If, as a member of the audience during Avatar, you could not endure the destruction of Eywa, how, as a human being, could you possibly tolerate the destruction of Gaia? You cheered the heroes of the film on to victory against the greedy and myopic mercenaries, only to discover that, in reality, you are among the evildoers. You don't walk the Earth; you trample it. You are an eco-pathological rapist and murderer, and you are committing slow-motion suicide with every industrial movement you make.
Planet Earth, Live and In Color
But shame, outrage, and despair are not, in themselves, horrors sufficient enough to catalyze a full-blown case of PAEDD. To be truly out of your mind, you must be filled with an infinite love for something that you cannot touch. Fortuitously, as confronting hardship so often involves the magic of paradox, the way into the disease is also the way out from it. Pandora may seem like an exotic and impossible fantasy, but, save for the floating mountains and some far-out megafauna, it is modeled almost entirely after a vision of Planet Earth restored to its original beauty. The best hope people with PAEDD have for a long-term cure, then, is to actualize this vision in real life by taking the pathos and reverence they feel for the fictional Pandora and using that energy to actively participate in the restoration of the celestial body that miraculously sustains our existence right here on real, live 3-D Planet Earth.
In other words, if you want to heal yourself, start by healing the world. By striking at the root of the problem, not only can you alleviate your symptoms, you can reverse them, giving your life a newfound sense of vitality, gratitude, exuberance, meaning, and mission. In this sense, PAEDD can ultimately be a blessing both for you and everyone and everything around you.
As I said before, I am not alone in my struggle, and I am not the only one who has found healing and purpose in the eco-recovery treatment program prescribed above. The much-maligned fansite, avatar-forums.com, for example, is buzzing with suggestions on how to, in effect, bring about a kind of Pandora on Earth. One poster on this site suggested joining Greenpeace. Another announced that he would be writing angry letters to Wall Street and GM and all other corporations who are imperiling the delicate balance of life on this planet.
People have quit smoking, littering, eating meat, playing video games, and watching television. Entire chat rooms are dedicated to sharing ideas about renewable technologies. One comment from "PandoraOnEarth," whose moniker pretty much sums up her mission, succinctly highlights both the pain and the promise of PAEDD. In order to cope with her "homesickness" at losing Pandora, "PandoraOnEarth" felt it necessary to, in her words, devise a plan for implementing Pandora on Earth, at least those parts of it that appeal to me and are probable... In this, I can have hope, instead of the hopelessness I felt just after the realization that Pandora would never be real... As human beings, we have the power to sculpt our world as we see fit; for good or bad... The current social structure of city life and six degrees of separation are not working for us; we are coming apart at the seams.
I have read over a thousand Avatar-inspired eco-pledges, ranging from the practical to the fanatical (one zealous fellow claimed that he had traded his bed for a hammock, given up his car for a horse, and galloped about town trying to "liberate" the roots of trees from the sidewalk concrete above). One thing all these pledges, diverse as they are, have in common is that they all seem to emanate from a profound re-thinking of the relationship between human beings and nature. This is because Avatar, rather than simply telling people that they shouldn't pollute because it is bad for the planet, shows people, on a visceral, instinctual, primordial level, that they are the planet. By humanizing nature, Avatar effectively ecologizes humans.
The Truth Will Break Your Heart
"Pandora on Earth," then, is an unquestionably viable project, one that could transform an ailment into a movement. The energy of such a movement would surge up from the soul and crystallize intellectual anxieties over rising CO2 levels into an existential panic over the murder of Gaia. However extreme this form of motivation may seem, we are in dire need of exactly this type of radical spiritual ecology. Environmentalism is failing; we are failing to heal the planet. We have the intellect, but we lack something wild and pulsating at the core of our efforts, and this is where the pain of PAEDD could prove itself useful. Avatar provides what An Inconvenient Truth, for example, does not: wonder, communion, inspiration, romance, reverence, music, mysticism, love, hope, awe. The truth, however inconvenient it may be, simply does not matter unless it breaks one's heart.
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