Pandora and The Modern Thought

     In the movie Avatar, there are several environmental concepts portrayed. The master narrative in the film is that all life is connected through their spirit and their energy. The Omaticaya people believed that all life on Pandora was dependent on each other and the Tree of Souls. That connection allowed the people to live amongst the land and animals. The humans that were on Pandora came to dig up priceless rocks to sell on Earth’s black market. The leader of the humans, Parker Selfridge, didn’t care too much about the natives of Pandora or their land. He said sarcastically that “…you throw a stick in the air around here and it’ll land on some sacred fern.”  That leads me to believe that he and Colonel Quatrich were believers in Anthropocentrism. To them humankind is far more important than anything else. Dr. Grace first wanted to study the wildlife on Pandora to understand how they were connected. She studied the planet with an atomistic view. She took samples of plant life and studied the Omaticaya people independent of each other. She later realized the paradigm that the whole planet was connected through some sort of “electrochemical communication” that allowed the plant and wildlife to interact with each other.  Dr. Grace was trying to explain the Planet Pandora to Parker by using reductionism. She compared Pandora to something he could understand, like synapsis in the human brain. Even then, he did not want to understand. Jake Sulley, the main character of the film, set out to Pandora to take his brother’s place in the Avatar Project. He viewed his self-narrative as one individual, distinct from any group, and not reliant on anyone. When he entered the avatar machine for the first time and Dr. Grace wanted to help him, he refused. He said he was tired of people telling him what he could and could not do.

     Although the planet is made up of living organisms, the idea of Pandora is also mechanistic in the fact that the planet is a network of energy that is borrowed. When you die your energy is returned back to the planet to reproduce other organisms. The five assumptions about the structure of being, knowledge, and method from Merchant’s article(48-50) on radical ecology stand true for Pandora: (1) matter in Pandora is composed of particles; (2) there is a natural order in Pandora where everything has an identity; (3) knowledge and information can be abstracted from the Tree of Souls; (4) over a period of time, Dr. Grace studied and analyzed different plants and wildlife on Pandora (5) humans were able to affect the balance of nature on Pandora by interacting with it. Another concept that can be obtained from Avatar is the dualism between the humans and the Omaticaya people. To the viewers the humans are portrayed as evil compared to the Omaticaya people as good. A connection could also be made between the American Settlers versus the Native Americans. The Humans, like the settlers, came seeking land and resources plowing anyone or anything that stood in their way. I think Avatar was made with many underlying themes that can be connected to different environmental issues. If you watch it closely you’ll be able to see the similarities in how our society treats the environment and how the humans treated Pandora. Hopefully many people will watch this film and come away with a different outlook on environmental issues.