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Avatar director on environmental mission
News Articles Featured | The World | September 30, 2010
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[The audio of the interview, including the background intro, at theworld.org.]
LISA MULLINS: When the movie Avatar came out, indigenous groups around the globe could relate to the plot. The film is set in the future, when humans are mining a precious mineral called “unobtanium” from a planet called Pandora. The mining colony expands and threatens the existence of an indigenous tribe. Here’s a clip from the film.
MALE SPEAKER: This is why we’re here. Unobtanium. Because this little grey rock sells for 20 million a kilo. That’s the only reason. It’s what pays for the whole party. It’s what pays for your science. Comprendo.
MULLINS: The parallels with real life are not lost on Avatar director James Cameron. This week, Cameron went on a fact-finding mission to the oil sands of Alberta, Canada. The oil sands, or tar sands as they’re often called, are considered to be an expensive and dirty way to extract oil from the ground. Yet a lot of tar sand oil flows south to the United States. James Cameron was invited to the area by indigenous leaders in Alberta, Canada who complain that pollution from the tar sands is harming their people and their environment. Cameron told us that he was struck by what he saw while he was on a helicopter tour of the area.
JAMES CAMERON: You look down and you see just a vast area of devastation. There’s no other way to put it. And you think, how are they ever going to reclaim this and turn it back into the beautiful arboreal forest that was there before. Because that’s the promise that’s been made. Oh, we’ll put this all back. This is only temporary. We’re just going to mine the surface and then we’re going to put in new trees and it’s all going to grow and you won’t even know the difference. Well, unfortunately that’s not what it looks like, that’s not what it feels like.
MULLINS: When you say it’s not what it looks like, contrast what you saw up in the air to what you saw and felt on the ground. And really for those people who don’t know what tar sands or oil sands are, maybe you can tell us a little bit more.
CAMERON: Basically what you’ve got, is you’ve got an enormous deposit of the lowest possible grade of oil. It’s basically tar. That’s why they call it the tar sands. It’s all mineable in one way or another. Some of it can be surface mined and then the rest can be extracted using some kind of process like steam injection. It’s all very, very energy intensive. I was invited here by indigenous people who are the ones that are on the ground who are being directly affected by this enormous development.
MULLINS: So these are residents of the Fort Chipewyan area which is…
CAMERON: Yes, exactly. Exactly. You know, it’s a small town and I relate to it because I grew up in a small town, almost exactly the same size. Although it was in Ontario. I know what it’s like when everybody knows everybody and they’re looking at this cluster of very aggressive cancers that are very unusual. Lymphomas and [INDISCERNIBLE] cancers and things like that that should have an occurrence of one in a hundred thousand and you’re getting several within a population of 1,200 people. There’s something going on there and that needs to be studied. The health risks need to be studied. This is a small community of people that are afraid to eat the fish from the river that they’ve survived on for a thousand years. Afraid to drink the water and that’s not right.
MULLINS: The demand, as you suggest, is only going to be increasing. So you’re dealing with not only an environmental problem but certainly a resource problem.
CAMERON: I think the big issue of fossil fuels and a rapid large scale conversion to renewable energy is the biggest single challenge we face right now and we face this imminent crisis, which I believe is a clear and present danger, of irreversible global climate change.
MULLINS: Let me just interrupt for a second. I mean you work in the…
CAMERON: I figured you would. I was kind of waiting on [INDISCERNIBLE] rant there.
MULLINS: That’s right. But you’re in an industry that uses, of course, an enormous amount of resources. This is a, as we suggest, a big fight to fight. But you’re kind of in the thick of it on both sides. You’re using the resources and you’re fighting the problem in and of itself.
CAMERON: Anything that anybody’s doing anywhere is using resources. The question is how can we do it better. How can we limit the energy that we use? How can we be more efficient?
MULLINS: But what can you do professionally? Being the director of blockbuster movies must help in terms of wielding some kind of clout, but beyond that is it bearing witness? Is it testifying?
CAMERON: There are lots of people that make blockbuster movies, but very difficult to make blockbuster movies that are about environmental themes, or at least historically that was the case. But we managed to make the highest-grossing film in history that was about an environmental theme. I will try to do whatever I can do to help in this issue of energy policy and the environment in general and specifically on the indigenous rights front because it seems like wherever I turn, whether it’s Brazil, which I’ve been down to the rain forest twice, or whether it’s here in Alberta, you see that the indigenous people who are getting the short end of this thing. They have their finger on the pulse of nature and they’re the ones that are telling us that something’s wrong and we’re not listening to them.
MULLINS: Alright. Well very nice to talk with you. James Cameron, thank you.
CAMERON: Okay, thanks Lisa.
MULLINS: Film director James Cameron speaking about his fact-finding trip this week to the oil sand in Alberta, Canada. The US State Department is now considering a 2,000 mile pipeline project that would help bring a steady stream of oil from Canada directly to the US Midwest.
Tagged with: avatarsands, james cameron, the world
