by Agence France-Presse
James CameronBRASILIA – Director James Cameron was in Brazil on Monday to lend his Avatar success to the fight against a controversial dam project he denounced as an “ecological disaster.”
Cameron, who made a pro-environment message central to his blockbuster film, urged Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to stop construction on the Belo Monte dam in the country’s Amazon jungle.
“I would challenge him to be a hero” by halting work on the project, Cameron told a media conference in Brasilia, standing alongside actress Sigourney Weaver, who starred in Avatar and Cameron’s earlier Aliens.
Activists have tried to portray the construction of the dam, and opposition to it by indigenous people who would be displaced by it, as strikingly similar to the Avatar storyline, in which feline-featured natives on a moon fight against militaristic strip-miners from Earth.
Cameron, who has long had a fascination with marine and jungle environments, said, “Huge dams are a 20th century idea in the 21st century: it’s a dinosaur’s idea.”
Belo Monte, he said, “is going to be an ecological disaster,” and he asserted that “the knowledge of indigenous people, who learned how to live with nature,” is one of Brazil’s biggest resources.
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