THOUGHTS ON THE ECOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY UNDERPINNING JAMES CAMERON’S “AVATAR”
I love Cameron’s movies. TERMINATOR 2, in particular, is one of my all-time favorites. Do I hear someone saying that it’s a trivial flick because it shows stuff like airborne 18-wheelers and massive explosions? Of course it’s got those things! Cameron makes commercial movies designed to be seen by millions of people, not art flicks which are going to appeal to small coteries of self-proclaimed intellectuals.
So yes, TERMINATOR 2 was unashamedly produced to be a successful action flick. But it also transcends that genre, because it’s a thoughtful treatment of two very real and important problems: the containment of the nuclear genie our species let out of the bottle around seventy years ago, and the control of the machine intelligence we started developing at about the same time.
There’s no way, though, that I can agree with Cameron’s Luddite prescription for neutralizing those dangers. I was moved, sure, by the scene in which the Arnold Schwarzenegger robot destroys itself to save humanity from the sophistication of the chip which drives its intelligence, but I remained unsentimentally conscious of the naivety of trying to save ourselves by destroying our technology. Let’s just say that I found Cameron to be more convincing as a story-teller/movie-maker than as an eco-political philosopher. And what a magic story-teller he is. I was even more moved by the poetic, near-metaphysical ending to his crypto-Luddite but wonderful TITANIC.
AVATAR is also an entertaining action movie, and it, too, deals with a serious and important problem: what can be done about the fact that humans are destroying the natural world? With this latest film, though, Cameron goes WAY too far down the Luddite path–goes all the way, in fact, to acceptance of the “noble savage” solution to our ecological woes. Adopt the ways of “indigenous” peoples such as the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines, he tells us in this movie, and the industrial way of life which is destroying our planet can be forsaken.
That’s a completely unrealistic prescription to treat the hemorrhage of biodiversity our planet is experiencing. The real etiology of the that hemorrhage lies in the evolution of human ingenuity, and we can’t abdicate from that ingenuity any more than we stop breathing. (My Merriam Webster’s Medical Dictionary defines “etiology,” by the way, as “all the causes of a disease or abnormal condition.”)
Do I hear someone out there telling me to lighten up? That AVATAR’s just a movie? That it isn’t meant to be treated as a scholarly examination of the biodiversity crisis? Sure AVATAR isn’t scholarly, but it’s all the more powerful and influential for that very reason.
Yes, James Cameron, you’re quite right: the biosphere which nurtured our species is in dire jeopardy. But if we do manage to stop the human-caused extinction spasm, we’re not going to do so by limiting the power of our species. We’ll do it, on the contrary, by continuing to develop and expand the knowledge and awareness which underlies that power. We stand, today, on the threshold of understanding and accepting the real etiology of the mass extinction which is presently occurring on our planet, and nothing makes that etiology as clear as the emerging history of our impact on the big animals with which we co-evolved
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