IT IS ONE of the most graphic passages in the whole of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The description of the toxic desert on the outskirts of Mordor. Inspired by the polluted landscapes surrounding Britain’s great industrial cities in his youth, Tolkien employs the waste-dumps of Mordor as a metaphor for the diseased and poisoned nature of the Dark Lord’s character. Just as the ruined land is beyond all rehabilitation, so, too, is Sauron.
Here is Tolkien’s description of that terrible place:
“They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing – unless the Great Sea should enter it and wash it with oblivion. ‘I feel sick,’ said Sam. Frodo did not speak.
For a while they stood there, like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know they can only come to morning through shadows. The light broadened and hardened. The gasping pits and poisonous mounds grew hideously clear. The sun was up, walking among clouds and long flags of smoke, but even the sunlight was defiled. The hobbits had no welcome for that light; unfriendly it seemed, revealing them in their helplessness – little squeaking ghosts that wandered among the ash-heaps of the Dark Lord.”
Throughout the fantasy, Tolkien takes great care to reassure his readers that the “free peoples” of Middle Earth are at great pains to stand aloof from Mordor and all its works. If, however, someone were to attempt to describe the political economy of Middle Earth (at the end of the Third Age) it would have to begin with the declining empire of Gondor and its vassal states, Rohan and The Shire. A largely self-sufficient economic entity, such trade as Gondor still engaged in was principally with the Dwarf kingdom located in the Iron Hills, many hundreds of miles to the north. Tolkien hints that Gondor might also have engaged in limited commerce with the kingdoms of the “swertings” – the black-skinned peoples of the south – but only during the period when the Dark Lord was believed to be dead.
There can be no doubt, however, that Mordor constituted the economic powerhouse of Middle Earth. Like the ante-bellum South, Mordor boasted vast plantations in which thousands of slaves produced the food and other materials required for its sustenance. Any surplus was traded with the southern kingdoms which had, since Sauron’s return, fallen steadily under Mordor’s sway. Moreover, the Dark Lord’s military build-up, in preparation for his attack upon Gondor, would have required the production of weapons on an industrial scale. Mordor’s hunger for iron and other minerals must have been insatiable.
Deconstructing Tolkien’s great tale in this cold-eyed economic fashion is, of course, anathema to LOTRaficionados. The War of the Ring is supposed to be a battle between good and evil, not an economic struggle between a rapidly industrialising, slave-owning tyranny on the one hand, and an economically weak, largely agricultural, kingdom without a king, on the other. Looked at in this fashion, it becomes very clear, very quickly, that without the magical assistance rendered by Gandalf and the Elves, Gondor would have been a gonner.
Cold-eyed and economically determined is, however, very definitely the nature of the world in which we are required to live. A world sadly lacking in magical beings dedicated to the protection of fading empires and bucolic farming communities like the Shire. On Planet Earth, the rising power of a tyrannical industrial powerhouse is unlikely to be checked by anything remotely resembling wizards, elves or hobbits.
Where Tolkien’s fantasy and twenty-first century reality do intersect, however, is in the environmental degradation attendant upon our high-tech civilisation. The hideous pollution which Tolkien encountered in his youth has, like the factories and mines that created it, largely disappeared from England’s green and pleasant land. But this does not mean that Mordor-like desolation is also a thing of the past. Mordor has merely shifted its location: from the north of England and the midlands, to the seemingly limitless horizons of Inner Mongolia and the horrors of Baotou.
Baotou is the global centre of rare earth production: the place from which the minerals that make our post-modern, digitally-driven world possible. Only in China is such an industrial complex possible, because the inescapable environmental degradation attendant upon the extraction of Rare Earths would never be tolerated in the democratic nations of the West.
Read how a team of BBC journalists and photographers described their arrival at the man-made “lake” on the outskirts of Baotou. If Mordor is anywhere in this world, then surely, it is here:
“We reached the shore, and looked across the lake. I’d seen some photos before I left for Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight. It’s a truly alien environment, dystopian and horrifying. The thought that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did the realisation that this was the by-product not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot video on my cerium polished iPhone.”
Tolkien’s great fantasy both reveals and conceals the true nature of the world human-beings inhabit. The Ring of Power – symbol of the ruthless instrumentalism through which humankind has subdued the planet – is wonderfully conceived, but its ability to instruct the reader is fatally weakened by Tolkien’s determination to make Good triumph over Evil.
The bitter truth, of course, is that all of us wear the Ring of Power, all the time. And all of us are irredeemably engaged in the moral self-destruction that use of the Ring inevitably entails. We New Zealanders may be “sleepy hobbits”, dozing blissfully in our beautiful little Shire at the world’s end, but that doesn’t stop us, when we’re awake, from using the wondrous consumer goods Baotou’s rare earths make possible. Our ease, and the bounteous lifestyle of which we are so proud (and of which the rest of the world is so envious) only exists because somewhere, far, far away, in the barren wilds of Inner Mongolia, giant pipes are continuously spewing their poisonous brew into a lake so ruined, hideous and deadly, that Sauron, himself, would blanche in horror.
I’ve seen this footage before. It’s horrifying, but it left me with the uneasy feeling that having seen it has somehow now made me complicit by default. Who is going to give up their smart phones, ipads etc in protest of this environmental apocalypse? That’s the point, we won’t. What do you do with the knowledge – of the dark side of technology?
And the rest of the rear earth minerals from the Africa’s? Why they go into Americas Military industry to make stuff like night vision goggles and missiles in the west. The rear earth picture in the west isn’t rosy either.
Q: Whose fault is this?
A: The people that create the demand for flat screen TVs and smart phones. That’s us.
That’s bullshit. Oil from Norway and oil from Nigeria have totally different environmental and labour impacts, even though they are both mined with the same demand in mind.
Talking about our own consumer decisions is just a story that we tell ourselves so that we can convince ourselves we have some, however small, agency or power to affect this. We do, but it is election votes that count not dollar votes, which are by definition stacked in favour of the rich.
To bad most people don’t take voting seriously.
Unfortunately there is no rare earth from Norway. At the moment the Chinese have pretty much cornered the world rare earth market.
By the way, for the uninitiated what you’re seeing is a fairly standard slimes dam being built – common to all hydro-metallurgical process plants. Depending on the analysis of the slimes, it may not be at all harmful and should be covered in soil and replanted afterwards.
There are plenty of rare earth elements available to be mined in North America and elsewhere. In fact isn’t the point of REEs that they are not rare, but don’t occur in concentrations instead being evenly spread out and thus expensive to gather.
I think you really have to rethink your reason for saying that Andrew,
Chris and I would come from the 1940’s and 50’s and this era was far better at managing waste generation than your 1970-80s ect’ where the economy was redesigned on “the throw away society”
I was a tradesman trained under those who came back from war, and hence I learned that it is better for the pocket & environment to fix things and keep them going.
Boy did I get a culture shock when I went to live in Canada and US in 1968, whereI witnessed the throw away society first hand, and marvelled at the good stuff this kiwi was always fixing that everyone was throwing out.
All the rest is history and now we unfortunately we have a Government who believes that scrapping old stuff is better to build up the economy, so now we see old cars TV’s VCR’s and everything thrown out because government is always planning ways to make older appliances and vehicles more expensive to keep now.
So ANDREW look no further than this Government for encouraging the digital technology causing the throwing away TV’s, video’s, Cell phones, and answering machines to name only a few, and out goes all old stuff as they push new policies to encourage this waste.
Next all appliances will be terminated when the new metering brings Time of use technology for switching off appliances when they need the extra power and you will need new appliances for this.
If you don’t like this then write your MP and complain but don’t blame consumers as they are driven by governments.
The government is doing this???
Don’t people just want better products?
So I suppose you sit in your 1940’s villa watching a black & white TV whilst burning coal to keep the place warm?
Actually, Andrew, 1940s villas fetch some pretty amazing prices these days…
As for black and white TVs… there’s no point in having the latest uber-tech television (plasma screen, internet connectivity, washes your car, etc) if the stuff we’re getting in our households in mostly garbage.
Maybe my memory is tinted by youthful naivety, but I seem to recall that TV programming was more interesting in the days of TV1 and 2. There was certainly greater variety.
You must be kidding!
Post WW2 was a time of appalling pollution and despoiling of nature. This was the era of Silent Spring and Thalidomide.
Environmental controls on mining operations are far more strict today than they were then. You’re looking at the past with rose tinted glasses
And yet, Andrew, our lakes, rivers, seas, and air are more polluted than ever. And add atomic pollution into the mix, and that’s quite a cocktail we’re dumping into the planet’s environment.
I think the glasses you’re wearing are the same brand as CGs?
Nope.
Across the Western world, pollution is the lowest it’s been for maybe a 100 years. Rivers in England and Germany now have trout back in them. Power stations have scrubbers and precipitators on their stacks, cars have stringent emission controls. Gone are the killing smogs of previous generations. Gone are the results of 1940’s and 50’s bomb tests. No more DDT and 245T spread across the land causing birth defects.
You really need to get out more.
You could also read “The Lorax”, by Dr. Seuss. Obviously a tale of a land polluted by furious industry, but you can see where many would have some sympathy for the Once-ler.
He is a master entrepreneur (creating market niche of the thneed), obviously very highly skilled (in knitting, electronics [builds radii-phoone], plumbing [fixes his own pipes], engineering [invents a super-axe-hacker which quadruples efficiency], and industrial architecture [builds his own factory]).
He ‘does it for himself’, but realises too late that he has externalised the cost to the environment, to his disadvantage.
Would that we would recognise that we have externalised in time.
Such destruction is not inescapable. Just need to require that the chemicals used are caught and reused.
Of course, doing that does cost more and will mean that a lot less people will buy cellphones and thus there won’t be as much profit.
Ah Yes! The 1940’s and 50’s. The era of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ and 2,4,5,T.
Trust me, waste is managed far better now than then. Many of the things that miners in the 1940’s and 50’s got away with are no longer tolerated. Although I can’t speak for China – it being an undemocratic and communist regime.
Comments are closed.