We always have to be aware that Avatar is a movie, and what we see onscreen is there primarily to serve a narrative purpose. Avatar is a movie of hopeful awakenings, from Jake Sully emerging from cryosleep (suspended animation) in orbit around a new world, to the movie’s very last frame when he makes a final wakening as a Na’vi, fully committed to his new world. But hopeful awakenings are much more effective, for story purposes, if you have a nightmare to wake up from.
There’s nothing new in dark portrayals of the future. My generation, born in the fifties, was brought up with the Cold War, a mind-numbing stalemate that could have triggered a mass nuclear war: a future terminated by a wall of blinding light. Western culture has a deep-rooted expectation of apocalypse just around the corner that seems to date back at least as far as the Book of Revelation. We’re always fearing the worst; it’s just that the worst we can imagine changes with time.
Perhaps apocalyptic thinking is valuable, in some circumstances. Maybe our habitual pessimism about the future is a kind of folk memory, a grandmother instinct warning us not to be complacent, to make us expectant of drastic future change, as we have experienced change in the past (such as the Ice Ages). None of this minimises the real threat posed by such problems as climate change. But a recognition of our habit of apocalyptic thinking casts a clearer perspective on our hopes and fears.
And as regards the near future, maybe we’ve still got time to avert the green apocalypse.
I doubt we really could kill off our “mother.” I’m lucky enough to live in a rural community in the north of England. Looking out of my window as I write I can see “nature”: hills, a river, forests, fields. But in fact almost everything I see save for the basic shape of the landscape is artificial, made that way by human intervention, and almost all of it is less than two centuries old. The green I see is mostly crops, or grass for the sheep, or the pine trees of the managed forests. But the wild creatures persist, at the edges: in the hedgerows, underground, at the coast, in the river valleys, the birds in the air.
It’s the same even in the heart of our greatest cities. The city of Pripyat was built to house nuclear workers from Chernobyl, and was abandoned after the disaster. After just a couple of decades its open spaces were green, and the paving stones were so smashed and lifted by tree roots they looked as if they had been through an earthquake.
Gaia has proven pretty resilient in the face of mega-disasters such as the impact of asteroids, like the one that knocked out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. The daddy of all extinction events, the “end-Permian” catastrophe possibly triggered by eruptions in Siberia a quarter of a billion years ago, nearly ended multicelled life on Earth altogether. But life, though much depleted, made it even through the end-Permian, and the grand story of recovery and evolution began again.
Compared to such horror shows our feeble efforts at “ecocide” really don’t amount to much. For example we’ve barely touched the hardy old life forms believed to live in the “deep hot biosphere,” inside the rocks, kilometres down beneath our feet (see Chapter 22). Even if we blasted off the topsoil and irradiated the oceans, those ancient survivors would some day emerge to begin the story of life once more. It is a kind of cold comfort that if we were to disappear tomorrow the wild would take back a recovering world remarkably quickly.
There’s no doubt we face a complex and challenging near future. But, as the example of the ozone layer recovery shows (Chapter 1), we are capable of facing up to problems on a global scale, and resolving them. I think we’ll survive the green apocalypse, chastened and changed perhaps, and by the time those now young grow old, their children will have found something entirely new to worry about.
But we may need the resources of other worlds to save this one.