What’s the literal equivalent to the fantastical image of an eco-conscious tribesman downloading his memories into an organic hard drive?

I just can’t figure it out.

Since this post contains SPOILERS about the #2 grossing film in cinema history we are putting it AFTER THE JUMP. Again, if you are one of the three people on the planet refusing to see this movie, yet will be upset if plot points are SPOILED, don’t read this post. SPOILERS.

In “Avatar,” James Cameron presents a world – Pandora – in which all of the flora and fauna are connected through a single giant network, and animals are equipped with physiological data receptors/transmitters, which they can use to port into the network or into each other. The Na’vi, Pandora’s only sentient race, use this ability to create bio-electrical symbioses with other fauna, and to download and upload memory imprints into towering deciduous hubs that, uncoincidentally, appear as giant weeping willows with hanging, iridescent fiber optic cables for branches. The Na’vi’s governing (only? ) religion, which worships the sum total of Pandora’s ecology in the form of a deity named “Eywa,” is based on their uneducated belief that the planet’s unity – and their ability to hear the voices of their ancestors – is rooted in divinity, rather than science.

And that’s all awesome. The problem comes when Cameron starts asking me, the viewer, to equate all of these wonderful imaginings to the scientific reality of Earth, and mankind’s voracious consumption of its resources. On the most basic level, the comparison is hard to make because the Na’vi are not, like humans, at the top of Pandora’s food chain. Of course they have a reverent respect for their planet’s ecosystem – they interact with Pandora as both consumers and the consumed. I’m not saying there isn’t intellectual value in forcing humans to posit the world from the standpoint of a species that views resource consumption from both sides, but it’s impossible to ask a thinking, biologically self-conscious being to feel, on command, the same base looming instinctual terror that a gazelle feels at the appearance of a lion – or the thoughtless magnetism of a bee to a flower – and then to re-intellectulize that experience into a newly attained respectful naturalism.

Beyond that, the deity called “Eywa” is less analogous to Mother Earth than to a motherboard. In this case, the indictment of humanity’s relationship with the planet is less a critique of a species that’s unable to create some pseudo-mystical heart-bond with their home world than it is an observation about a home world that’s ecosystem is unable to foster the kind of bio-electric neuro-emotional network that informs the fictional Na’vis’ eco-centric worldview. To put it in simpler terms, without all the crazy mindmelds, prayer uploads (presumably, the planet converts uploaded thoughts into raw data that any given species’ receptor tendrils then convert into organism-specific auditory output, which is how the animals receive Sully’s pleas for assistance) and consciousness transfers, Pandora is still a functioning eco-system – in fact, it’s basically Earth… so, the addition of the network (which, again, awesome story concept) only serves to confuse and negate any viable resonance between the film’s themes and the human relationship with our own slowly dying planet.

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