Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Robert Baird
The Indian...stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not
her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the
habits of the house. His house is a prison.
Since those tumultuous days [1960s], Noble [Ecological] Indians have saturated
public culture. They grace the covers of fiction and nonfiction best-sellers, and
pervade children’s literature. They leap from movies and television screens, fill
canvases, take shape in sculptures, find expression in museum and gallery
exhibitions, animate dance and other performances, and appear in T-shirts. Time
and again the dominant image is of the Indian in nature who understands the
systemic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living forms,
and takes steps to conserve so that earth’s harmonies are never imbalanced and
resources never in doubt. This is the Ecological Indian.
INTRODUCTION
We have any number of role models for individuals living in nature, from
tragic Alaskan journey chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Similarly, James
Cameron’s Avatar (at this point, the most technologically sophisticated film in history)
transposes our contemporary view of the ecological Indian onto a science fiction world
created around an indigenous tribal culture of the year 2154 on a massive moon called
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Pandora. Having despoiled Earth, colonizing, strip-mining humans travel to Pandora to
mine a powerful mineral, no matter what the cost to the local inhabitants. Thoreau,
McCandless, and James Cameron, in very distinct ways, each followed the model of the
ecological Indian to assist with their quite different returns to nature. Thoreau most
famously modeled his Walden Pond reverie on lessons and lore from Indians, leaving
unpublished at his death an extensive collection of “Indian Notes.” A tragic figure of our
own age who lacked Thoreau’s literary significance and powers of reflection, but went
deeper into the wild than Thoreau ever did, McCandless trekked into the Alaskan
wilderness with a 22 rifle, a bag of rice, a paperback of Thoreau’s Walden, and a copy of
“comprehensive guide [that] includes more than one hundred plants recognized by the
speculated by Jon Krakauer and Chip Brown, was that he starved in the wilderness he
came to subsist upon, perhaps complicated by his failure to distinguish between Indian
Like many westerners of the last 500 years who have imagined and practiced
various forms of going Indian, Thoreau, McCandless, and Cameron share with French
particular, and indigenous peoples in general, represent the ideal model for living in
harmony with nature. That any human band can live in equilibrium with nature, even as
an ideal mythos in our heads, represents a potential answer to the dominant, our-very-
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sustainable, and how might we return to them before we ourselves join the megafauna of
Even our traditional European and western agrarian ideals, the romantic ideal of
golden harvests as seen in Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s “The Harvesters” (1565), threshing
of wheat by hand, the farm workers resting after their hearty lunch, and more recent
idealizations of the family farm community, have largely been threatened to extinction by
decades of industrial food production, which rests precariously on the ordered, crop row,
mention the petroleum-fueled nitrogen fertilization and chemically controlled mono crops
of contemporary farming. As I write this, the front page of my local Champaign, Illinois
news daily—The News Gazette—carries the story of waste spill into Lone Tree Creek
and Sangamon River from a CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) that led to the
deaths of 40,000 fish and amphibians. Contrast the mass, industrialization of our food
plantings of corn, beans, and squash (as does Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s
Dilemma), and our contemporary alienation from nature seems less science fiction or
ecological jeremiad than a legitimate psychological response to our century long slide
into dystopia.
America’s most famous Indian. Star of perhaps the best-known public service
announcement ever, he was a black-braided, buckskinned, cigar-store native
come to life, complete with single feather and stoic frown. In the spot’s original
version, launched by Keep America Beautiful on Earth Day 1971, he paddles his
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canoe down a pristine river to booming drumbeats . . . rows into a city harbor:
ship, crane, a scrim of smog. . . pulls his boat onto a bank strewn with litter and
gazes upon a freeway. . . . ‘Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the
natural beauty that was once this country,’ intones a basso profundo voice, ‘and
some people don’t.’ On those words, someone flings a bag of trash from a passing
car. It scatters at the Indian’s feet. He looks into the camera for the money shot. A
single tear rolls down his cheek. ‘People start pollution. People can stop it,’
declares the narrator.
From Ginger Strand’s perspective the “genius” of the Crying Indian public service
announcement undercut more dramatic environmental action since its proposed solution
to environmental problems was that individual citizens should stop littering. The “sell
out” of environmentalism, according to Strand, is that the Ad Council and Keep America
Beautiful, producers of the Crying Indian PSA, actively served the business interests of
the disposable can industry at the expense of refillable bottles. For Strand and others like
documentary filmmaker Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage,
and author Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land, the Keep America Beautiful organization and
its Crying Indian public service campaign, with its corporate backing of producers of
truth is less positive or even environmentally negative. For Strand, the most famous
crying environmental Indian of the last century is compromised not only because the
actor, Iron Eyes Cody, was actually Italian-American Espera Oscar DeCorti, but also
because:
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helm, a new ad agency was brought in—Marsteller, who happened to be
American Can’s own ad agency. The visual arm of Burson-Marsteller, the global
public relations firm famous for its list of clients with environment-related
publicity problems, Marsteller crafted the new approach. The crying Indian
campaign, premiering on Earth Day 1971, had it all: a heart-wrenching central
figure, an appeal to mythic America, and a catchy slogan. There was a pro forma
gesture in the direction of ecology—the Indian paddles by some belching
smokestacks, after all—and the language had shifted from “littering” to
“pollution.” But the message was the same: quit tossing coffee cups out of the
window of your Chevy Chevelle, you pig, and America’s environmental problems
will end.
Strand does acknowledge the power of the Crying Indian PSA, its message coming across
that “What we’ve done to this land is not right, and Indians know it, because we did it to
them, too.” For viewers, “a dark possibility opens up: our way of life is destructive. The
cars, the pollution, the factories: it’s not, despite what we’ve been told, the best of all
Crying Indian PSA on YouTube highlights the ad’s effectiveness and ability, still, to
incite moral indignation. After Avatar’s successful translation of the crying ecological
Indian into the science fiction film it is now obvious that the Crying Indian PSA from
1971 was an effective, early environmental jeremiad in the form of science fiction. In the
style of an Indian Rip Van Winkle, who has awakened years later, or time traveled by
traditional canoe to a 1970s America of polluted rivers, belching smoke stacks, and
inspired millions of American viewers to look, regretfully, upon their sleek, modern
world.
In his powerful and controversial book The Ecological Indian: Myth and History,
Shepard Krech sought to undercut the idealized and romanticized view of Indians in
harmony with nature by comparing the poetry to the history. In reviews of numerous
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historical and archeological findings from multiple sources, Krech was able to show that
real Indians in history, even pre-1492 contact, had often acted in ways inconsistent with
debated possibility that Pleistocene hunters of mega fauna such as Mammoths and Giant
Sloths may have contributed wholly or partially to their extinction, the ecological
struggles of the Hohokam with salt buildup in their extensive irrigation systems, and
markets for beaver, deer, and bison, Krech argues that Indians were not ecological
“saints” or the first conservationists, but real people making difficult decisions as they
employed a very sophisticated appreciation of nature. In the years following his major
publication, Krech’s work suffered abuse from both extreme political ends of the Culture
wars, with rightwing talk radio hosts and political organizations co-opting his findings to
argue, in effect, see, Indians are no better than western industrial folks in there
left saw Krech’s diminishment of the ecological Indian ideal, and his interpretations of
history, as a frontal assault on their beliefs, cultures, and contemporary autonomy and
stewardship of land, resources, and hunting and fishing rights. An excellent historian,
Krech’s basic reading of the historical record is correct: both pre-1492 and contemporary
Indians were and are real people with complex and diverse relationships with nature, and
some historical Indian practices (buffalo jumps, where some amount of the kill was
wasted; and the use of fire to alter the landscape, which sometimes got out of hand and
destroyed more than was intended) seem, from contemporary conservation and ecological
perspectives, as less than ideal. That noted, the tremendous gulf between pre-1492
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Indians and their environment and our own post-colonial, post-industrial, post-petroleum
environment and behaviors seems monumental, almost as different as, say, Earth from
Pandora.
No, the main problem with Krech’s critique of the ecological Indian is his belief
that he can, with only “objective” history and science at his disposal, judge an entire
swath of history, and the infinitely complex relationship of an entire continent of peoples
with nature, using a patchwork historical and archeological record missing entire
purviews, and without the aid of the imagination. More forcefully, Krech does make
judgments and, ultimately, crafts a narrative broad sweep worthy of any storyteller.
Krech doesn’t realize that if removes the ecological Indian from existence, it will be
Krech is right to emphasize that one problem with idealizations and cherished
myths is that daily practices and careful readings of history can undercut them; from there
it is not too difficult to cynically throw our ideals out as compromised and for real people
in the environment for centuries, from Rousseau to Avatar, we also have centuries of
officials critiqued tribes for failures of conservation awareness, practice, results. Most
significantly, we have the perpetual tension between the real lives and practices of tribal
peoples contrasted with impossible ideals and standards set within the ecological Indian.
Like a strange version of the one-drop blood quantum, a single slip by real tribal peoples
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in the realm of environmental relations leads some to the conclusion that indigenous
relations to the environment are therefore equivalent to western, industrial practices. This
simplistic dichotomy and us-them binary is, of course, a major failing and perpetual
problem of our contemporary politics and discourse. The point I will argue here is that
the idealized ecological Indian of literature and cinema continues to serve us as a beacon
and collective psychological rallying point within our long lamentation of our
living with and working against nature. Native ways (see Easter Islanders, the Hohokam,
and the Anasazi) did not always insure adaptability, survivability, conservation, or
harmony or symbiosis. That said, the gulf between the embedded-in-nature stance of
historical and contemporary indigenous peoples contrasted with our highly urbanized,
largely accounts for our current alienations from nature and our Avatar-style idealizations
I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be
myself.
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about the noble savage and
when they are, in fact, more complex, serious, and relevant to modern thought than we
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give credit. Rousseau most certainly did believe that indigenous peoples were closer to
nature and, therefore, stronger, more content, and egalitarian than any person suffering
from the virtues of civilization. Like many cultures and philosophers, Rousseau sought
current state of messy advances and moral failings. Yet Rousseau did not, as the
common caricature of his thought holds, believe that a simple return to nature was
possible. Indeed, Rousseau’s thought was far from naïve and sentimental in this regard
as he argued insistently that it was impossible to return to nature and our original state by
direct means. It was only by indirect means and through our modern, civilized states of
being that Rousseau felt we could get somewhat closer. For Rousseau, it was an act of
the imagination and our ways of being that might improve our fallen state. It is in this
regard that we should give Rousseau credit for the “original story” behind all the
subsequent narratives—from Deerslayer to Avatar. These stories situate our hopes for
reconciling humanity’s place in nature by going Indian with the ecological Indian.
The message has definitely been resonating with people . . . A large part of the
appeal of the movie is it speaks to something that people know is true. It may take
place on a fictional planet, but it's a story that definitely happens on Earth.
modern world, these films, these returns to nature are human creations that perform
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enhance, amplify, and improve on nature. They are time capsules, museums, zoological
parks, and textual, celluloid, digital time travel machines of our imagination. If we begin
with the latest of these machines, James Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar, then our cold
analysis will not seem so callous or academic. Avatar is our culture’s latest, greatest
theatrical lighting to stagecraft. Indeed, it is one of the points of this essay that it is
makes it able to render an enhanced nature and refashion the noble savage of past films.
This, perhaps, drives the director, film crew, global audience toward a frenetic, desperate,
and ultimately hopeless return to nature via machine. As our global virtual world
expands in proportion to the shrinkage of nature, our future selves, or, perhaps, Na’vi-like
anthropologists from another world, may find in Avatar a cultural artifact that
inhabitable virtual nature, even as it laments and dreams one last great return to nature.
Avatar begins, in its theatrical release versions, with a flyover of a misty jungle
forest (Pandora) and our hero, paraplegic Marine Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington’s)
voice-over: “When I was lying there in the V.A. hospital with a big hole blown through
the middle of my life. I started having these dreams of flying—I was free! Sooner or
later, though, you always have to wake up.” Next, this lush dream flight over verdant
jungle is contrasted with the antiseptic, completely technological world of the interior of
a deep space exploration ship, the crew in cryogenic hibernation for nearly six years,
totally dependent on machines and artificial environments. The crew awakens and floats
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out of their sleeping pods in zero gravity. We see no plants or animals—all is
mechanical and electronic. Avatar will continue to juxtapose the technological world of
the colonists of Earth with the natural world of the Pandoran Na’vi; interestingly,
Cameron claims that the great cost (over 300 million dollars) and length of his production
(four and one half years) are due to this extensive and rigorous creation and fabrication of
sequence showing Jake Sully on earth, just before his departure to Pandora, presents even
more explicit a contrast between a verdant nature and a fallen urban dystopia. In the
alternate opening, Cameron borrows heavily from Blade Runner’s dystopian urban
landscape of total congestion, pollution, ubiquitous neon advertising, and gritty night life.
A wheel-chair bound vet, shades of Lt. Dan in Forrest Gump, Jake Sully spends his time
drinking and fighting in bars and returning to his tiny apartment, where space and style
and comfort have been sacrificed for a flat panel television that takes up an entire wall
only 5 feet from his bed. Beautifully, magnificently, baby tiger cubs (cloned at the
Bejing Zoo) play on his gargantuan screen, the only flora or fauna seen in the entire Earth
opening, sad reminders of awe and fear inspiring predators, “Monster of God” (to
reference the outstanding naturalist writer David Quammen’s book), that once roamed
freely on Earth, and, we will soon see, dominate the Pandoran ecosystem.
marvelous flora and fauna, Avatar’s designers seemed to borrow heavily from
Spielberg’s dinosaur successes in the Jurasic Park series, even as they tried to top that
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big budget blockbuster with their own imaginative enhancements. In the spirit of the
blockbuster action spectacle, Avatar did Jurassic Park one better in combining it’s story,
invented fauna, and special effects creations around the conceit of Na’vi taming and
flying pterodactyl-like Mountain Banshees, a richly evocative trope that satisfied the
demands of a global cinematic spectacle, but also contrasted powerfully with the aerial
gun ships and space craft of the human, “Sky People” invaders. More subtly, but most
significant for this essay, Avatar’s Banshee flying Na’vi reinterpreted American Indian
tribal cosmology and clan totems of Eagle, Raven, and Hawk and also the historical
domestication and incorporation of feral Spanish horses into plains Indian culture. By
having each Na’vi ritually tame and form a “network” bond with each Mountain
Banshee, Cameron and his designers and storytellers took an imaginative leap that
convention, Indian religions and history, video games and virtual worlds, and network,
Cameron’s Aliens, where heavily armed space soldiers follow a tactical landing in order
to eradicate aliens on distant planets. On Pandora, the humans must don oxygen masks
and are quickly marched into the well-secured human colony, which is part forward
operating military base (a Pandoran Fort Apache or Khe Sanh of Vietnam) and part
Sully uses a genetically sympathetic Na’vi body as his flesh-and-blood avatar. On his
very first time using his avatar, Jake revels in his regained ability to walk and breaks free
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of the operating room, escapes outside into the compound, runs through a garden,
enjoying both the return to full mobility as well as his new world. This contrast with a
military industrial dystopia and the yearning for a pre-fall, direct and immediate relation
with nature is the central idealized mythos of the film. This ideal is starkly contrasted
with the film’s central nightmare: the threat of our becoming completely entombed in
our own technological, militarized, and corporatized environment, to the exclusion of any
vestige of nature, save images of cloned tigers on our wall-sized televisions. The pathos
and paradox of Avatar is that both Cameron and his global audience certainly shared a
basic understanding that our return to nature was made possible wholly by the self-
Besting our great natural history museums with its sense of presence within a believable
“natural” world that is, entirely and only, the latest, greatest flicker of light on Plato’s
cave wall, Avatar is, partly, a glorious reminder of what once was and is gone forever.
Since there does remain enough real nature outside Avatar’s virtual space that we can
experience firsthand, and fight for, Avatar’s message and experiential effects in service of
catastrophe might actually outweigh the film’s carbon footprint and amazingly successful
One of the most interesting aspects of Avatar is the way in which Cameron and
his team have used their imaginations and cinematic virtual prowess to create a Pandoran
nature that is as amplified, jacked up, and just as “larger than life” as the mechanical,
militarized, fantasy spectacles that are the calling card of science fiction, graphic novels,
and video games. In Avatar, the Pandoran plants, wildlife, and indigenous must compete,
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and ultimately prevail against, the hyperbolized gun ships, mech suits (AMP suits:
Amplified Mobility Platform suits), space craft, weapons, and technological gizmos
familiar from Cameron’s own Aliens to countless video games such as Mechwarrior,
World of Warcraft, and Halo. Nature is amplified, enhanced, re-imagined and made as
compelling and “pumped up” as any other video game element. Pandoran
bioluminescence is an explosion of light, whereby all the flora and fauna of the planet
engage in a fireworks show and glow of lights that is visible from space.
When asked by New York Daily News reporter Ethan Sacks about the difference
between his own Avatar and The Day After Tomorrow (both of which use the blockbuster
science fiction film as a cautionary tale regarding human impacts on the environment)
James Cameron forcefully rejected the comparison: "’The Day After Tomorrow' was
crap science. It was ridiculous, so it was fairly easily dismissed . . . The thing about
next point highlights his awareness of the difference between science and fiction. As one
craftsmen, and one who has been known for a monumental commitment toward
believable and plausible worlds, including years of design and fabrication of the
Pandoran flora and fauna, Cameron fully acknowledges and embraces his storyteller’s
role as imaginary architect: "The only thing that 'Avatar' does, and I think it does it very
something that as any human being with a conscience you probably already feel."
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As the latest expression of the noble savage and going Indian myths, Avatar
works like so many other narratives in these domains, functioning to express the grief of
lost nature and alienation from being in nature. All humans develop the capacity to
grieve death and lament their awareness of and perpetual distance from animal existence
place in nature, and, therefore, to begin to build ramparts, both physical and imaginative,
that separate our consciousness from nature and our animal being.
May 9. Sunday [1841]. The pine stands in the woods like an Indian, - untamed,
with a fantastic wildness about it, even in the clearings. If an Indian warrior were
well painted, with pines in the background, he would seem to blend with the trees,
and make a harmonious expression. The pitch pines are the ghosts of Philip and
Massasoit. The white pine has the smoother features of the squaw.
how such disparate Indian dwellings as tipis, earth lodges, and hogans arose from
unique cultural traditions, but ultimately highlight a common practice wherein “Many
Native people have planned and constructed their dwellings as a microcosm of the
universe. They aligned their houses with the cardinal directions, used lodge poles as
pathways linking the heavens to the Earth, and built domed roofs in the image of the
bowl of the sky.” The natural materials of traditional Indian dwellings are, like the
nests of birds and beaver lodges, literally parts of nature repurposed and reassembled.
Indian dwellings built of natural materials and following traditional building practices
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imaginations even as most Indians and non-Indians rely on ever greater amounts of
context it is not surprising that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, likely the most
bridge this chasm between modern construction materials and practices and a physical
and aesthetic position within nature by such bold methods as building the home on top
of an active water fall, incorporating native rocks that protrude into the living area,
and glass windows that connect seamlessly into rock via carefully cut recesses.
In Avatar this dwelling with and in Nature has been taken literally back to a
Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora, the Na’vi’s
Hometree is over 325 meters tall, is the “spiritual and physical home of the Omaticaya
clan,” and is “two to three times the height of the Terran redwoods that once covered
dozens of clan members. The tree is honeycombed with natural hollows and alcoves
in which the Na’vi sleep, eat, weave, dance, and celebrate their connection to Eywa.”
close around their bodies to the touch as if animate. These hammocks, according to
Avatar: A Confidential Report, have two Na’vi names, which can be translated as
“Eywa cradles everyone” and “Safe in the arms of Eywa” (38). The massive
Hometree, however, is not the most significant tree to the Na’vi. The Tree of Souls, a
willow-like tree of light that can connect with any life form on Pandora, is considered
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by the Na’vi as their most sacred site, and it is this location that serves at the film’s
final battle sequence and final scenes where the human bodies of Grace and Jake are
brought to connect and transfer back into their avatar bodies, a natural method of
connection and transfer that contrasts markedly with the technology-based “linking”
achieved by the humans. The literalness and simplicity of Avatar’s tree hugging has
been critiqued as part and parcel of the film’s overall commitment to didactic,
many scenes cut from the original theatrical version and now available via DVD
suggest a more complex and morally ambiguous film, including a scene where the
Na’vi massacre the mining crew that assaulted Hometree. In the end, Avatar’s
insistence on re-imagining a full-bodied tree hugging seems one of the film’s most
argues with RDA executive Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) about the value of
Pandora’s trees, hoping to persuade him from directing his fully militarized “security
forces” from attacking the Na’vi’s most sacred Tree of Souls. Most revealing is the
fact that the general rhetorical positions and sarcastic barbs displayed here could work
in almost any debate between environmental and business concerns of the last 100
years:
Dr. Grace Augustine: Those trees were sacred to the Omaticaya in a way you
can't imagine.
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Selfridge: You know what? You throw a stick in the air around here it falls on
Dr. Grace Augustine: I'm not talking about pagan voodoo here. I'm talking
Dr. Grace Augustine: What we think we know is that there's some kind of
synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the
trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora.
Dr. Grace Augustine: That's more connections than the human brain. You get
it? It's a network—a global network. And the Na'vi can access it—they can
upload and download data, memories, at sites like the one you just destroyed.
Selfridge: What the hell have you people been smoking out there? They're just
goddamn trees.
Dr. Grace Augustine: You need to wake up, Parker. The wealth of this world
isn't in the ground—it's all around us. The Na'vi know that, and they're fighting
to defend it. If you want to share this world with them, you need to understand
them.
represents a work of monumental ambition and scope aimed at a mass audience and
carrying a cautionary message aimed at warding off ecological and social catastrophe.
Most revealingly, trees are at the center of both stories. In Diamond’s historical and
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global span from the Anasazi and Mayan, to the Easter Islanders and Vikings, to
and ecological health (Rwanda; Haiti). It may not be overly simplistic to say that,
according to Diamond and many historians and environmental scientists, cultures that
the sincerity with which Avatar explores ethical and spiritual expressions. While its use
New Age thought is not merely cosmetic adornment and affectation. In many ways,
Avatar represents a very conscious attempt to present a pop culture expression of deep
ecology for the masses. With its story of space travel and discovery of an Earth-like
indigenous past within a science fiction dystopia, (into the future to rediscover our past),
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Avatar is also a pop culture cosmology, an attempt to explain where we came from, and
mainstream ecology’s restrictive focus on science alone with an ecosophy that considers
our relationship with nature within a philosophy, an ethical system, and a search for
wisdom. Currently, deep ecology is evident in much of the rhetoric and thought of the
green movement, environmental activism, and New Age religious beliefs. Like
Rousseau, who answered the question of why we have inequality among peoples with his
argument that man fell from a pure relationship with nature and created debilitating
civilizations, deep ecology similarly is founded on the ideal of equality for all, this time
borrowing from animism the ideal that all animate and inanimate elements of nature are
equal. All things in nature have a right to exist and thrive. This is, in many ways, the
antithesis of the Judeo-Christian reading of man as sovereign over nature or the largely
anthropocentric stance of post-industrial, scientific ideology. For Naess and other deep
ecologists, even the more benign idea of Christian stewardship of nature is seen as a
articulated deep ecology. In reflecting on the great separation between our contemporary
environmental contexts and the fictional world of Pandora and the historical practices of
Indian tribes it is very easy to doubt a return to nature or even the possibility of saving
some greater part of nature. Rousseau was right; we can never return fully to nature.
And, too, imaginative flights of fancy such as Avatar are merely that. Yet there is
something of Pandora still on Earth. Following the global success of Avatar, James
Cameron lent his celebrity to support Amazonian indigenous tribes who are fighting the
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proposed 17 billion dollar Bello Monte Dam project on Brazil’s Xingu River. In a
Message From Pandora” James Cameron recounts his visits to the Kayapo tribe in Brazil
and suggests his own hopes about where we go from here. Cameron follows Rousseau’s
And I’m not saying we have to abandon the cities and go strip off all our clothes and try
to run out into the forest and live like the Kayapo. That’s not going to work; and the
Kayapo don’t want us there. Plus, we wouldn’t know how to do it. We’ve severed the
connection to the ancient knowledge that’s necessary to do that.
His hopes for our future, like his film, follows from his faith that we can reconcile the
What we have to do is we have to transform ourselves yet again, into something that’s
never existed on this planet before, which is kind of a techno-indigenous people. We
have all our technology. We’ll use high technology and science to provide us with the
energy that we need, but they’ll be sustainable solutions. Nature’s not our enemy; it’s
our sustenance and we need it and we need nature healthy for us to be healthy and to
survive, long term. And that’s the realization we have to come to and that’s the next
stage of evolution that we have to reach.
Perhaps the universality recognized in Avatar and other treatments of the ecological
Indian is more than just narrative convention; perhaps the challenge to establish a place in
Works Cited
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Baird, Robert. "‘Going Indian:’ In and Around Dances With Wolves." Dressing in
Bol, Marsha C. Ed. Stars Above, Earth Below: American Indians and Nature. Niwot,
Brown, Chip. Feb. 8th, 1993. “I Now Walk Into the Wild.” The New Yorker.
Diamond, Jared. 2004. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York:
Viking Adult.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Editors Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr. 1987. The
Ethan, Sacks. “James Cameron uses Earth Day Release of 'Avatar' DVD to Promote
Garennes, Christine Des. 2010. Agency Ups Monitoring of Large Livestock Farms. The
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Krech, Shepard. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W.W.
Martin, Calvin. “The American Indian as Miscast Ecologist.” The History Teacher.
Quammen, David. 2003. Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of
History and the Mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Rogers, Heather. 2005. Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. New York: The
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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. Rousseau: ‘The Social Contract’ and Other Later
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the Western Political Science Association, Manchester Hyatt, San Diego, California,
Strand, Ginger. “The Crying Indian: How an Environmental Icon Helped Sell Cans—
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3642/
Thoreau, Henry David. 1906. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton
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Wilhelm, Maria and Dirk Mathison. 2009. Avatar: A Confidential Report on the
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