I must confess that Avatar was not a film that I particularly wanted to see. It is, after all, a Hollywood blockbuster that consumed huge amounts of money and resources in its making and which has no doubt produced huge profits for a handful of people who are already far too wealthy for their own good and for the good of us all.
But my son Oscar, a feisty 8 year-old, was determined to see it, so in the end, and with a huge reluctance, we found ourselves queuing with the crowd to see it in 3D in a nearby cinema. The plot is fairly standard. Humans of the future are poised to destroy a beautiful world called Pandora (a moon of a much larger planet in some far-off solar system) because they want to get hold of a rare mineral buried in its crust. The humans are nasty and armed to the teeth. But, in an attempt to satisfy the whims of their goodly ethical investors back on Earth, they have hit on a clever ruse for getting the indigenous Pandorans to move peacefully out of the way of the giant bulldozers and colossal mining machines poised to destroy their world.
The trick involves transferring the consciousness of two humans into two genetically engineered Pandoran bodies so that these ‘avatars’ can infiltrate the Pandoran community and convince its members to abandon the giant sacred tree under which there sits a particularly rich deposit of the mineral that excites such manic greed in the avatars’ human masters.
So far I was unimpressed. I could smell the coming of gratuitous Hollywood violence, and hoped that it wouldn’t wreak havoc on young Oscar’s psyche. But it was impossible to leave – he was engrossed, and it was clear that an attempted exit would be more trouble than it was worth. So we stayed, bracing ourselves for another two hours of this meaningless, silly stuff.
Then, suddenly, one of the Avatars escaped the high tech confines of the human compound with its pop-up, see-through computer screens, bleeping lights and other utterly mechanistic, soulless high tech paraphernalia, and wandered off into the surrounding wilderness, leaving his human body marooned in the plastic coffin that had not long since propelled his trembling consciousness into the avatar body.
To my amazement, the Computer Generated (‘CG’, Oscar tells me) Pandoran world that the avatar stumbled into was stunningly lovely, even to my eyes as a trained ecologist. Here was a complex Pandoran tropical forest biome teeming with the right ecological feel and texture. The organisms were from an imaginary world, but that world ably mirrored the diversity, integrity and ineffable wholeness of our own healthy, earthly ecology.
Eventually, the avatar meets a beautiful female (of course) indigenous Pandoran (of the ‘N’iva’ tribe, I believe) who rescues him from a tricky misunderstanding involving some toothsome Pandoran carnivores, and then takes him on a long and visually stunning journey through the forest to meet the rest of her tribe.
To my amazement, the Pandorans, despite their ‘CG’ blue skins, long tails and feline Nubian good looks, movingly portrayed something of the wonderful gentleness and sensitivity of our own, real life, indigenous people. The speech was right, the elegant movements and physical agility were right, the dignity was right, but above all, their deep connection and love of their mother planet was utterly and totally spot-on. They called her Eiwa (I think) – we call her Gaia, but to me they are one and the same. They spoke of Eiwa’s sacred intelligence with which they communicated via a living network of all-pervasive underground organisms – the Pandoran equivalent of our own mycelial (fungal) world which connects the plants on our Earth’s land surfaces with an intelligence so acute that some serious mycologists refer to it as a ‘brain in the soil’. I had no doubt at this point that the makers of this film had taken advice from some excellent anthropologists and ecologists. I can even hazard a guess at which distinguished American mycologist gave them the low down about mycelial networks. Next time I see the film I shall look for his name in the credits.
The more I saw of the long-limbed, blue skinned N’iwa people, the more I realised that they were telling us, in their ‘CG’ way about the preciousness, intelligence and sacredness of our own world, beleaguered and plagued as it is by the real greed and selfishness of us all, its human inhabitants. The more the N’iwans swam, danced, and fought for survival against the violence that was eventually unleashed against them, the more I felt my own flesh and blood coursing with a deep intuitive knowing that our earth is alive, that it is intelligent, that she is a sacred ancient being, and that we must do all we can to protect her from our ignorance, hatred and delusion.
So much so in fact, that by the end of the film a powerful Gaian consciousness thrummed and pulsed through every cell in my body like a mighty cleansing river. An eerie possibility dawned on me: could it be that through this film Gaia’s ancient voice is calling us to wake up out of the destructive sleep of mass consumerism that currently drives our ruthless destruction her lustrous blue, green and white body? Could it be that via Avatar, Gaia is revealing herself to modern humanity using the very technology that elsewhere, in countless homes and offices, lulls us all into a numb state of disconnected, passive acceptance of the destructive status quo? It’s corny, I know, and I shouldn’t admit this, but I confess that I stood up trembling as people left the cinema around me. I found myself wishing and praying that Avatar will help whoever sees it to fall in love with the Earth, to rediscover the dignity of simple living in vibrant local communities and to tread lightly on our mother Earth. Imaginary the N’iwans are, but their style of consciousness must become a widespread reality in our human world, and fast, if we are to avoid the total collapse of our civilization and our living planet.
Stephan Harding is teaching on Gaia and the Evolution of Consciousness in June
Stephan Harding is the Co-ordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science.
