Avatar and the Rain Forest The tropical rain forest is a place unlike any on earth and for that reason its vegetation has attracted more attention from writers than any other vegetation anywhere else on the planet: as Whitmore (1990) states, “more ‘purple passages’ have been penned on lowland evergreen rain forest than any other vegetation type” (p. 40). Through this lens of human beings’ fascination with the wonders of the tropical rain forest, one can see why James Cameron took such care to bring to life the tropical world of Avatar. Cameron’s film is an ode to nature—to the wonders of the environment. It is a sci-fi reimagining of what our world could be like if only we stopped trying to loot and plunder the natural world. As the villains in Avatar show, nature is corrupted by the external influence of people who seek to exploit nature and create disharmony where harmony should be. Though Whitmore shows numerous examples of nature itself displaying a kind of smothering conflict—for example, with the strangling fig with fan palms (Whitmore, 1990, p. 41) which grows over a host tree in order to find light for itself—Cameron takes the position that it is better to live in harmony with nature than to try to destroy. Ironically, Whitmore shows that in falling in love with the verdure, one can miss the reality of nature which is that there is cruelty in it—and the strangling fig is an example of that cruelty, smothering the host beneath it in order to send its roots to the earth below and its shoots upwards towards the light of the sun.

James Cameron’s Avatar is almost an unintentional allegory of the fig tree described in Whitmore’s book. The humans from planet earth are like the fig tree, looking to exploit the resources of the moon planet on which the Na’vi live. They want to mine the moon for its valuable resources—and in doing so they are willing to kill anything in its way. The Na’vi are,...

Like the host tree that is smothered by the strangling fig, the Na’vi and their tree of life attacked. In Cameron’s romantic take on the tropical rain forests, however, the host tree (the Na’vi) fights back and the strangling fig (the humans) is put in its place. Cameron wants to show in Avatar that nature is good and that respect for nature is what the guiding spirit of life—the Eywa—wants everyone to have. Living in harmony with nature is possible and this harmony that Cameron insists upon is depicted in the final battle in which the wildlife of Pandora, the moon planet, unite to take down the humans. In other words, nature resists the strangling fig in Cameron’s film. In reality, as Whitmore shows, the strangling fig is part of nature and is not resisted but rather, in fact, smothers the host tree and dominates its way to the top. Cameron romanticizes nature and the concept of the tropical rainforest in Avatar. Whitmore shows the true colors of the rain forest thanks to the image of the strangling fig.
Wade Davis in One River likewise shows how nature is not quite as harmonious as Cameron would have his audience believe. Instead of union and unity of purpose, there is the sense that beings in nature will dominate and take over in spite of obstacles. The example that Davis gives is the example of Cubeo settlement, where the women take the venomous snake that is killed by the men and “create nourishment out of poison” by pressing the venom from the snake (Davis, 1996, p. 468). The women do not live in harmony with the snake in the same way that the natural world of Pandora lives in harmony with itself. On the contrary, the women see the snake as deadly and make use of it, just like the strangling fig views the bigger tree as an obstacle to its own survival. The strangling fig takes over the bigger, host tree in order to survive and uses the host tree’s girth and strength to fortify itself—just as the…