Forest decline, oil leakages, holes in the ozone layer. Pollution on land and under water, topics like these have dominated the news since the end of the twentieth century. People are becoming more and more aware of the side effects of their desperately wanted progress.
From a consider-the-environment reminder at the bottom of every email to a compulsory waste separation: Educational advertising and environmental thinking has started to influence almost all parts of everyday life. Therefore it is not surprising that ecocriticism as a literary discipline has been enjoying great popularity since the late 1980s, starting in the US the criticism smoothed its way to Europe not much later (Curry 238).
Even if ecocriticism is claimed to be a relatively young literary approach, artists like the British poet William Wordsworth or the American writer Henry David Thoreau had filled their works with descriptions of the beauty of nature and its need for protection far before those topics were shown on the news (ibid. 239). Another of those ahead-of-his-time artists was also the British writer J.R.R. Tolkien. His major works The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings-Trilogy (1954-55) are especially famous for their sometimes several pages long descriptions of the sublime nature of Middle-earth. Tolkien was not the first writer to create a fantasy world, but in contrast to novels like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) or Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Tolkien’s world is far more complex and connected. He gave his fantasy-world its own past, languages and human as well as non-human cultures. But Tolkien especially avoided a pure symbolical reading of his work by connecting it to reality, particularly using his description of nature...
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Oxford English Dictionary (OED): “Green Man.” 24. December 2013
Shippey, Tom: The Road to Middle-earth. How J.R.R. Tolkien created a new Mythology.
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Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Hobbit or There and Back Again. Repr. London: HarperCollins, 2006.
Throughout your life, you will be taken out of your comfort zone with many challenges and uncertainties. This is shown in The Hobbit, The Lightning Thief, and through my grandfather’s immigration story from Germany. Bilbo was taken on an adventure that took him beyond his normal comfort zone. He loved the familiarity of his hobbit-hole until Gandalf and the dwarves arrived at his door. The Hobbit contained many relatable moments about life, which can be explored through the novel, other people’s lives, and other works of fiction.
Ehrlich, P. R., & Ehrlich, A. H. (1996). Betrayal of science and reason: How anti-environmental rhetoric threatens our future. Washington, D.C: Island Press.
Perceptions of the natural world have fluctuated throughout humanity’s short time on this earth, going in and out of style as societies and technologies have grown and died. As is the the very nature of literature itself, literature and its authors have managed to capture these shifting views, expressed and illustrated by the art of written word. Naturally, the literature chosen for us to read based on this fluid theme of nature encompasses an array of perspectives. One of these views is that nature is sublime and above all else, a reflection of all that which is perfection. Another is that nature is cold, uncaring, and indifferent to the vanities of humanity.
Climate change. The beginning of our worlds extinction. Started by none other than us as human beings. We have started the destruction of Kiribati and other small islands that are vulnerable to rising tides and we as developing and developed countries need to realize the reality of the situation. We need to take action against the force of nature that we have altered.
While reading any of J. R. R. Tolkien’s major works, be it The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, or The Lord of the Rings, one cannot help but notice the amount of attention that is given to nature. There are numerous details given to describe each location, each character, even each tree. Tolkien did not claim to be an environmentalist, but by spending so much time in his books explaining the importance of nature, it is hard to say that he did not care about it. About the fantasy world that Tolkien recreated, Sherry Turkle argues, “The question is whether that prepares us to live in a world that's complex, where we need to be able to work in a structure where there are no rules and where we have to be really attentive to other people's cultures and other people's ways of seeing things” (qtd. in Grossman 4). Lev Grossman counters this point when he says, “If The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy, it's ultimately a fantasy about growing up and putting childish things aside” (5). Grossman believes that LOTR is a fantasy, but unlike Turkle, he thinks that the reader benefits with a lesson about growing up and sacrifice.
The Hobbit, written by John R. R. Tolkien, is a fantasy novel published on September 21, 1937. It was written as a prelude to the famous series, The Lord of the Rings, written seventeen years later. The Hobbit introduces the reader to an incredibly immersive fantasy world, that enriches the reader into its epic storyline. The story takes place in a land called Middle-earth, a land filled with enchanting surprises and magical wonders. It was the perfect playground for Tolkien to develop his main character Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo Baggins was a small hobbit, who unaware in the beginning would become a large role in the plot. It is through this character that Tolkien implemented the theme of heroism into the story. Bilbo’s unexpected adventure with the dwarves and the wizard gave him the opportunity to develop into the ultimate hero of Tolkien’s tale. Bilbo’s epic journey to become the hero of the story begins when Gandalf, the wizard, tells Bilbo of an expedition that would soon change his life forever.
Nature plays an important and powerful role in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Often, it is used to Shakespearean effects, in order to foreshadow doom. At other times, descriptions of the “green earth,” in particular, are used to render Middle-Earth into an almost maternal, life-giving persona. One could argue that these descriptions of “green earth” take on a life of their own, treating place as character. After all, places in Lord of the Rings often possess multi-dimensional qualities and are capable of change. In Aragon’s words, the “green earth” is “a mighty matter of legend” (The Two Towers 424). “Mighty” is not always the most appropriate word for places or objects, except when they hold power—perhaps even autonomously so. For example,
Habermann and Kuhn discuss J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings is one of the creation texts of fantasy writings and the focus of a number of writings about the history, geography, and mythology of ‘Middle-earth’, which has long become an unusual phenomenon. The authors try to argue that Tolkien texts offer a fictional study of sustainability where they try to combine an application of geographic information system technique with documented analysis and understanding text to show that there is a systematic fluctuating distance between our real world and Tolkien’s secondary world as a respect to climate.
Tolkien describes, "It had a perfectly round door . . . the door opened on to a tube-shaped hall
Gersdorf, Catrin and Mayer, Sylvia. Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Rodopi, 2006. Print
Nature is often a focal point for many author’s works, whether it is expressed through lyrics, short stories, or poetry. Authors are given a cornucopia of pictures and descriptions of nature’s splendor that they can reproduce through words. It is because of this that more often than not a reader is faced with multiple approaches and descriptions to the way nature is portrayed. Some authors tend to look at nature from a deeper and personal observation as in William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, while other authors tend to focus on a more religious beauty within nature as show in Gerard Manley Hopkins “Pied Beauty”, suggesting to the reader that while to each their own there is always a beauty to be found in nature and nature’s beauty can be uplifting for the human spirit both on a visual and spiritual level.
Efforts to improve the standard of living for humans--through the control of nature and the development of new products--have also resulted in the pollution, or contamination, of the environment. Much of the world's air, water, and land is now partially poisoned by chemical wastes. Some places have become uninhabitable. This pollution exposes people all around the globe to new risks from disease. Many species of plants and animals have become endangered or are now extinct. As a result of these developments, governments have passed laws to limit or reverse the threat of environmental pollution.
include the earth warming 2 to 3 degrees in the next century, arctic ice disappearing
The protection of the environment however has just recently become the major issue that it is in today’s society. People worldwide have slowly begun to realize and become aware of the blatant destruction and deterioration of the environment and ozone. As well as the consequences and side affects, that we, as a society have created. The majority of people are just becoming aware of the frightening reality of the situation. As society becomes more informed on the issue of the environment, they too become more impatient, and feel that in the snap of fingers, the damage can be reversed and future damage can be stopped instantaneously.
Environmental philosophy tries to make sense of the unexamined values, assumptions and ideologies behind humanities treatment of the environment and, in doing so, aims at helping to elicit an effective human response to related issues (Curry, 2011). Environmental philosophy, has gone beyond being merely an academic pursuit, now requiring the world’s population take moral responsibility for the damages caused by their industrial advances on natural systems.