It is not often that a movie comes along that has the wow factor. But with James Cameron the scale of his new movie, Avatar brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for almost three hours, factors into that wow. As the New York Times says, "With "Avatar" James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life - our moviegoing life included - as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie - one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump - is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
OK, much of the press about Avatar has been centred on the special effects and the 3-D presentation. True, these are modern filmmaking marvels but the film succeeds far beyond the incredible technology used to create it. However, the film has embedded within it important messages that should not be ignored at our peril. "With Avatar, Cameron has delivered a fast-paced fantasy adventure that weaves together a stream of powerful themes that are so important to our modern world that they extend far beyond the world of fictional film: Issues like corporations destroying nature for profit, the lack of respect for living creatures, and the failed policies of "military diplomacy" that the USA continues to pursue. The themes in Avatar reflect the greatest challenges of our modern world, and the message of Avatar is both deeply moving and highly relevant to the future of human civilization." 1
The parallels between our world and Pandora, the world that Cameron has created is remarkable and unmistakable:
James Cameron made the comment that the world of Pandora that he had created was not only beautiful but it was like paradise - the Garden of Eden. And we certainly get that impression from the incredible landscapes and alien foliage that is unveiled as the movie unfolds.
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Just like the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Pandora is inhabited the sapient race of humanoids called Na'vi who are blue skinned and live in a kind of paradise, similar in many ways to our story of Eden. And interestingly, the Na'vi are all but naked. This is a courageous attempt by Cameron to mimic the story of Adam and Eve along with the idea of Eden, herkening back to the time when mankind was innocent and pure, and where nudity was not a big deal. Cameron is courageous because even though for most of human history nudity within a social setting was quite normal, he is faced with a strange paradox. Americans (and other people in some other countries) freak out when confronted by naked bodies on film, yet find it quite acceptable for wantum violence, blood and guts to fill the screens of movie theatres. So it should be no surprise that while the Na'vi are near nude and swim naked, the outsiders who use remotely controlled, genetically engineered human-Na'vi bodies call avatars, are generally clothed. Even in the fictiona future of Avatar humans are still ashamed about their bodies while the Na'vi are not bothered that they are near naked. Why should they? It is their natural state!
 Like the Garden of Eden the Na'vi are all but naked as Adam and Eve were in the garden. In fact the original conceptial art depicted the Na'vi naked, but American taboos to nudity prohibit developing the movie with nudity and so the Na'vi are scantily attired instead in order to preserve the so called American puritan values. But the message is clear nonetheless ...
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 The Na'vi are all but naked but the humans need to wear clothes. This is because today most of the human race suffer from a mental disorder known as Gymnophobia. There is a reason for this - see "The Answer To All There is"
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Cameron has said in the past that Avatar shared in many ways the theme of the film The Emerald Forest. As Wikipedia says, "The film [Emerald Forest] is clearly motivated by the destruction of the rainforest, but apart from the impact on the environment and the local wildlife, it examines the fact that a way of living which was natural to human beings for many thousands of years is also being destroyed. Scenes exploring the culture and spiritual beliefs of the tribespeople give the viewer an idea of how South American people lived in the times before widespread colonisation."
The near nudity in the film on the part of the natives reflect the innocence that was found in the Garden of Eden. And just as there was a serpent in the garden, in Avatar there is also a serpent and it has a name - BIG CORPORATE BUSINESS. Avatar can be seen as a very accurate reflection of the struggle between big corporate companies and indigenous populations that has happened so often in our history, and continues even today in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere. But the story is more than this. It is a parable, a lesson of what we as humans do to our neighbours and the effects upon our environment in the pursuant of perceived wealth.
 "This is why we are here because this little grey rock sells for 20 million a Kilo. Their villages happens to rest on the richest deposit and they need to relocate." Does that sound familar?
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In "Avatar" Pandora is an idealic world for the Na'vi who have no need for the technology of the kind that we hold so dear today. Just as the jungles of the Amazon provided the needs for the natives who lived their until western civilisation infiltrated and eventually choked upon their way of life, so too the Na'vi find that their forests of provided for all their needs.
The Na'vi certainly do not need clothing as such and so they do not require washing machines or the chemical detergents that we need to clean them. What use are machines to them? What use is the grey rock that the humans hold so dear? What we discover is that the Na'vi are one with nature just as many cultures were on Earth not very long ago. And that is what defines the film more than anything. Their planet (moon) is a living breathing world and everything on it is all interconnected. It is a concept that some people on our world recognise and call it Gaia. But just as most of the people of our world have been struck down by a mental disorder called Gymnophobia most people have lost their connection to the natural world and as a consequence, mankind will reap the whirlwind. Avatar is a timely warning...as we shall see, although it will be a warning that will be generally ignored. But the whirlwind is coming and "the writing is on the wall".
The Earth is a living entity called Gaia in which all life on it is linked and this concept is unleashed in the film in a big way.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, James Lovelock was researching the possibility of life on Mars for NASA. His assumption was that the requirements for life on Mars would be the same as for life on Earth so experiments were designed to test Martian soils "for chemicals whose presence would indicate life at work. . ." After a while, Lovelock questioned his basic assumption. He wondered whether life on Mars would reveal itself to tests based on life on Earth, to say nothing of more basic questions like, what is life, and how should it be recognized?
"I expected to discover somewhere in the scientific literature a comprehensive definition of life as a physical process, on which one could base the design of life-detection experiments," he recalled, ". . . but in the whole vast encyclopedia of facts the crux of the matter, life itself, was almost totally ignored." Designing a universal "life-detection experiment" was a lot more complicated than Lovelock thought it would be. Eventually he became intrigued by a colleague’s notion of "life detection by atmospheric analysis" and they began working together. "Our results convinced us that the only feasible explanation of the Earth’s highly improbably atmosphere was that it was being manipulated on a day-to-day basis . . . and the manipulator was life itself."
Lovelock then made the leap, which is still considered controversial among many scientists, that because the Earth acts like a living organism then it must in fact be a living organism. "The entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae," he explained, "could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with the faculties and powers far beyond those if its constituent parts". Lovelock’s contemporary, the novelist William Golding, suggested that he call the living Earth, Gaia and with the help of colleagues, especially Lynn Margulis, Lovelock’s inquiry evolved into the Gaia Hypothesis. The evidence gathered in support of Gaia is now considerable and it is one of the reasons why "Global Warming" is in the headlines. The human race through their exploitation of the natural resources are in fact at war with the living Earth that is Gaia and it is a war that mankind is going learn at his peril, he is going to lose. This is not lost in the Cameron's film.
The concept of Gaia is unleashed in Avatar in a big way, in fact it is the underlying theme of the entire film, although it is never referred to as Gaia. The Na'vi understand and work with Gaia (not against her). Even when killing an animal, they recognise that it's life has returned to Gaia and absorbed into the planet's neural network. Due respect is made towards the animal with a prayer. In the film the animals, Na'vi and even the trees have neural connection fibers, allowing all living creatures to "plug in" to each other's neural networks. Once connected, they can feel each other's emotions and thoughts. They are, in essence, operating as one single being with expanded sensory aware.
This may sound far-fetched and nonsense, but the evidence gathered in support of Gaia here on Earth is now considerable. For example there is evidence that there are indeed interconnectedness of all living systems. Plants, for example, really do talk to each other through their roots and other sensory systems. The study of this field of science is called Plant Neurobiology, and the world's top research facility is the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Italy. There, it has long been established that plants are, in fact, intelligent. The migration of birds is another example of the links between Gaia and animals. In fact all life on this planet depends upon Gaia, just as Gaia depends upon all life to maintain itself.
The film passes on this message throughout revealing as it does the reliance and interconnectivity of all living things towards each other. Even so it appears initially that Gaia is neutral, allowing nature to go its own way, regardless of the consequences. At one point in the film when all hope seems lost for the Na'vi, Jack Sully prays to Gaia to help save them, at which point the female character Neytiri says, "[Mother Nautre] doesn't take sides. She only maintains the balance of life." But what happens though is that Gaia reaches a point when being neutral is detrimental to itself and so it acts. I won't spoil the story and tell you what happened in case you have not watched the film. Anyway, there is a lesson to be learned. If you dispoil a planet so much sooner or later there is going to be a backlash and heaven help anyone or anything that has been the cause.
What we see in Avatar is a beautiful world, breathtaking in every respect. The Na'vi have lived for generation to generation in a veritable garden of Eden from which they have been nourished and nurtured. The Earth too is a incredibly beautiful, at least when seen from a distance. But take a closer look and things are not pristine as it was.
The Past - the Garden of Eden. The Present - our Polluted Toxic World. (Part of this picture is credited Shawn Dell Joyce, namely Gaia (left of Eden) contrasting the shame/rape of nature by the industrial world (right of Eden), with images spanning the Roman Colliseum to the L.A. Freeways)
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The music video for "Earth Song," has an environmental theme, showing images of animal cruelty, deforestation, pollution and war. Jackson and the world's people unite in a spiritual chant-"Earth Song"-which summons a force that heals the world. Using special effects, time is reversed so that life returns, war ends and the forests regrow.
In June [2009] a clash between native peoples and Peruvian police over exploitation of the Amazon turned bloody. Thousands of indigenous people blocked roads to protest new rule changes that made it easier for foreign companies to extract oil, gas, minerals, and timber from the Peruvian Amazon, including tribal lands.
During the ensuing clash, twenty-three police were killed and at least ten protestors, according to official numbers. Indigenous groups, however, say that hundreds remain missing and have asked for a Truth Commission to investigate the tragic incident.
For decades real indigenous tribes around the world have faced off with corporations-mining, logging, oil and gasdetermined to- exploit their land. These corporations, much like the company in Avatar, usually have support from the government and access to 'security forces', sometimes in the form of ex-military or state police. Yet unlike the film, in which the indigenous group triumphs over the corporate and military invaders, the real-life stories of indigenous tribes rarely end justly: from Peru to Malaysia to Ecuador their struggles continues even now...
For thousands of years, the Yanomami have thrived in the rainforests of South America. Now, they are struggling as the government fails to protect them from mining, ranching, criminal invasions, attacks and disease.
During the 1980s, the Yanomami suffered immensely when up to 40,000 Brazilian gold-miners invaded their land. The miners shot them, destroyed many villages, and exposed them to diseases to which they had no immunity. Twenty percent of the Yanomami died in just seven years.
Evaristo Nugquag, president of COICA, the Pan Amazonian Coordinating Committee of the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon Basin, accuses the petroleum industry of ruthless destruction of indigenous lands. He says, "for years the oil industry routinely used our open spaces as a free disposal system, pouring millions of gallons of untreated oil into hundreds of unlined open pits that bleed into the rivers that the Huaorani view as the jungle's bloodstream." He emphasizes that environmental problems must be solved within the context of indigenous peoples' aspirations to control their borders and their natural resources. Indigenous control, he says, is essential to indigenous survival. "Without the rainforest we will disappear. We have no other place to live." The director of the Torampare community says his people see their destiny foreshadowed by the fate of the almost totally decimated Cofan Indians. The Cofan's 20-year encounter with the Texaco Oil Company has left them hovering on the edge of extinction, with fewer than 500 surviving.
For the past two years, Colombian army troops have been evicting the U'wa Indians from their ancestral high tropical forest lands to make way for oil exploration by the California-based Occidental Petroleum..
The Palawan live in the south of Palawan Island in the Philippines. Thousands of new settlers and a big mining push by the Philippine government now pose a serious threat to the tribe.
There are around 40,000 Palawan in total. Some of those in the interior are very isolated and have little contact with outsiders. More than 300 mining applications are pending on the Palawan’s land since President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo initiated a huge new wave of mining projects across the Philippines in 2006. Mining in Palawan has already ravaged forests, generated flooding and caused the siltation of rivers and farmland, it has also destroyed sacred sites. Marylin Samparan, Palawan woman’Rolando Punoi, a Tagbanua from Sitio Lamane described the impact of mining on his land, ‘Now we see mining companies criss-crossing our forest, drilling the soil, stripping the trees away, destroying our watersheds, polluting our drinking water.’
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