AJ News

Notes from the Countryside

I’ve heard that some fans of the movie “Avatar” are going through withdrawal, tragically bereft because they can’t live on the planet Pandora. Well, wake up, people! We already live there, because just about every image of Pandora in that movie is borrowed from our home planet.

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Many of the images in “Avatar” are borrowed from Earth’s oceans. The shallow seas of our world are where you get the magenta, turquoise and lime-green hues that director James Cameron splashes so lushly across the movie’s scenery. Bioluminescence, the glowing light from plants and animals that captivates “Avatar” hero Jake Sully occurs in many of our marine organisms. The “seeds of the sacred tree” in the movie are a variation on Earthly comb jellies, and other Pandoran forest creatures are really sea anemones and feather duster worms transplanted to dry land.

Why does Earth’s marine life offer such staggeringly alien and diverse images for James Cameron to exploit? Covering 70 percent of the globe as it does, the sea is our world’s predominant habitat type. It offers an endless variety of depths, temperatures, light levels, salinities and microhabitats for creatures to find niches in. As a result, we have far more phyla, or major categories of life forms, undersea than on land.

Avatar also imports fig trees, taro plants, banana leaves and ferns galore from Earth’s terrestrial realms into Pandora’s forest without any alteration whatsoever, presumably because they looked really cool and “alien.” And, of course, we had our giant flying reptiles and horned rhino-like monsters on Earth, too, in our day. Granted, the dinosaurs have been gone for quite a few million years, but they were here!

So the forms and hues of Pandora are all shamelessly derived from our world. The moviemakers’ true creativity lies in mixing those Earthly elements up in new combinations. While you may never get to snorkel in the tropics or tour the rainforest, you can explore the “alien” corners of our world through aquariums, botanical gardens, science channels, books and Web sites.

Closer to home, I can think of a number of spookily alien yet beautiful things in nature right here in good old northeast PA: Bucks growing and shedding pounds of antlers in the space of a few months each year. Conks on dead trees. Mushrooms popping up overnight. The chlorophyll-free Indian pipe plant. Clusters of frog eggs in ponds. Dragonflies and snapping turtles—creatures from the age of the dinosaurs that still fly and crawl among us. The stream-eroded rocks at Little Rocky Glen or Seven Tubs. Millions of leaves changing color each fall, falling and creating natural compost. And the burning skies at sunset, when the sun catches rows of high clouds.

Which leads to my final point: Appreciate what we’ve got! The lesson of the movie “Avatar” is not that some other planet could be so much cooler than ours. The lesson is that the planet we have here, now is great, and we need to take care of it. Otherwise, some great-grandchild of ours in 2154 may be claiming, like Jake Sully, that “we destroyed our world” and “there’s no green there.”

Mary Felley is the Executive Director of the Countryside Conservancy (945-6995; cconserv@epix.net) and secretary of the South Branch Tunkhannock Creek Watershed Coalition.