Tolkien, a technocritical novelist?

You thought you were reading distant tales of magic rings and Mordor? In reality, Tolkien tells of the excess of a society that transforms the world into exploitable resources: the land, trees, peoples, and life itself. This imaginary world is our industrial society.
 
For Tolkien, evil lies in the logic of domination: Babylonian industry, endless extraction, permanent pollution, and technical power that rhymes with tyranny. Saruman razes forests to fuel his forges. He replaces trees with factories. He drills, he burns, he digs. A familiar tune. For Mordor is already here: mines, smoking power plants, recurring megafires, all-powerful monopolies.
 
The Earth never stops "speaking," but are we capable of listening?
 
Tolkien didn't imagine anything. He saw it. In his childhood through the industrialization of England. In the First World War and its killing machines. Like the anarchist William Morris, he witnessed the worst of what industrial modernity produced: mastery and desolation, the annihilation of trees, men, and beauty. Saruman is its striking embodiment: industry brings power, and power brings order.
 
Tolkien's books are not fables, but warnings. On the other hand, who are the hobbits? Simple folk, skilled with their hands, going barefoot. Self-sufficient, rooted, and ecological.
No hierarchy, no king, no empire, no infernal factories. The "Shire" is not
a postcard. It's the promise of another world, low-tech and festive. A world destroyed by concrete, agribusiness, and the religion of progress.
For Tolkien, true political power lies in sobriety, courage, and the renunciation of power. Far from the gigantism of our industrial societies. For a world without trees and water is not fantasy: it is the future that technoscience is preparing.

Tolkien's work confronts us with a decisive choice: Do we want to be on the side of life or endless extractivism? On the barricades, will you be Orcs or Ents? Triumphant industry or nature defending itself?
 
Gouge out Sauron's eye,
Join the resistance!