Avatared

I went to see Avatar yesterday with the boys. I don't know what to think about it. But here's a few things which have been swirling about in my head...

First, let me say that as someone who works with environmental devastation every day, it is a reality i deal with. From the destruction of peat bogs to the overfishing of the seas. It is a real and very urgent problem. And everyone is going to know what it means to have not stopped behaving the in the infantile way we are - no one will be spared, even people who know that we need to stop now, because there is no one to stop the machine.

So, when i see a film like Avatar, i want to scream...

I wonder, whose side is James Cameron on? Because if he was on the side of the environment, we would have allowed the film to have the ending it should have had. The ending that has occurred on this earth for the last five hundred years. That is happening now to the Orang Asli in the degraded rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia. It is taking place RIGHT NOW, not in some safe future or distant past. People are being shoved off their lands and being killed for defending their right to be alive. Being killed for palm oil plantations and being killed for greedy, short term, lucrative contracts. For the fool's gold of biofuels.

That male Western fantasy also really annoyed me. I understand this is James Cameron, not Andrea Dworkin, but still. 

And i tell you what scares me the most, what scares me the most was at some stage, i wondered, who was the audience identifying with - the rapist or the raped? I looked at the amount of thought that had gone into the design of the giant robots, the helicopters, the artillery...and i thought of the boys who love all this shit and who could play these games all day and night and wondered, who are they identifying with? The forest dwellers or the gunships? 

It also scared me how Cameron was trying to make a point about the sanctity of life while using a medium which was so clearly not about it. The whole idea of an avatar, which takes you out of yourself into a fantasy world is one which is just about a million miles away from connecting with the reality around us. Perhaps that's what needs to happen, but i've seen it even in the environmental movement, where people start inhabiting head space and not body space, when it becomes all about the theory and ideas and how to do things, then govern, overrule the reality of what is actually taking place on the ground. The Climate Change talks are a good example of the almighty mess people with good intentions have made, because they're desk people, not on the ground people.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions...

People need to STOP TALKING and START DOING. Stop wringing their hands and get on with it. Like Alan Bailey, the pig farmer and butcher i get my meat from. A man of action. Didn't like what was happening to HIM, and so decided to do something about it. Got himself a farm with his pay off and is now farming rare breed pigs in a humane way. A humble, down to earth man, who loves to talk and rant and has a dry sense of humour - and makes the best bacon in the world.

That's real.

Stop talking. Stop wasting your time. Stop with the prevaricating. Stop it.

And stop watching film after film after film of how the earth is going belly up and start doing something about it, because, guess what, its happening to us now and no one is doing it to us, we are doing it to ourselves, and if we don't get off our asses and stop watching and talking, then one day - we will be gone. Our trees would have gone, our fish disappeared, our birds fallen from the skies and our water unfit to drink. And then we can fight for the last scrap of shite which isn't worth fighting for. And unless you don't want this to happen, then wake up and stop sleeping, dreaming inside your Avatars.