As the real world is being desolated (climate change, ecosystem distress etc etc), real people experience solastalgia. When, in Avatar, they can 'see' an alternative world, which is beautiful, diverse and complex, one that meets their aesthetic, spiritual and ethical needs, they want to live within it. During the movie, they experience a virtual solastalgia as they become virtual participants in the attempted destruction and desolation of the Na'vi and other life forms in this pristine environment ... all for the sake of a meaningless materialism. The movie becomes, for such people, an existential experience of negative environmental change (defined as solastalgia). At the conclusion of the movie when they must accept that such a world is virtual only, they experience a virtual nostalgia for it and become depressed.
The irony of humans finally seeing the value of life, different ways of being 'human', non-human beings and living systems via a movie about a virtual world and its destruction is not lost on me. That a brilliant movie with all of its digital special effects can be more powerful as a change agent than the environmental writers and commentators of the world says something important about environmental education in critically important domains such as global warming, environmental and animal ethics, and habitat destruction.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What is at work here is the power of story and storytelling. "Once upon a time" takes us to a receptive place in our minds more readily than polemic or instruction.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to ask what kind of environmentalism white people fantasise about in this sort of fiction... as well as what environmentalism is being promoted in government responses, or in general enviro responses of white people.
ReplyDeletehttp://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar
"Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels."
And what does this desire to dominate racially mean in terms of other oppressions and the environment?
I read your article which provides more information..
ReplyDeletekailua dentist