A delegation of Māori people from across New Zealand enters the Grand Hall of Parliament in March of 2013.

Some members wipe away tears. The day has been a long time coming - it is the end of three years of intense negotiations between the Ngāi Tūhoe, an indigenous people in New Zealand, and the Crown negotiation team. From a broader perspective, it is a day that the Tūhoe have been waiting for since the 1800s, when their lands were seized by the New Zealand government and their people were displaced from a forest that came to be the Te Urewara National Park. This signing ceremony marks the end of negotiations, and the beginning of a settlement that will radically change the legal status of the forest, and how it is to be managed.

Many believed that the negotiations would never succeed. While some of the core principles of the settlement were settled, the "sticking point" for both sides was on the questio of who would own the land. An earlier version of the settlement was rejected by Prime Minister John Key, whosaid that vesting ownership of the forest with the Tūhoe was “unacceptable to the government”.[1]

In the end, the agreement was settled with a compromise that ultimately better align with the ideals of the Tūhoe people.

“I realized he was misunderstanding what we were on about,” said Tāmati Kruger, the chief negotiator for the Tūhoe. “Ownership was his obsession, not ours. So now we don’t use that word. It’s not a Tūhoe concept anyway. In the course of these negotiations, I’ve had to study the European understanding of that word ‘ownership’ and where it came from. Ownership is the proof that something is yours to sell. So it is more about how to rid yourself of something, to gain material benefit from it, than to preserve and keep it."[2]

The breakthrough came when it was agreed that the land would become a self-owned legal entity. Rather than they or the government owning the land, the Te Urewara would belong to itself. This agreement became law through the The Te Urewera Act of 2014. It marked a significant legal precedent for the rights of nature, in a legal context. This was the first time in the world that a natural body had been recognized as a legal person.[3]

Viewing a forest as a legal entity with rights is an inversion of the norm. Usually in legal structures the land, or river, or forest, is a resource. The owner can use the land, and take things from it. Instead, when land is an entity are recognized to have obligations toward the land – to develop a reciprocal relationship with it, and to protect it from harms.

After becoming the chair of the Te Urewera Board, Kruger explained that this inversion alters framework with how people associate with the land.

"As Tūhoe people, we accept that we have obligations and responsibilities, not only to ourselves, but to how we live, where we live, and that it is our duty in order for us to progress in advance as human beings, we must know our place in nature. We don’t see that our struggle is a struggle of rights. It’s rather a struggle to restore our sense of responsibility to ourselves and to nature. We don’t own Te Urewera. We don’t own this land, but we live with it, and our behavior and what we believe in and what we sense will determine how well we live with the land."[4]

The contrast between management of Te Urewera and under a National Park system and Tūhoe stewards has been striking. The Board have suspended the use of arial pesticides to manage an invasive possum population, instead following manual trapping. Outside entities must sign reciprocal Friendship Agreements which require a reciprocal, rather than extractive relationship with the forest.[5]The Te Kawa o Te Urewera, the official management plan for the forest published in 2017, lays out the implications of such a framework.

"Te Kawa is about the management of people for the benefit of the land - it is not about land management.Nature is our mother; respect for one’s parent is the highest duty of life, without her we have no purpose together."[6]

The case of Te Urewera set a precedent to be followed around the world, including the Muteshekau Shipu (Magpie River) in Canada, Atrato River in Colombia. In Ecuador, article 71 of the 2008 Constitution states that nature “has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes”.[7] While the idea that nature is a person is not a modern invention, this recent legal trend gives new powers to the environmental movement.

What does it mean to consider nature a person? In the Te Urewera example, we see that people declare their obligations to the land. In Tolkien, nature becomes embodied into people that can act to defend themselves.

Most famously, we see this in Treebeard and the Ents, the ancient tree shepherds who rise up to destroy a threatening industrial power. But the ents are far from the only people to be found in Tolkien’s nature. The woods and rivers are more than places to be passed through, or even admired by the characters. They are participants in the drama of the story, and shapers of events.

The characters occasionally indulge in metaphor. Take, for example, the waters surrounding Rivendell and Lothlorien. At the last moment, when the Ringwraiths are about to seize Frodo following weeks of pursuit, the river rises in a sudden flood, and casts the black riders away. Afterwards Gandalf tells Frodo that Elrond "commanded" the waters to rise. "The river of this valley is under his power, and it will rise in anger when he has great need to bar the Ford."[8]

Similarly, Haldir acknowledges "the rivers long defended us,"[9] when explaining Lothlorien’s status as a sanctuary in an increasingly dangerous world. When Legolas speaks to the company toiling through the snows on Caradhras, he says, "I have not brought the Sun. She is walking in the blue fields of the South, and a little wreath of snow on this Redhorn hillock troubles her not at all."[10]

These cases could represent this could be little more than figurative speech. But it is clear that the characters do in some situations believe the natural word exercises a natural will upon the world.

We see that the role of nature is not always benign. In some cases, the natural forces of Middle-earth are actively hostile to the company. When the Fellowship seeks to come to Lothlorien through an overland route, they are foiled in the attempt by Caradhras, the mountain they attempt to cross. They face harsh weather in the form of wind, cold, and spectacularly deep snow drtfts which threaten to bury them on the mountain paths. While some members hesitate to call the surprising storm an act of malice, Gimili does not. "Caradhras was called the Cruel, and had an ill name,’ said Gimli, ‘long years ago, when rumor of Sauron had not been heard in these lands.’”[11]

Later, as the company manages to escape the drifts, Gimli remarks ‘Caradhras has not forgiven us...He has more snow yet to fling at us, if we go on. The sooner we go back and down the better.’

When it is revealed that the storm was highly localized, as if the company was targetted, Gimli’s suspicions are confirmed. "Ah, it is as I said,’ growled Gimli. ‘It was no ordinary storm. It is the ill will of Caradhras."

If Gimli is right, it is not immediately clear why the Mountain has taken to such hostility toward the company. Perhaps, as a spirit of nature, it has over the long years developed a hatred of the talking peoples of Middle-earth. Why the mountain has developed this animosity toward the companyin particular is not clear. Gimli says "He does not love Elves and Dwarves," yet later in the book Galadriel and her kind appear to cross the mountains without incident. Perhaps more than any other, the episode illustrates nature as an inscrutable force.

In most events, however, nature’s hostility toward and intervention against the people of Middle- earth is in response to danger. In The Lord of the Rings, Nature can be hostile land destruction when faced with a history of violence.

Tolkien himself professed a deep sympathy with nature, and his letters that have survived reveal a man who often felt humans have overstepped their bounds in their relations with the natural world.

"There are of course certain things and themes that move me specially," he once wrote "...I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals."[12]

We know that even the gentle Hobbits have had conflict with the trees of the old forest, which motivates some of the hatred seen in the woods of the early chapters.

Merry tells his companions that "I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them in. In fact long ago they attacked the Hedge: they came and planted themselves right by it, and leaned over it. But the hobbits came and cut down hundreds of trees, and made a great bonfire in the Forest, and burned all the ground in a long strip east of the Hedge. After that the trees gave up the attack, but they became very unfriendly. "

Such a battle might have been "long ago" for the Hobbits, but the memory is evidently still fresh in the minds of the trees. After the hobbits are rescued from Old Man Willow, a powerful and malicious tree in the center of the forest who tries to drown and crush them, the colorful Tom Bombadil explains the anger inherent in the forest.

"Tom’s words laid bare the hearts of trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange, and filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers. The countless years had filled them with pride and rooted wisdom, and with malice."[13]

Treebeard tells a similar story, explaining that "bad memories are handed down." He explains to Merry and Pippin the curious nature of Ents and trees, in which some ents are slowly falling asleep and losing the capacity for speach, but some trees are "waking up", and becoming aware.

"When that happens to a tree," he said, "you find that some have bad hearts. Nothing to do with their wood: I do not mean that. There are some trees in the valleys under the mountains, sound as a bell, and bad right through. That sort of thing seems to spread. There used to be some very dangerous parts in this country. There are still some very black patches.’

Pippin tells his companions that some of the trees he has seen are actively dangerous.

"You stand still looking at the weather, maybe, or listening to the rustling of the wind, and then suddenly you find that you are in the middle of a wood with great groping trees all around you. They still have voices, and can speak with the Ents – that is why they are called Huorns, Treebeard says – but they have become queer and wild. Dangerous. I should be terrified of meeting them, if there were no true Ents about to look after them."[14]

All of this presents a nature prepared to strike back against abuse, with devastating consequences, as we will explore in the destruction of Isengard. It is a satisfying theme for every activist who has wished for some destructive construction project to be dismantled or swept away. Perhaps in the playing out of natural systems, as we see in our own times the storms of increasing intensity, temperatures rising beyond healthy limits, and the destruction of coastal buildings, we can recognize a form of Nature seeking its own vengeance against destructive forces.

It is interesting that Nature, while frequently the protagonist of The Lord of Rings, is not in any way to be considered purely good. We see that nature can be corrupted and itself be force of evil. It is clear, however righteous might be the anger of the Old Forest, the malice of Old Man Willow has taken an evil bent. Elsewhere, the power of Sauron has gripped southern Mirkwood, and in his occupation we see a form of nature that is both vital and destructive. When he comes to Lothlorien, Frodo looks out beyond the protected forest to Mirkwood, and he sees a formidable sight:

"Beyond the river the land appeared flat and empty, formless and vague, until far away it rose again like a wall, dark and drear. The sun that lay on Lothlórien had no power to enlighten the shadow of that distant height.

‘There lies the fastness of Southern Mirkwood,’ said Haldir. ‘It is clad in a forest of dark fir, where the trees strive one against another and their branches rot and wither."[15]

In Fangorn Forest, the Old Forest, and in Mirkwood, we see woods that are hostile and destructive. This, Tolkien tells us, is the result of damage from external actors.

This seems to be an important point. In a letter responding to a reader who had remarked upon the "gloom" of the forests, Tolkien insisted the gloom of any of his forests came from their oppressors.

"In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies. Lothlorien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time ofthe story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a power that had hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story." [16]

In the twenty-first century, the "personhood" of nature is being re-examined. Various indigenous cultures have for millennia considered nature to be a person[a]. This perspective has taken root in legal battles. The rights of nature have been established in rivers and forests.[b] Perhaps if we all shifted our perspective, and thought of the ecosystem we inhabit as a person rather than as a consumable resource, we would make different decisions about how we used it and interacted with it. In Tolkien’s world, nature is able to speak out against the damage, and actively to resist its own destruction. In our own, we find ourselves needing to take action.

[1] https://orionmagazine.org/article/te-urewera-rainforest-new-zealand-legal-entity/

[2] https://theconversation.com/when-a-river-is-a-person-from-ecuador-to-new-zealand-nature-gets-its-day-in-court-79278

[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-cracks-down-wildcat-miners-amazon-shift-their-operations-2023-12-28/

[4] https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2024/09/brazil-cracks-down-on-illegal-gold-mining-sparking-anger-in-the-amazon/

[5] https://orionmagazine.org/article/te-urewera-rainforest-new-zealand-legal-entity/

[6] Te Kata o Te Urewera, pg 7, 14

[7] https://theconversation.com/when-a-river-is-a-person-from-ecuador-to-new-zealand-nature-gets-its-day-in-court-79278

[8] Fellowship

[9] Fellowship

[10] Fellowship

[11] Fellowhship

[12] Letters, pg 220

[13] Fellowship, pg?

[14] Towers, pg?

[15] Fellowship, pg?

[16] Letters, 420

[a]Ecuador, braiding sweetgrass

[b]Examples