derek Caelin 🌱
Pleased with my outline themes of Hope and Despair in #TheLordOfTheRings. I'll weave together events from the story with modern climate stories.
- Hope and Despair
- The Line 3 Protests
- Impending Doom of Middle Earth
- Despair as a weapon
- The Nazgul
- The Palantir
- The Words of Wormtongue
- Responsese to Despair
- Embrace Despair (Denethor)
- Hope on, Then
- The plan to destroy the ring
- Theoden riding to glory
- Sam in the black lands
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