And it may well be that that time is drawing near at last.  For if Sauron of old destroyed the gardens, the Enemy today seems likely to wither all the woods. ~ Treebeard, Chapter 4, The Twin Towers

January 2012, Maidstone, England By Gail Zawacki
13 January 2013 I don’t think of myself as lacking imagination, but, being a mostly doggedly practical person, I never was a fan (loathed him! … thought he was a weird boring wuss!) of elaborately convoluted fantasies such as Tolkien’s. I tried, and failed, to read him when I was a teenager. But now I think maybe he was on to something (I’ve been reading the link above to Chapter 4, an oddly enchanting Chinese translation). When it comes to the advent of agriculture, the mortal threat from machines, and the massacre of trees, it would appear Tolkien is a deep ecologist after all. Since of course, Wit’s End is all about trees dying from pollution, it seems appropriate to acknowledge that he had far more to impart than just cute idiosyncratic nomenclature.  Here is the last known photo of Tolkien in front of his favorite tree, a pinus nigra, the seed for which was brought from Greece in 1790 and planted in the Oxford Botanical Garden.

He called it Laocoön, and it is apparent why when comparing the muscular branches with the sculpture.

Source

The original depiction of the punishment of Laocoön for warning the Trojans of Greeks bearing gifts stands in Rome, but there is a copy at the museum at Oxford.

Alas the forest isn’t the only ecosystem that is collapsing thanks to the atrocious hemorrhaging of industrial pollution.  The coral reefs are expiring at a harrowing pace too, and they are at least as essential to the rest of life on earth as trees.  Our perceptions of both the oceans and the forests have altered in conjunction with the imperceptible degradation of their condition.  We are becoming so inured to ugly, dead trees and stumps that many talented photographers, like the anonymous contributor to flickr who took the pictures in this post, lovingly photograph them as though they are examples of natural beauty … instead of the abominable decay and death they truly represent.

November 2011, Maidstone, England The pictures of leaves that follow are shared from Windspiritkeeper’s blog.  It’s amazing to me how closely the damaged leaves he photographs in the West – Santa Barbara and Arizona – resemble the injured foliage on the East Coast, different species in a very different environment … but impacted by the same atmospheric gases. [more]

The withering of all woods is drawing near