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Tolkien loved trees and nature and hated modern machinery. In the latter part of his life he never rode in a car (he converted his garage into a study).

Love of nature is neither liberal nor conservative. Most of the conservation organizations used to be conservative. Hippies liked Tolkien because they liked the idea of going back to the land and simplifying their lives, and they liked the idea of innocent little people like hobbits. There's a bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, called Rivendell, which is still rather hippyish.

During the 1950s there was a lot of great science fiction about people revolting against an oppressive and dictatorial regime. Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth collaborated on several excellent books in this line. Here, too, I think revolt against oppression is something that both hippies and conservatives can identify with. When the liberals wrote these stories, they were thinking of Senator McCarthy and the "conformity" he represented. But when conservatives read them, they could as easily think of Stalin and Mao. Another SF story along these lines, in fact one of the first, was Ayn Rand's "Anthem," which I recall first reading in a pulp magazine.

The great appeal of fantasy is that it's an essential element in life and in stories, but it was kicked out of literature during the nineteenth century by the "realist" movement. Earlier, fantasy was a normal part of literature, as in The Odyssey or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. In the nineteenth century, it was kicked out of serious fiction and went its separate way. Tolkien was preceded by William Morris, George MacDonald, and others who wrote heroic fantasy back then.

Tolkien loved trees and nature and hated modern machinery. In the latter part of his life he never rode in a car (he converted his garage into a study).

This is quite an interesting topic. While classical conservatives celebrated nature and deprecated modernity, contemporary conservatism is often characterized by a "if it's green, pave it" mentality. As a rural person myself I sometimes feel out of place in the attacks on "bird watchers" and "butterfly chasers" in some contemporary conservative literature. Isn't the exaltation of man humanism? And wouldn't the "re-wilding" of the land or the extinction of humanity be suicidal for the left?

Interestingly, for all its current association with environmentalism, Marxism was originally unapologetically industrialist. It was Communism that industrialized Russia, which meant Communism was often associated by Russians with modern technology just as American leftists associate it with capitalism and seem to see Marx as some sort of bucolic figure.