Audacious Environmental Hypocrisy: James Cameron – Grow Up

I thought Avatar was a great film, beautiful even. Cameron is such a good story teller he even had me rooting for the blue rain forest people and wishing death on all the appalling Americans in final battle scene.

But seriously, James Cameron grow up.

Avatar is an anti-mining, anti resource development rant worthy of a not very clever spotty undergraduate.

James Cameron is a self confessed unrepentant greenie, and in the world he creates mining is evil and life in the rain forest is just spiffing. So lets throw a few facts in the way of Cameron’s gorgeous but idiotic narrative.

Mining makes everything about James Cameron’s life and our lives in the developed world, beautiful, possible, bearable, majestic, gorgeous and full of promise. The people of the rain forest on the other hand who live the simple, organic, back to nature life so adored by the Hollywood elite such as James Cameron, also have short lives of misery, disease and squalor. They would do anything to have a piece of the James Cameron life and escape their subsistence hunter-gathering nightmare.

So James Cameron hear it one more time – Grow Up.

Mining companies bring jobs, roads, infrastructure, health clinics and opportunities to some of the poorest people on the planet.

James Cameron, even more than rest of us, uses the earth’s resources for his pleasure and his very profitable business. His films all employ enormous quantities of heavy metals in planes, boats, trains and the latest cutting edge camera, lighting and computer technology.

Everything about Cameron’s work uses metals mined from somewhere and his gigantic transport needs are fueled by oil.

So grow up James Cameron.

Having spent the most depressing two weeks of my life at the charade that was the Climate festival in Copenhagen I am particularly sensitive to the James Cameron idiocy. Like the 45,000 hyper-educated and pampered fools who attended that conference James Cameron bangs away on his computer objecting to mining and celebrating the indigenous life without ever realizing that the computer would not exist without mining.

So I have a suggestion James Cameron, go and live there, burn whatever passports you possess and do it, live it, be that guy who walks the walk with no escape route back to the unnatural but fabulous life of development. Go to the rain forest, try it and see just how awful it is to live without electricity, computers, roads and medicines that come with modernity.

Or if you don’t want to do that I have a suggestion.

James Cameron, please, please Grow Up!