The Cameronomics of Avatar: Big budget, small message

Avatar is James Cameron’s latest sweat-to-breakeven blockbuster.  You can tick all the boxes on this one for your standard ’Hollywood Epic’:  

• An entire nation/civilisation at stake – check. 
• Striking visuals and special effects – check. 
• Tough-as-nails scar-faced military bad guys – check. 
• Warrior princess tamed into loving submission by handsome warrior hero - check. 
• Cheesy, predictable love story – check. 
• One man saves the day – check. 
• Happy ending – check.

Avatar is an escape to another fantastical world in the distant future (A.D 2154), presented intentionally with an emphasis on the visual rather than the cerebral.  There are no plot surprises, but what Cameron’s script lacks in nuance the cinematography just about makes up for in sensory overload, scattered appropriately as you would expect with some thrilling escapes by the story’s hero from the jaws of planet Pandora’s more robust wildlife.  

As far as pure entertainment value is concerned, it’s a winning formula with mass appeal, which is clearly why someone was willing to back Cameron to the tune of $250 million to get the film made and probably another $250 million on the marketing budget.  Ever since Barack Obama, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke made ‘trillion’ the new standard unit of account, a half-a-billion dollar movie doesn’t sound as expensive as it used to.

But for all the big-budget visual grandeur, which, let’s be honest, is losing its shine at the margin anyway in a near-perfect digital age, it is painfully inescapable that this formulaic, computer-geek-generated piece of visual art provides only a paper-thin veneer for Cameron’s real beef with ’immoral’ big mulinational corporations (along with a few not-so-subtle digs at George Bush’s war policies).  

Cameron leaves no ambiguity or subtleties in his plot.  Greedy humans have come to Pandora to rape it for a mineral called Unobtainium (seriously), worth $20 million/kg (by the way that’s worth about $8000/oz in 2009 terms which hardly seems like a price worth travelling to another planet for.  Also just realised the miners in the movie still quote unobtainium in dollars – a subtle commentary on Cameron’s faith in the paper greenback or perhaps just the latest in many incarnations of the redenominated devalued dollar?!).  The corporation run by the greedy humans doesn’t care for the environment and is willing to go to any destructive length to obtain, ah… unobtainium, for the shareholders of course.  The native race is peace-loving and lives in harmony with Mother Nature, whom they effectively worship.  The foreign invasion by the greedy humans is disturbing the balance betw… th… zzz zzz zzz z zz zzz.

You get the picture.  But one can’t help concluding after the whole skit is up that Cameron’s crusading moral metaphor against corporate greed and environmental destruction doesn’t really fit with a real world.  Sure, humans have abused their planet in the name of resource acquisition, but are ‘greedy’ Western capitalists really the chief cause?

If you scan the planet you will quickly find that wherever the state controls the economy, or where there is deep poverty (usually the two go hand in hand), that’s where the environment is profoundly sick.  Where economic freedom and private property ownership reign we tend to see environmental improvement and in many cases reforestation and a setting aside of wilderness areas and protection of key natural resources.  Communist countries by contrast left disastrous stains on the environment.  Their resource use was inefficient, crass, and in many cases deeply damaging.  Meanwhile, the indigenous folk on Pandora might be a nice ideal for Cameron’s fantasy land, but if in his bloated metaphor they are a representation of our less developed peoples here on Earth, their Pandorian environment would better be shown by Cameron as a deforesting wasteland succumbing to soil erosion and species eradication as the desperate need for bushmeat trumps any warm and fuzzy considerations about “sustainability”.

Tapping into its natural endowments is a country’s best chance for creating wealth and prosperity.  The fallacy of state control over key resources is that it will use those resources with the best intentions in mind.  Sadly this is mostly not the case.  When land and resources are privately owned however, natural assets become correctly priced and we start to see and experience the real benefit of not plundering some resources in order to obtainium others.  If water was priced correctly for example, when water source degradation or pollution took  place it would drive up water prices, boosting the returns on water provision and thereby increasing the incentive of private owners to protect and nurture their water sources.

We all need a reminder that the Earth and its resources are vitally important.  But it’s time to start getting savvy about the debate.  No matter what ideology you subscribe to, the question any political-economy has to answer is: what is the most efficient way to meet people’s needs with the resources we have.  Arbitrary resource allocation under coercive economic systems does not offer us a viable solution, and nor does leaving our resources un-utilised.  Periods in history of economic freedom on the other hand have tended to provide the best solutions to scarcity.  

The environment is worth something, it just needs to be owned by people who will price and value it correctly.  Free people.