Environmental Activism Documentary

          In James Cameron's film, Avatar, an alien tribe on the distant planet of Pandora fights the human invaders bent on mining their forest home. In The Nature of Things episode, titled The Real Avatar, the indigenous people of the Cordillera del Condor area of Peru face a similar predicament, as they fight against the Peruvian government and private mining and oil interests to defend their home, in an effort to preserve both biodiversity and their traditional way of life. Though there had been a previous agreement between the tribe and the government to establish a protected conservation area, the election of a new president, Alan García, led to the passage of new laws to open that land to privatization and development in the name of profit. These decrees disregarded the prior promises made to the indigenous people, and instead granted access to corporations, including a Canadian mining company and an American oil company. According to environmental scientists, these extraction activities threaten to pollute the area. The mountain range where many of these private development projects are meant to take place overlaps with a portion of the Amazon Rainforest, and also acts as the sources from which rivers flow. The local tribes rely on these ecological features, traditionally viewing their environment as a living thing which provides for them and which they must protect. Though the tribes have engaged in impassioned protests against the actions of corporate interests, the continued lobbying by mining, oil, and other companies for permission to exploit the resources of the tribal lands has thus far won out against the pleas of the indigenous people and the concerns raised by environmental scientists.