With the movie Avatar, Pandora is presented as a virgin land of unspoiled beauty, a paradise with a vast landscape full of wildlife, huge trees, plants that react and move like animals, astonishing rainforests, wonderful waterfalls, lakes, rivers, massive cliffs hovering above the ground, impressive mountains and magnificent animals. It is nature as something divine and marvelous. Contrary to Pandora's magnificent natural landscape, the base's environment is purely a military construct in which everything is gray and dark and only artificial light exists. The image of this lifeless place in which the only things are enormous excavators, trucks, steel and chain-link fences, huge tractors, gigantic, heavily- armored, human-operated …show more content…
In the beginning, Jake appears to be totally disconnected and alienated from the natural environment. He can't relax because he is afraid of it and views it as something dangerous that needs to be tamed by humans. When he starts living with the Na'vi and is taught their ways, he has difficulty assimilating. As Neytiri points out in their first encounter, Jake's alienation from nature makes him "ignorant like a child" (Avatar) and unable to appreciate and live in the natural environment. However, he slowly changes and finally becomes part of nature's network. The change starts from the outside and slowly moves to the inside. He first changes on the surface, that is a change of the body, but soon Jake feels an internal confusion. He is not sure in which world he belongs and who he really is. He admits that he can barely remember his old life and that the Na'vi's world seems more authentic. He finally realizes the energy that exists in nature and learns to appreciate every living organism. He admits that he has fallen in love with the forest and with the Na'vi's way of living. He even reaches to the point of fighting against humans to protect Pandora's natural environment and the Na'vi's way of life. Jake is transformed from a contemporary individual …show more content…
These mushrooms require the “blasted” element of a landscape to grow. Tsing ends her article with the claim that “blasted landscapes are what we have, and we need to explore their life-promoting patches” (108). In the various matsutake patches that she mentions, the blasted landscape is idealized and desired. In Satoyama, for example, the work done to cultivate a matsutake-friendly forest is extreme.
She wrote, “the high value of matsutake today makes it easier to love matsutake forest reconstruction” (105). She also preemptively scolds this reaction when she admits her own reaction to the restoration projects was colored by her position as a “North American schooled in wilderness protection” (104). All that said, shouldn’t there be some more skepticism there about the role of capitalism in reconstructing wild spaces? Tsing introduces the community involvement and the nostalgia present in these projects too, but what if they would have come to pass if the monetary payoff wasn’t so