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As something like 200 million movie-goers know, Avatar depicts a foreign planet where a tribe of blue people lives in harmony with its jungle home atop a valuable mineral deposit; the tribe must defend itself against an earth-based mining corporation and military contractors. The movie has flaws--the story is trite, as David Denby pointed out, rather "Pocahontas meets Fern Gully," as a friend of mine disparagingly put it, and it rehashes the old Indians-need-a-white-savior-to-help-them-fight-the-white-conquerors narrative in a way that should make us uneasy--and yet: it breached my defenses, surmounted my inclination to be skeptical, and filled my heart with ardor for my fondest wish that biodiversity might be defensible against King Midas disease and Empire.

There was a startling synchronicity. Last summer, Colburn joined scientists and the Cape Farewell Project on an expedition from a shrinking Peruvian glacier down into the Amazon basin. The scientists collected data toward measuring the carbon content of the rainforest, and Colburn gathered materials for an art series involving 3D cut paper and video. She had told me that the part of the Amazon she visited is the most biodiverse place on Earth, that it is home to fifteen uncontacted tribes, and that Texas-based Hunt Oil was prospecting to drill there. I thought, Avatar is like an allegory for Peru. I emailed Colburn and told her so.

She replied with a link to an article titled, "The Real Avatar Story." The article reports that last June Peruvian police opened fire on five thousand Awajun and Wampi people in their tenth day of a protest against new rules that made it easier for foreign companies to exploit indigenous land. Current.com reports more details: three MI-17 helicopters launched tear gas while police on the ground shot rifles; machine guns may have been fired both from the helicopters and on the ground. This did resemble Avatar, right down to the helicopters.

Eighty-two protesters suffered gunshot wounds, and accounts say that somewhere between eleven and fifty protesters, and twenty-three police, are known dead, with up to four hundred protesters disappeared. Witnesses report that the military burned bodies and threw them in the river.

A few weeks later Hunt Oil moved into the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve and began building one hundred helicopter landing pads and three hundred miles of trails along which to detonate over twelve thousand explosive charges for seismic testing. I don't think it is taking the Avatar comparison too far to ask, how many explosive charges does it take to topple a Hometree, or a Tree of Voices, or a Tree of Souls?

A weak link in my pleasure at the indigenous victory that concludes Avatar is that, given the formidable asymmetry of the conflict, James Cameron was unable to imagine a realistic way for the Na'vi to win, and he resorted to a magical solution: the planet Pandora herself joined the battle, mobilizing jungle beasts to enter the fray at the darkest hour and, like Holy Champions at the Apocalypse, drive out the corporate evil.

But here on earth, where the battle appears to be equally asymmetrical, it doesn't seem likely that tapirs, anacondas and jaguars will help indigenous Peruvians drive away Hunt Oil. Instead, people will have to focus on real-world solutions.

The problem is, I don't think anybody knows what an achievable real-world solution to the irrepressible drive to drill for oil everywhere might be. We can argue that, under threat of catastrophic climate change, nobody should prospect for oil, period; or that uncontacted tribes of the Amazon should be allowed to choose the terms on which they engage the outside world. But the destruction of the Amazon is the sort of grave problem for which the very concept of a solution seems magical, utopian--and "utopia" is Greek for "not place," as in, there is not a place where utopia can really occur. Nobody can finally end the threat of profit-motivated conquest or climate change or nuclear annihilation or terrorism. Certainly, threats can be mitigated through lots of practical hard work and collective organizing, but look at December's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen: following seventeen years of international climate-change negotiations, the conference achieved merely a non-binding accord recognized by even its champions as inadequate to avert catastrophic climate change, and characterized by the chair of the G77 (a bloc of one hundred and thirty poor countries) as a "suicide pact."

With real-world evidence like the Copenhagen suicide pact, we can see why James Cameron failed to devise a realistic solution for his high-stakes drama. We can see why the wish to be saved by a holy Apocalypse persists.

But then, it took generations to criminalize slavery in the United States, and another century to end legal segregation. Seventeen years may well have been the size of the window we had to avert climate catastrophe, but seventeen years is nothing.

Colburn confessed to me that, "The more I know, the more bleak my worldview becomes. But it's human nature to keep engaged. I think it's actually pretty rare that someone feels defeated and just gives up. Humans are always trying to embrace optimism and make change and move forward, and I'm a victim to that impulse, probably."

A victim to that impulse. This is wry humor, perhaps. Wry humor may be the skeptic's version of the fantasy that Pandora will send reinforcements--perhaps each has the possibility to be not a substitute for action, but an aid to it. In the same way that a spiritual like "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" could be both comforting and galvanizing to the Civil Rights Movement, maybe humor and fantasy both take the edge off the otherwise grim never-ending necessity to face the Hunt Oils of the world.

Luckily for me, life doesn't feel grim in Minneapolis right now: the snow has just melted, the birds are singing spring, and the other morning I was awakened by a thunderstorm that I could pretend, from under my covers, was the sound of summer. Next week, assuming a meteor hasn't flown through my desk window to smash my computer, I will tell you about Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, and about Dreampolitik.

Read the interview with Adriane Colburn.