AVATAR

This past December, a week before Christmas, 20th Century Fox released a science fiction film that would become the biggest box office of all times: Avatar. I have never been a science fiction buff and the only science fiction I had ever enjoyed was the Bionic Woman, a TV series of the late 1970s. Thus, I never planned to see Avatar, but a teenager, son of a good friend of mine, who was visiting town, insisted that I take him to see it. After thirty three years of the release of the Bionic Woman on TV, there I was, watching for the first time a 21st century science fiction film. I was soon struck by the plot, which carried an environmental message. Some have argued that James Cameron’s Avatar is without a doubt the most epic piece of environmental advocacy ever captured on celluloid. Cameron, the director, told the British newspaper the Sun :

"The point is that we are devastating habitat and biodiversity at a terrible rate. We are causing a global climate change that is going to be absolutely devastating to the coral reefs. Science is unable to keep up with our industrial society. We are destroying species faster than we can classify them. We are destroying the food chain faster than we can understand it. The politicians are over in Copenhagen talking about climate change now – but there are other issues as well."

While reading John F. Richards’ book The Unending Frontier (2003), I could not help but think of Avatar. Some of the historical processes of the early modern world presented by Richards are also present in Cameron’s 22nd century lush earth-like moon Pandora, which is being attacked by an American mining corporation. Both Richards and Cameron highlight the settlement of the frontiers, which has a strong impact on the environment and on native peoples. Richards accounts for the entrepreneurial spirit of the Western European societies taken by maritime achievements in shipping, mapmaking, navigation, and global exploration, which leads to the settlement of far off places around the globe and subsequently to the destruction of their ecosystems and native populations. Cameron, in the same fashion, accounts for the establishment of a futuristic biotechnology that allows scientists to grow Pandora’s native people’s-human hybrid bodies called avatars, which are operated via mental link by genetically matching humans, which facilitate research of Pandora's biosphere for harnessing its natural resources, with total disregard to its native peoples, the Na’vis. The powerful RDA Corporation in Cameron’s film wants to mine a valuable mineral called unobtanium in Pandora, much like the VOC (the Dutch East India Company), for example, wanted to tap natural resources in Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Richards highlights the expansion of the frontiers, with its negative impact on the environment due to intensive resource extraction and land use, which was often very detrimental to the ecosystems and the native peoples. For Richards, by writing the history of these lands, how they came to be conquered and exploited, he is shaping identity and subsequent action. For him, we “desperately need a shared global identity that derives from knowledge and wisdom about a common human past” (2003: xiii). For filmmaker James Cameron, his blockbuster Avatar, which depicts a world of stunning natural beauty that is threatened with destruction, is a cautionary tale about our own environment.

The Dutch with their East India Company (VOC), the Spanish with their annual fleets (Carrera de Indias) and the Portuguese with their colonization enterprise (Captaincies) occupied far off lands, exploited resources, enslaved, catechized and killed hundreds of indigenous populations. The similarities in Richards’ chapters abound. Extracting natural resources, cultivating land intensively for profit, and converting the native populations were some of the reasons for much of the undertakings of the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Portuguese in the early modern world. While the Dutch gained converts to its Reformed Church, the Portuguese and Spanish sought converts to the Church of Rome. The devastating effect on the indigenous groups was unprecedented, with an estimate loss of 5 to 6 million native people in the Americas alone. The environmental impact that the Europeans caused on the lands that they conquered was such that much of the natural resources and the native populations, often killed by pandemics, were completely transformed or wiped out by the time they left. The Portuguese changed one-million-square kilometers of Atlantic forest in Brazil; the Spanish completely altered the landscapes of Mexico, Hispaniola and the West Indies islands; and the Dutch managed to deplete nearly all the larger fauna of the entire Cape region and wipe out the vast deer herds of the Western Taiwan plain.

Expansion of territory is highlighted in several of Richards’ chapters. He analyzes the frontier settlement undertaken by the Russians, for instance, who for centuries acquired territories, actively changing the habitats in ways that the pastoral nomads had not done before. The tsar and patriarch of Moscow, much like the Crown in Portugal and Spain, and the Dutch Republic, also aimed at converting their conquered population. The conquered Muslims, by the Russians, were forced to accept Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Different from what the Western Europeans had done in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the Russian settlers did not clear, at least at first, most of the forests they acquired. They left some of it standing as a defensive mechanism against attackers. Later, however, with the rise of settler population, these forests were inevitably reduced. Similar to what had happened to the native peoples in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, once the frontier was conquered by Russian settlers, no longer could the local peasants escape serfdom.

Richards also points out that early modern China, much like Russia, expanded its internal frontiers of settlement and intensified its land use in spite of adverse climate conditions in certain regions. Chinese expansion also had an adverse impact on the environment, with widespread deforestation through central and southern China, which resulted in severe consequences. Much like most of the other stories approached by Richards, the indigenous peoples of China also lost ground to the frontier settlers, the Han migrants. Also, similar to most of the other settlement stories, China’s forests were not able to keep up with the demands for industrial and domestic fuel.

One unique story of the early modern era presented by Richards is of the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603-1867), a time of internal peace, political stability, and economic growth. Richards argues that “the social discipline imposed by the Tokugawa regime at all levels made it possible to conserve forest and other resources and to regenerate resources” (2003: 149). He points out that literacy was unquestionably a great asset to the dissemination of the technical and moral information to the population. This asset, however, was missing in most of the enterprises carried out abroad by the Europeans during that same period. The Portuguese Crown, for instance, was not interested in disseminating literacy in Brazil. Historian Thomas Skidmore has argued that,

The Portuguese Crown prohibited printing presses from operating in Brazil, with the result that no books, newspapers, or magazines were ever published in colonial Brazil. Brazilians had to get their university education in Coimbra, Portugal, and their only hope to publish was in Europe. The absence of the printing press in colonial Brazil was unique in colonial Latin America. So in this respect, colonial Brazil suffered from a singular defect: the absence of two institutions, the printing press and the university, essential for economic development. The latter condition persisted long after independence; the first Brazilian university was not founded until 1932 .


Still in regard to the Tokugawa period, sociologist Robert N. Bellah asserts that “there were rationalizing tendencies in Japanese religion that contributed to Japan’s economic and political rationalization starting during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868)” . For Bellah “Japan contained a ‘functional analogue’ to the Protestant ethic. Both Buddhism and Confucianism contained ‘this-worldly’ or ‘inner-worldly’ ethics emphasizing activism and achievement in the secular world”, which for Bellah was the same type of religious orientation that Max Weber (1904) presents in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to explain the rise of modern capitalism. Perhaps the religious ethics contributed to the conservation measures taken by the Tokugawa regime to protect and nurture state forests.

Six hundred and fifty years separate the beginning of the early modern era -- when Western European nations started an expansion enterprise that irreversibly and severely impacted the environment and the lives of native peoples in far off lands -- from the fictitious world of Pandora created by director James Cameron. The plight of the Na’vis and their land of Pandora, despite distant in time and space, is not much different from that of the indigenous population around the globe that were assaulted by Europeans under the banner of Christianity and development. One difference, however, remains between these two stories, besides one being fictitious and the other real: The Na’vis are saved by Jake Sully, an American former marine, who falls in love with a native woman and her culture and rejects the RDA’s agenda to conquer Pandora. Unfortunately, during the European expansion of the early modern era, not even the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, considered the defender and apostle to the Indians, was able to save the indigenous population of South America. His ideas had little effect on changing Spanish attitudes towards the natives and their lands. The lust of the conquistadores’ for gold and other resources was stronger than the recognition of religious or moral justice. Unfortunately, there was no hero in Richards’ stories to save the environment and the native populations.

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Neda Bezerra
Geographically-Integrated History Laboratory
Historical Resources Management
Idaho State University
Pocatello, ID.