Climate Change Lessons from James Cameron's Avatar: New Values Required

"The Earth is dying.... covered with a gray mold of human civilization.... Overpopulation, overdevelopment, nuclear terrorism, environmental warfare tactics, radiation leakage from power plants and waste dumps, toxic waste, air pollution, deforestation, pollution and overfishing of the oceans, global warming, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity through extinction... all of these have combined to make the once green and beautiful [earth] a terminal cess-pool." This isn't the opening pages to Soylent Green or an overzealous dystopian climate change movie, but the opening pages of the greatest cinematic masterpiece of our time; thus read the first page of James Cameron's Avatar Script- the ultimate green movie of all time. Surprisingly, Avatar does not feature a single scene set on our planet in which it paints such vivid, powerful themes.

Avatar, is set in the year 2154 (144 years from today). The hero of the story Jake Sully is a paraplegic marine disabled from a war over energy. Replacing his deceased twin brother on a mission requiring his identical genome, Jake launches out to space to land on the lush and vibrant rainforest moon: Pandora. The scenery is breathtaking: trees tower as high as mountains, plant life glows neon green, red, purple and blue, and mountains float like clouds in the air due to the magnetic flux from large quantities of superconductor minerals. Immediately you're reminded of a similarly beautiful landscape here today on earth in the Amazon & Congo Rainforests; both are treasures global warming looks to steal away as we approach the futuristic earth of the movie. Avatar ties so closely to the future perils of this planet and the desperate acts caused by business as usual. The theme of "Economy over the Environment" is a thematic value system the movie shares with current conventional practices.

The item of greed and justification for violence in the movie (like in our world) is simply a black rock. Like how we treat fossil fuels and coal, the antagonists aim to pillage the land to obtain a mineral called "unobtanium... this little grey rock sells for $20M a kilo, it's what pays for the whole party." The theme of corporate and social irresponsibility rampages throughout the movie: exploitation of resources in foreign lands, pillaging indigenous populations, and "forcing their cooperation;" all actions ignoring the millions of tons of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.

The corporate administrator in the film, Parker Selfridge, justified his destructive actions on the environment and hailed: "The only thing worst than bad press is a bad quarterly statement." He uses the bottom line to justify his hunger for industrial resources . The important lesson for climate change comes in the need for a new value system, like the triple bottom line: people, planet, and also profit. Money isn't everything. As Sigourney Weaver's character says so eloquently, "Don't you get it? The value of this planet isn't just in the ground, it's all around us."

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