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Control room Avatar eye Neytiri Roger-Dean-like landscape of floating mountains

Although I adored Up, for me Avatar has been the ultimate in 3-D experiences. Elaine, Gaia and I went to see it on Thursday evening – and I haven’t been able to get it out of mind since. And Sigourney Weaver, one of my all-time favourite actresses, is only part of the story. For more, see here and here.

Like Star Wars (1977) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the film broke through to the treasure store of storylines and images I had accumulated through childhood and younger years, not least from reading science fiction books like Dune. Indeed, there was much of the film that forcefully reminded me of Dune‘s author, Frank Herbert, who I met in the 1980s. The tanks in which the avatars are grown are straight-line descendants of the axolotl tanks in which mentats were grown in the Dune series.

The landscape of floating mountains in which the final battle is fought reminded me inexorably of the work of Roger Dean, whose painting I have long loved and had about the house–and who I met way back in the early 1990s at a Green exhibition where we were both involved.

The control room on the planet of Pandora is exactly the way I’d like the Volans offices to look like a year or two hence, with the addition of a bunch of comfy sofas and bookshelves. The entrepreneurial way in which a small group of principled heroes adapts the problem technology to new, positive uses is a wonderful illustration of the Power of Unreasonable People.

And the eyes have it: I loved the eyes of the Na’vi–and, also, the bio-botanical neural network. The social variant of that is what Paul Hawken has been monitoring and championing in his book Blessed Unrest and in the work of WiserEarth.

Can’t wait to see the film again.

Elaine had been cutting obituaries for me while I was away in Switzerland – and one, from Wednesday’s Times, spotlighted the extraordinary life of Freya von Moltke – a wartime critic of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. The obituary got at least one fact wrong, asserting that she “is survived by her three sons”. Not true. Her second son, Konrad – born in 1941 – died in 2005. I knew him when he worked with the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP), where he was literally a towering figure. I recall a flight where Konrad strode down the plane aisle in his black cloak and was described by a chemical industry colleague as “Dr Dracula”. If I recall correctly, Konrad wasn’t greatly amused.

Earthrace at speed

Many years ago, I spent a fascinating afternoon aboard the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Sea Shepherd II in Alexandria, Virginia, before it headed off to tackle Russian whalers in the Bering Srait. have to say I approved of what they were trying to do – and still do. Yesterday, a Japanese surveillance ship, the Shonan Maru II, ran down Sea Shepherd’s $2 million trimaran, the Ady Gil.

I had featured the trimaran in slide presentations in its previous guise, as the Earthrace, which held the world record for the fastest circumnavigation. Given that the Japanese whalers were operating in Australian territorial waters, it is hard not to sympathise with an Australian member of the Sea Shepherd flagship, Steve Irwin. “Where the bloody hell are you?” she demanded of the Australian government.

Nagasaki after Fat Man

Although I was shocked at the lack of honesty in the Japanese A-bomb museum in Hiroshima when I visited it in the early 1980s, with the sense being given that poor Japan was bombed with no provocation, there is no denying the utter horror of the devastation wreaked on Hiroshima by Little Boy on August 6,1945, and by Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9. But what were the chances of someone being in both places at the time of the two bombs detonating?

Well Tsutomu Yamaguchi was. Having fled from the ruins of Hiroshima to his home town of Nagasaki, he found it impossible to persuade people there of what had happened a few days before. Then the second bomb went off and it was too late. Now he is dead, at the age of 93. He wasn’t the only person to experience both calamities, but was the only one to be officially registered as a hibakusha, or atomic bomb victim. Unlike other victims, he spoke out, bore witness. An impressive man.

 

Having been stranded in Zurich last night by snow blanketing Heathrow, I stayed overnight at a hotel near the airport, spending a couple of hours working on ideas for the new book. Then, as I was leaving for the airport again this morning, I was offered a lift by an attractive woman, her daughter and granddaughter. Although I tried to politely decline, ordering my own taxi, theirs turned out to be big enough for all – so I travelled to the airport with them.

When it transpired that I was leaving a couple of hours to catch my plane, whereas they were cutting it much closer, we began talking about the times we had missed planes. I mentioned tthat I had missed a flight to San Francisco where I was meant to be doing a speech and, another time, from Cornell to New York, so that I had to drive seven hours south to catch a flight. It turned out that my hostess had missed a flight from San Diego, where she had also been doing a speech. I asked on what? Helicopters, she explained. So, did she work for Sikorsky, I asked? No, she said, she had been the first woman to fly a helicopter around the world – from Pole to Pole, and back.

Turned out that she was Jennifer Murray, described by the Telegraph as a death-defying, globe-circling grandmother. A glorious conversation as we sped through the snowy fields – well worth having a flight cancelled under one for. Among other things, we talked of climate change and other forms of environmental destruction.

On the flight back, I finished Lords of the Sea, John Hale’s unbelievably wonderful account of the the Athenian navy and the birth of democracy. Utterly fascinating, but at times profoundly upsetting, as the Athenians energetically cut their own throats by forcing some of their greatest trireme experts into exile or to take their own lives through drinking hemlock.

Found myself reading out sections of the book to people as I travelled, including a section on page 287, where the environmental devastation effected by the construction and maintenance of the navy was described – coupled with the deadly (and linked) rise of King Philip’s Macedonia, which would ultimately end the independence of Athens:

Macedon’s rise had been fueled in part by Athens itself, for the navy required constant supplies of timber. Plato had already described the deforestation of Attica and its devastating effects on the Athenian countryside. With the trees cleared from the hillsides, the soil had eroded to the sea. Athens’ loss had been Macedon’s gain. Over many years Athenian silver had been enriching the northern kingdom through purchases of oak, fir, and pine for ships and oars. Philip could now cut off this resource at will …

Rings more than a few bells in today’s world.