Avatar’s environmental message

There were two reasons I wanted to get out and see the Oscar-nominated hit 3D movie Avatar—so I would have a clue what everyone else was talking about, and because my dad wanted to see it too. Now, thanks to an essay by Richard Meech, a Toronto-based documentary film-maker, which appeared in The Globe and Mail on the weekend, I can almost justify seeing a weekday matinee on behalf of Cottage Life.

Richard suggests that the film’s Canadian writer, director, and producer, James Cameron, may have “tapped into a zeitgeist that longs for a deeper connection to nature and a re-enchantment with the natural world.” Isn’t that what all true cottagers desire?

Even those among us who go to the cottage purely for the recreation (a.k.a. dock parties) must have some sense of the natural world as a provider, if only to give a lake for wakeboarding and a dark sky for the nightly bonfire.

Ah, so cynical. Most of us know that the power of nature is more profound than that. “Part of what Mr. Cameron has done,” Richard writes, “is to awaken an ardour for the beauty and mystery of nature at a time when many people feel our planetary ecosystem is most under threat.”

I first met Richard when he was working on Millenium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World, a 10-part series that explored remote tribal societies. So it didn’t surprise me to learn that he was working on another film, Vine of the Soul, about ayahuasca, a sacred medicine in the Amazon. In his essay, Richard postulates a link between the thick ayahuasca vine of the Amazon and the “Tree of Souls” in Avatar. “Both plants—our vine, their tree—allow initiates to…plug into the living biological matrix that sustains all life.”

“In the end,” Richard writes, “it may just be that Avatar will get us all listening again to the plant world around us.”

Will it really take a sci-fi film to bring us back to our senses?

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Posted in Nature,The environment