not bothered by parallels

The big new Christmas movie, James Cameron's Avatar, which opened yesterday, has some striking green themes.

There's deforestation: a truly massive tree gets destroyed. There's a threatened indigenous people: the home of the Na'vi tribe gets obliterated. And there's a new-agey idea that that there's a mutual thing going on between the people living in forest and the forest itself and there may even be scientific evidence (Sigourney Weaver tells us) of electro-magnetic impulses that allows the forest to act like a brain, communicating between its many constituent elements.

The baddies of the piece, of course, don't have such a sophisticated brain. What the US military has is muscle - a massive arsenal of weaponry which it aims to use ( 'shock and awe') to get the 'savages' moving out of an area where there they have discovered a very precious mineral called - yes! - 'unobtanium'.

This raises an interesting question. I assume you can't have a successful blockbuster movie that's anti-American. So there must be plenty of people watching this movie who aren't remotely bothered by the parallels suggested by the storyline.

Update: in this interview Cameron refers to the themes of imperialism and biodiversity and attacks the way America has 'had eight years of the oil lobbyists running the country'. But he points out that anti-imperialism is American too. 'You can take it back to the origins of America in a fight of rebels against an imperial dominating force.' Except the rebels in question were hardly fighting on behalf of indigenous people. more ...

ibsen gets it

In Ibsen's The Wild Duck the elderly Ekdal, who has suffered disgrace and imprisonment, sounds as if he's been reading Jared Diamond's Collapse.

Or he has seen this YouTube clip where David Attenborough explains what happened on Easter Island. Or he has studied Dr Seuss's drawings for The Lorax.

In the second act, the elderly Ekdal asks the merchant's son, Gregers, about the forest they both know around Hoydal.

EKDAL: How does the forest look up there now? Still good, eh?
GREGERS: Not as good in your day. It's been thinned out a lot.
EKDAL: Thinned out? Chopped down? Bad things will come of that. The forest'll have its revenge.
(Trans. Michael Meyer.)

The Wild Duck depicts a number of characters who have retreated from the real world into a make-believe one. The way that Ekdal and his son keep the animals in the attic is just one example. (Another of the play's green angles: Ibsen's wild duck presents the first laboratory animal on stage.)

pic: poster for Christopher Morahan's 1979 production at the National Theatre. more ...

pushmi-pullyu award nominee

'Get your barbie ready - we're in for a sizzler', headlines the Independent. The Met Office's chief meteorologist, Ewen McCallum, says the period from June to August is likely to see prolonged spells of hot weather. It's 'odds-on for a barbecue summer'.

50% of barbecues are fed on wood charcoal and most of that charcoal comes from the world's tropical forests. Today's Independent also devotes pages 1, 4 and 5 to saving rainforests. Headline this time: 'How Britons fuel destruction of the rainforest'.

Previous nominees for heading in two directions at the same time here and here. more ...

allergic reactions

When the Guardian reviews Amazonia at the Young Vic, the critic says the play's eco-piety makes her want to go out and lop down a tree.

When the New York Times reviews Wild Blessings: A Celebration of Wendell Berry, at a festival of new American plays, the critic says he is 'more than ready to hop on an environment-trashing jet plane and return to the soulless city'. more ...

waiting for the new code

Sam Mendes' production of The Cherry Orchard opened in New York this week. The cast includes Ethan Hawke, Simon Russell Beale (pic), Sinead Cusack and Rebecca Hall.

Chekhov's last play (it premiered in 1904) depicts a world on the verge of huge changes. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley sees parallels with today:

'People are always misspeaking in The Cherry Orchard, stupidly and hurtfully, because no language could properly reflect a shifting social order that has yet to assume any solid form.'

'The old codes don’t apply, but the new ones haven’t arrived yet. Which makes the early 20th century sound an awful lot like the early 21st century.'

(See the green side of Chekhov.) more ...

'don't watch so much tv'

Last night's debate at the RSA on Chico Mendes, activism and environmental art wasn't really a debate at all (there was no exchange of competing views). But it was enjoyable and informative, and even, at times, inspiring.

The chair, theatre director Paul Heritage, explained the background to the Amazonia project. It was clear that the process of this year-long project, which had involved large-scale work with communities in Brazil and Lambeth, had been as much the point of the project as the Christmas production that had resulted at the Young Vic.

Elenira Mendes (pic) described her father's life and the circumstances of his assassination and explained how the Institute she has set up in his name is carrying his work forward.

The composer Jonathan Dove talked about his experience writing community operas. 'Whatever the story is, the message they're telling is: "If we work together we can achieve wonders".' He said, 'Protest songs can be turned round quickly. An opera takes several years to put on. It feels like time is running out and doing opera is a luxury.'

Greenpeace's Charlie Kronick said Chico Mendes had realised something that had taken 20 years for many environmentalists to understand. 'You can't separate environmental and social justice.' Kronick asked, 'What is the role of the arts?' His answer was: 'It's about transformation. What we do doesn't depend on what we know, but what we feel. That's what art does. It's transforming.'

The fashion designer Vivienne Westwood spoke about her campaign Active Resistance to Propaganda. 'Every time you look a word up in the dictionary, you're fighting for freedom. When you become an art lover, you stop being a consumer and start being a thinker.' Her motto was: You get out of life what you put into it. 'Popular culture is a contradiction in terms,' she said, 'It's very passive. Don't watch so much TV.' more ...

david lan gets it

The Young Vic's artistic director David Lan identifies two key issues in relation to theatre and climate change. One is the global interconnectedness of 21st century lives. The other is the 'impossibility' of controlling context when everyone arrives with their own ideas.

On interconnectedness: 'The premise one starts from is: "We want to learn". I suppose a lot of the impulse comes from a sense of wanting to live in the real world, and part of the process of being alive is constantly discovering that you don’t really understand what’s going on and you want to know a little bit more than you did last week and the realities of the way we live are so complicated, but as the last three months have made abundantly clear, we are also living in each other’s pockets. A complex financial situation in downtown Miami can cause a collapse of the banks in Reykjavik. Now, what does that mean about the way we create work in the theatre?'

On context: ' ... part of the job of producing is to try and control the way in which the audience receive what you are creating, by the context in which that is presented. If you are working in an area, like this Brazil project , which has a relationship to a set of ideas and arguments and actions about climate change, it is very, very, very hard, it is impossible, to control that context, because everybody comes at it with a set of their own ideas.'

Hat tip RSA. more ...

exit strategy

The Guardian's hostile review of Amazonia includes this fairly remarkable sentence: 'But it is the sheer po-faced earnestness of the turgid script that scuppers any joy, as if those making it thought that watching it would make us better people, when actually the preachiness makes you long to rush out and lop down a tree.' more ...

the real thing

The Columbian vice president, Francisco Santos Calderon (left), says anyone who takes cocaine in the UK is responsible for the harm caused by landmines to the Colombian people and for breathtaking damage to the rainforest.

Related. Helen Mirren - Why I stopped taking cocaine. ('I had never grasped the full horrifying structure of what brings coke to our parties in Britain.')

more ...

holding tight

Roger Deakin, the author of Waterlog and Wildwood, died in August 2006. Fans of his work will be fascinated by the latest Granta which contains extracts from his notebooks. (Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, the Suffolk ruin he moved to in 1969, will be published in October.) In one entry Deakin recalls the moment, aged 17, when he heard that his father had died.

'That might actually have been the moment that made me into a conservationist ... I didn't want to lose anything more. I had lost such a big part of my life, I needed to compensate by holding on tightly to everything else.'

In another entry the desire to conserve has become a passion for change.

'Why write? A writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just to reflect or report on them as they are. Mine is to promote a feeling for the importance of trees through a greater understanding of them, so that people don't just think of trees, as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.' more ...

consequences

The explosion of logging in central Africa is threatening ... sea turtles. The logs are transported downriver to timber yards, but on the way 1000s of logs are lost. These logs float out to sea. Many of them get washed ashore, where they force turtles either to abandon their nesting attempts or to nest too close to the waterline.

It's one of half-a-dozen examples rainforest biologist William Laurance gives in his New Scientist article (subscription only) of 'the perils of trying to make linear decisions in a non-linear world' or the law of unintended consequences. 'In a complex, interconnected world, yanking on a string in one location can cause painful jolts in far-flung and unpredictable places.' more ...

chico, herzen, david king and clownfish

1. Chico Mendes was murdered 20 years ago. Our online journal records the Young Vic's efforts to prepare an Amazonian show.

2. Tom Stoppard on 1968, Herzen and liberty, and what we squandered long before 9/11.

3. Professor David King calls for 'people of integrity' within government to give scientific advice regardless of political pressure.

4. Bambi, Baloo and the the clownfish in Finding Nemo (above) are unsung green heroes. more ...