Frodo Is Green

It’s gone alarmingly quiet around here over the past couple of days, and I can only think it’s that everyone in the world’s internet is broken except for mine. Surely that is more likely than people having second thoughts following on from my last post. Surely.

So for a completely unrelated reason I’ve decided to meander from the path of Frodology’s small list of membership, uh, suggestions, and address an issue which has always, always, been a subject close to Frodo’s heart.

Before Orthodox Christians started polluting the Earth’s delicate atmosphere with their toxic clouds of incense, before the Jews began wasting fuel by burning precious hydrocarbons in the temple at Hanukkah, and before the Vatican started melting down the world’s wealth for its coffers, Frodologists were being green. Frodo opted to trek all the way to Mordor under his own power. He didn’t take the train, or use a car, and didn’t even consider taking a plane. He didn’t leave his television on standby and he had no time for chlorofluorocarbons.

And what does the Pope do? He putts about looking like a goldfish in his Popemobile, a modified SUV with heavy bullet-proof glass. He doesn’t even use a hybrid. I feel confident that Catholics probably manage the lowest miles per gallon of any faith. They should hand out catalytic converters at communion instead of bread.

Hobbits didn’t have industry and didn’t even harm the Earth by farming. In fact it’s not actually clear what the economic basis of their society was, perhaps some combination of hunter-gathering and begging, but the point still stands that their hairy feet had the smallest carbon footprint of any socially-developed humanoid to follow. They certainly didn’t have to cut down trees for, say, I don’t know, carpentry, to make ends meet.

Really we should all just leave the cities and pick up the pastoral lifestyle where medieval peasants left off. We should forsake technology and abandon science because it’s half a step away from full-on witchcraft, and certainly wasn’t sanctioned or even mentioned in The Book. If Frodo didn’t need it, then we certainly don’t. What’s so great about progress anyway? Why can’t anyone just be happy to stay still and admire the view? I mean, it didn’t quite work for the Khmer Rouge, but we could give it another shot.