The Ents Among us!

[bilbobaggins764]

My latest work in F and F examines the remarkable similarities between real trees and Tolkien's Ents.

https://fellowdustmag.com/2025/02/26/the-ents-among-us/

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This is quite a nice read, and very informative; though I should warn others that it is more about trees than about Middle-earth. (But that need be no bad thing.)

Spending time in forest areas reduces stress and anxiety, lowers your heart rate and blood pressure, and increases memory and focus. But, of course, it is not that trees reduce stress; it’s that our artificial environments cause these negatives, and we start to return to wholeness when we go back to the garden as God intended.

I would not disagree with that, but there is also the other side of the forest. Actually, you start by pointing at these two sides with Frodo's view from the flet high in the Mallorn tree on Cerin Amroth. On the one side is the green city of Galadriel, where the trees are Elvish towers and a light holds all the land in sway, and on the other side is southern Mirkwood, where stands the old dark tower of the Necromancer and all the light goes out.

Many years ago I was watching some movie with my son sitting on my lap. He must have been about 5 years old. I cannot remember what movie, but someone was galloping on a horse and the horse entered a forest. At the moment the horse entered the forest my son freaked out and would not watch any more. From this I concluded that we are born with some innate primordial fear of the untamed forest.

[Melahny_oftheWoods]

Simard is a forest ecologist with the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Canada, who found that rather than competing for resources, trees were helping one another survive. Trees that received more sunlight and produced carbon gave it to those trees with less sunlight, even when they were of another species.

So trees are more intelligent than humans, then. Haha.

In general, our social system largely has people competing against each other. Businesses competing against others, even trying to run others into the ground, individual's competing for jobs (which equal resources). We compete and work against each other, we are conditioned to be greedy and selfish, to want everything for ourselves and our families but to walk coldly past those suffering in poverty and sickness. We have much to learn from trees.

[TaigonSunblade]

There was a tree just at the edge of my parents' village which looked just like an Ent. But he didn't show me to the 'White Wizard'. :P