With the movie Avatar, Pandora is presented as a virgin land of unspoiled beauty, a paradise with a vast landscape full of wildlife, huge trees, plants that react and move like animals, astonishing rainforests, wonderful waterfalls, lakes, rivers, massive cliffs hovering above the ground, impressive mountains and magnificent animals. It is nature as something divine and marvelous. Contrary to Pandora’s magnificent natural landscape, the base’s environment is purely a military construct in which everything is gray and dark and only artificial light exists.
The image of this lifeless place in which the only things are enormous excavators, trucks, steel and chain-link fences, huge tractors, gigantic, heavily- armored, human-operated walking machines and the colony’s armed private security force. Having ransacked Earth’s natural “resources,” imperialist-minded humans in the mid-22nd Century are now looking to do much the same to other worlds. They treat nature as something to be controlled and exploited—by force if necessary.
The Na’vi, in stark contrast, practice a form of naturalism; they inhabit a world teeming with animistic spirits and see themselves as intricately interwoven into their land and its history. These lanky blue beings even possess the ability to establish a physical link with other Pandoran life forms. In short, whereas the invading humans regard themselves as outside nature, mirroring the current Western mindset, the Na’vi worldview embeds them deeply within nature, as is true for virtually all indigenous peoples on Earth today.
The Na’vi live in harmony with the natural environment and have a deep connection with it. They strongly believe in an animate and divine nature and that the planet functions as a network which they have to respect. According to their theology, the plants, the animals and themselves are closely interconnected. One affects the other and one cannot live separately from the other. Unlike humans who do not hesitate to kill animals, the Na’vi try to peacefully coexist with them.
Their ideology is that the killing of animals should be “clean” (Avatar) ” this means that animals are killed only when it is necessary for the Na’vi’s survival and in a way that the animals suffer the least. They call animals brothers and sisters to consider them equal partners and that they deserve the same respect and treatment that the Na’vi have among themselves. As far as the natural environment is concerned, they believe that their deity Ey’wa, their “Great Mother,” is “made up of all things” (Avatar), that is both living and dead organisms.
So nature, animals and the Na’vi are all sacred, spiritual and equal. There is “a network of energy that flows through all living things. All energy is only borrowed, and one day you have to give it back” (Avatar). This idea, that nothing belongs to someone and that someone has to return what he or she take, is completely opposite from the normal attitude towards nature. There exists a parallel between the connections of the trees’ roots and the synapses among neurons in the human brain.
In this way, everything in nature, like in the human brain, is interconnected and that any damage will affect the whole living within a network, we humans need to take care not only of ourselves but also of everything in it because if we destroy its balance it will affect us. This is evident in places where arsons were committed by people who wanted to exploit the land for economic reasons. Since everything in nature is interconnected, the destruction of wooded areas resulted in serious flooding during the winter rains.
Like the Na’vi in Avatar, we need to understand that we are part of an ecosystem whose balance is very delicate and that any human intervention that abuses it will inevitably affect our own lives. The military and corporate men’s attitude are contrary to the Na’vi’s spiritual relation to the natural environment. They don’t view nature as animate and sacred but want to possess and exploit it for profit. The reason that they inhabit Pandora is the unobtanium, an incredibly precious mineral that is sold at a very high price.
Obviously, they view nature as a commodity, as something that they can own and turn into money. The only problem that they face is that the Na’vi’s village is sitting “right over the richest unobtanium deposit” (Avatar) and they aren’t willing to relocate. The military and corporate men are so much drugged by a capitalist ideology that they don’t hesitate to attack their village with fire and gas, destroy their land and their Home Tree and even consider tearing down their most sacred Mother Tree through which they connect with Eywa.
Having absolutely no contact with nature and being driven by their greed, they are unable to respect and understand its importance and sacredness. Although most humans in Avatar are totally disconnected from the natural environment and have no respect towards it, the protagonist, Jake Sully, acknowledges the Na’vi’s ideology and internalizes their deep connection to nature. In the beginning, Jake appears to be totally disconnected and alienated from the natural environment.
He can’t relax because he is afraid of it and views it as something dangerous that needs to be tamed by humans. When he starts living with the Na’vi and is taught their ways, he has difficulty assimilating. As Neytiri points out in their first encounter, Jake’s alienation from nature makes him “ignorant like a child” (Avatar) and unable to appreciate and live in the natural environment. However, he slowly changes and finally becomes part of nature’s network. The change starts from the outside and slowly moves to the inside.
He first changes on the surface, that is a change of the body, but soon Jake feels an internal confusion. He is not sure in which world he belongs and who he really is. He admits that he can barely remember his old life and that the Na’vi’s world seems more authentic. He finally realizes the energy that exists in nature and learns to appreciate every living organism. He admits that he has fallen in love with the forest and with the Na’vi’s way of living. He even reaches to the point of fighting against humans to protect Pandora’s natural environment and the Na’vi’s way of life.
Jake is transformed from a contemporary individual who is raised in an urban, industrial and capitalist society to a person who, having discovered the magic that exists in nature, becomes fully aware of our condition: we live in a “dying,” artificial world where we have “killed [our] Mother,” nature (Avatar). Na’vi ultimately prevail through violence, meeting force with force. However, in our search to achieve sustainability, violence is not going to win the day. Domination is the tool of the “outsider’s” perspective.
The profound challenge humans now face is triggering a peaceful revolution, a consciously driven transformation of mind and culture. Momentum for just such a transformation is now building around the world. But success will require to break free from the bonds of outsider thinking and seek sustainable alternatives that replay us firmly within nature. In Anne Tsing’s articles, she proclaims her “nerdy” love for mushrooms. These mushrooms require the “blasted” element of a landscape to grow. Tsing ends her article with the claim that “blasted landscapes are what we have, and we need to explore their life-promoting patches” (108).
In the various matsutake patches that she mentions, the blasted landscape is idealized and desired. In Satoyama, for example, the work done to cultivate a matsutake-friendly forest is extreme. She wrote, “the high value of matsutake today makes it easier to love matsutake forest reconstruction” (105). She also preemptively scolds this reaction when she admits her own reaction to the restoration projects was colored by her position as a “North American schooled in wilderness protection” (104). All that said, shouldn’t there be some more skepticism there about the role of capitalism in reconstructing wild spaces?
Tsing introduces the community involvement and the nostalgia present in these projects too, but what if they would have come to pass if the monetary payoff wasn’t so high. In addition to the incentive of the price of the mushrooms, Tsing writes that the evergreen forests “supported none of the color and life associated with either love of the seasons or childhood pleasure” (104). Why, then, is that not a blasted landscape? Why not find the “life-promoting patches” in the evergreen forests rather than tear them down to make room for the blasted landscapes that will birth matsutake?
The image of Mastutake Mushroom immediately provokes me with Fay’s expedition, recorded on dispatches from Congo Trek. On the journey to through the heart of Central Africa, Fay calls Goualougo as “the last wild place on Earth. ” Fay thought that he’d really been living in a kind of wonder world out here—in an animal world that just doesn’t exist anymore. Fay really emphasized wanting to keep this last piece of earth the way it is. The goals of this activity are basically using photograph to record wild like and to identify threats to the rain forest.
In views of animals in Congo Trek, humans belong to one parts of the forest here. The animals here, pretty like Na’vi in Avatar, seemingly have magical relations with nature. They treat humans not like enemies but like “in no other place—we’re strange things, completely unknown to them. They don’t flee. They come to inspect you. ” In fact, because we are a species they have never seen before. However, humans, or we can say outsiders, press into the wilds like dangerous predators.
Fay mentioned “human zone” a lot in his dispatch. When transitioning into the human zone, elephant trails start to disappear and the forest becomes much more dense in the understory. ” I believe “human zone” is a zone in which human’s behaviors dominate others. People are armed in no-man’s land. If we hope to preserve the rainforest, we have to spend some time getting out of our “human zone”. The human zone appears where you expect it to. People have reached a very high level of human activity here and the forest has been very severely damaged by this activity. Human’s activity will always have influence on animals.
As Fay wrote, “elephants are—not just here but continent wide—their movements and densities are explained completely by the presence and activities of humans in a very fine way, down to the scale of a kilometer or two. It is like magic. ” Pygmies are the most outstanding representatives of groups in Congo river, which is distinct from Fay and his team. Pygmies live in a more primitive way, much closer to the forest. As outsiders move to the rain forest, none of them know the forest. None of them really have any idea of where they are. They just know that they’re hunting in zones that have lots of animals.
They don’t know if they’re in Congo or the Central African Republic. They’ve been killing large numbers of duikers and monkeys. There are various indications that this is large-scale commercial bush-meat hunting that’s going on here. They represent how humans and other species learn together in a landscape that has been shaped by multiple disasters. African American novelist Toni Morrison wrote in her latest novel, A Mercy: “We never shape the world. The world shapes us” (83). Only when we connect with nature, we can raise our awareness of coexisting with nature.