Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

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Despite being 40 years old, the messages in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind are especially relevant today. Nature is valued as a resource to be taken from and hardly, if ever, given anything in exchange. Miyazaki doesn’t just define relationships between humans and nature as a balance of give and take, though. Miyazaki’s portrayal of nature is unique because in his films nature is valued as far more than a resource to be bartered with. In this film, the predominant ‘civilization’ other than humans is the Ohms, massive hard-shelled insects. They display self-awareness, emotions such as anger and pain, and are able to communicate to humans through memory. They have their own values and autonomy, and live without any form of hierarchy. This film is successful in it’s portrayal of the natural world because it doesn’t strive to draw comparisons between humans or nature, or even say that nature is morally better than humans. I would say the goal of the film is to point out how limited our understanding of the natural world is as humans because we only assess nature through our own value systems and hierarchy.

Promoting sustainability is often ineffective when you are merely asking people to ‘do better’. Following Miyazaki’s approach, raising environmental consciousness should be about decentralizing humans from the narrative of the natural world while maintining that as long as humans exist, we exist in relation to the natural world, not apart from it.