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the lord of the rings - Doesn't Radagast care about trees?


In the book The Two Towers, Treebeard refers to Gandalf as "the only wizard that really cares about trees". But in Fellowship of the Ring, we met the wizard Radagast the Brown, whose special focus is on animals, especially birds.


Of course, animals aren't trees, but it is difficult to imagine a person loving animals without also caring deeply about trees - especially when that person loves birds most of all, and so many birds are so dependent upon trees for their survival. More generally, Radagast seems like an all-around nature lover, and this too suggests that he "really cares about trees".


This leads me to imagine several possibilities:




  1. Treebeard doesn't know Radagast (this seems unlikely - they have both been around for thousands of years, so surely they have bumped into each other at some point)





  2. Treebeard forgot about Radagast, possibly because he was annoyed at Saruman and a bit angry at the time




  3. Radagast actually doesn't care about trees




Is there some other alternative I have overlooked, or is one of the options I mentioned correct? Or does Tolkien never address this apparent problem?



Answer



One answer is that Tolkien was a philologist/linguist, not an ecologist, and the importance of habitat preservation—say, of the specific habitats of arboreal birds—may not have landed strongly with him. (In fact, his goofs in another area of science, geology, led to a Russian paleontologist deducing that if the map were true, then some important aspects of Tolkien's narrative in Lord of the Rings must be false, and so he wrote a sequel with a very different interpretation of the conflict between Gondor and Mordor.)


Another answer may be that for Radagast the well-being of trees was merely instrumental to the lives of the animals he loved, but that Treebeard, in the same section you quote, laments that no-one cares about trees for their own sake. (Remember that not even the Entwives really care about trees as much as the Ents.)



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