My grandson, four-years old, and me went this afternoon to see Avatar. This is the billion-dollar-grossing movie from James Cameron that is now all the rage.
Opinions on this movie are all over the map. The quarrelsome son who could never agree with his father, a mining consultant, says “It is the best movie I have ever seen.” My son-in-law and daughter said “We have seen that story before in Dances With Wolves.” The blog-sphere is awash with comments on the movie’s religious significance, its tree-hugging philosophies, and the racism of depicting innocent savages as blue-tinted aboriginals fighting to protect a forest from mining by white-men Americans.
I personally found the movie just too long and too noisy—even my grandson remarked “it is a loud movie.” And I felt uncomfortable most of the time thinking that I had read this story too often for my own good in the mining news columns of the past few years. Here is a link to one blog that analyzes the mining-related aspects of the movie, saying:
“It’s happening already in the Amazonian forests of Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Ecuador, where mining, oil, tourism, real state and lodging corporations are trying to take over the Indigenous peoples ancestral lands, in complicity with the local puppet governments.”
Discomforting as it is to watch nearly three-hours of decent white men planning to destroy the tree where lives a tribe of Avatars so the miners can mine “nonobtanium,” a very expensive element with an unfortunate name, that apparently occurs in abundance beneath the tree, it is even more embarrassing to watch the simulacrum of a white-women scientist working for a mining company studying the habits of the natives so that she can “understand” them as a precursor to getting them to move so the mine can be developed where they now live. The University of British Columbia turns out those types of earnest, well-meaning, but ultimately misguided ladies, year after year. They may be justifiably offended by this Hollywood caricature.
In fact the whole mining industry may be justifiably offended by this movie. It makes nasty fun of the fact that the mining company tries to give the Aboriginals schools and roads and health clinics—all the acrouments of sustainable development–and the ungrateful natives simply turf the miners out. How will we ever get nonobtanium if those forest folk keep rejecting the goodies of sustainable mining? The movie makes fun of the mining company whose shareholders demand profits even if a few cultures are blotted out and a few sacred trees are felled in the process. How will we ever make money and fund a consumptive lifestyle if we cannot mine in every forest and every glade?
The movies poses profound insights like this: “It has always been that way. If somebody has what you want, vilify them, provoke them, attack them, and take what you want.” That is a profound insight if you never studied history. The gold Kruger Rand testifies to a man who was thus dispossessed of his country by the British when they wanted the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. (I have never been able to decide if the gold Kruger Rand is a cruel joke or indeed a memorial to a man who acted, like the Avatars, to protect his country from greedy miners.)
I recommend that a copy of this movie be widely distributed in Alaska to all involved with the Pebble Mine. Both sides in the struggle to develop or stop the mine could take a lesson from the movie: how to band together to defeat the miners, if you can also get the cooperation of a few flying dragons, or conversely persuade the locals of the benefits of schools, clinics, and shopping malls, if you can enlist a few lady scientists from the University of British Columbia in developing a new Witwatersrand in Alaska. Maybe in ten years time, we can go and watch James Cameron’s new movie on the opening/defeat of the Pebble Bay Mine.
For the rest of this column, please go to the I Think Mining.com website: http://ithinkmining.com/2010/01/04/avatar-as-a-criticism-of-mining-or-a-reflection-of-deep-cultural-memory/