Global Pulse Blog

If you are still looking for ideas for that Valentine’s Day date, and have not seen Avatar, you want to check it out.  If you have somehow missed the previews, reviews, and interview specials so far, and are curious, Wikipedia is here to help.   Or you could read my unofficial take, below.

(Movie spoilers, and actual global health relevance, after cut.)

Cameron and crew set out to create a fantastic natural world inhabited by reasonably believable humanoids, the 10-feet-tall, blue-skinned, occasionally phosphorescent Navi.  They throw in some trigger-happy imperialistic humans, some well-meaning-yet-out-of-touch beleaguered scientist humans, and one good-looking befuddled-yet-heroic protagonist human, and the basic plot of Ferngully results.  (That is not a criticism on my part: Ferngully is a lovely movie in its own right.)  The good guys are attractive, the bad guys have horrid dialogue, and the visuals are worth the price of an IMAX ticket.  In the end, the bad guys receive a satisfactory thrashing, true love overcomes cultural barriers and genocide, 22nd-century gender roles look much like late-20th-century American ones, and the white guy saves the day.

All of which is almost enough to write off the movie as yet more flashy sci-fi, but here is why, issues of narrative aside, the thing works:

By making the Navi visually believable, Avatar reminds us that destroying the earth’s remaining healthy ecosystems for temporary profit is wrong not just because it represents a sin against the planet, mass murder of endangered animals, and irresponsible squandering of the very biodiversity that ensures the resilience of life on earth (including that of potential future human generations).  This sort of behavior also has the well-documented property of destroying in real time the lives, culture, and yes, health, of whatever indigenous human populations have managed to hang on to that ecosystem and live in reasonable balance with it.   Having developed cultures for thousands of years, controlled resource-rich lands across continents, and generally thrived for most of human history, indigenous tribes have been reduced over the past 500 years or so to under 5% of the world’s population — but currently represent 30% of its 900 million residents who subsist in extreme poverty — “relocated” to some of the world’s most depleted and polluted lands, subjected to systematic disenfranchisement, and suffering from disproportionate burdens of low education, ill health, and injury (State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples; Injury and trauma in indigenous populations). Which, I suppose, is too depressing to think about with actual human people in the picture.  The blue humanoids are here to help get the message across.

While the movie focuses on acute effects from forced population displacement (musculoskeletal trauma, burns, and psychological shock), the real-life effects from the loss of tribal lands and culture are just as devastating in the long term.  The chronic burdens of Type II diabetes, depression, and substance abuse are particularly well documented.  If you have seen Unnatural Causes, either when it first aired on PBS in 2008 or since, you probably remember Bad Sugar, which connects the dots between loss of culture and land, impoverishment, and chronic health outcomes:

As other bloggers and critics have pointed out before (again, see io9), Avatar’s biggest problem is not the predictability of plot, but the troublesome power relationship it reproduces — which is a rather familiar problem for students of global health.  For those of us looking for an alternative way to engage local/indigenous populations in future planning regarding ecosystem management and land use, I recommend starting with this article, which describes the use of community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods: Dakubo C. Ecosystem approach to community health planning in Ghana. EcoHealth. 2004; 1:50-59.

Stay tuned for:

• Later this month, I will be blogging from a conference on indigenous health in NYC.
• The 9th Session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues will be meeting in New York in April 2010.