Dennis Biba

Telling stories about humans and nature is a real balancing act. On the one hand, there is the dark and threatening wilderness, which can only be kept in check with great effort using fire and axes. On the other hand, there is nature as a romanticised place of longing that must be protected from human influence. Two competing narratives that assign contrasting roles. On closer inspection, the carefully drawn boundaries become blurred: humans become mammals, idyllic meadows become cultural landscapes. And seemingly natural events such as heavy rainfall or heat waves are increasingly becoming cultural disasters in the context of anthropogenic climate change. Finally, cultural studies weigh in, noting that nature as a concept is already a cultural product, while the social sciences emphasise humans as a product of their environmental conditions. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (original title: 風の谷のナウシカ, Kaze no Tani no Naushika) is an early attempt by Hayao Miyazaki, first as a manga, then as an anime film, to tell an eco-story that, instead of assuming nature and culture to be fixed entities, makes their inextricable entanglement the central element of the plot.

In a post-apocalyptic future, much of the Earth’s surface is overgrown with dense, rotten forest. Toxic fungal spores contaminate the air and are deadly to anyone who exposes themselves to them for too long without protection. Mutant beasts populate the rot, foremost among them the Ohmu, giant insects vaguely reminiscent of woodlice the size of a house. Humanity has almost wiped itself out in a global war in the past, and its numbers have declined significantly. In the coastal Valley of the Winds, people live protected from the spores and generate power from wind energy. It is a small utopia, but it collapses when an airship from the neighbouring empire of Torumekia is forced to make an emergency landing in the valley and contaminates the forest with spores. The inhabitants of the Valley of the Wind are quickly drawn into a conflict between Torumekia and Pejite, both of which want to destroy the mushroom forest.

In the midst of this conflict, the young princess Nausicaä attempts to negotiate between the parties and, above all, to give a voice to the forest, which cannot speak for itself. Nausicaä, who is based on both the character of the same name from the Odyssey and the Japanese story Mushi-mezuru Himegimi, is a talented pilot, botanist and can communicate with animals like no other human being. While everyone else sees the sea of decay as a threat that can only be eliminated by force, Nausicaä discovers that it is not nature that threatens humans here, but rather the toxic spores that are a late consequence of the nuclear war that nearly wiped out humanity. The trees have become petrified in a process of self-regulation and bind the pollutants, purifying the groundwater. The animal inhabitants of the mushroom forest have adapted to their environment and protect their habitat from attack. What at first glance appears to be an irretrievably catastrophic eco-apocalypse turns out, on closer inspection, to be a self-regulating ecosystem. This is an idea that Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock introduced into the environmental discourse on a global scale as the Gaia hypothesis. Incidentally, the Gaia hypothesis is less esoteric than the title suggests; it merely attempts to capture certain self-regulating mechanisms of the Earth system in a single image, whereas Miyazaki’s film actually tends towards a certain spiritual transfiguration. The message is that ecosystems are complex and not always apparent at first glance. The measures that humans use to combat decay are, in fact, what caused it in the first place. Nausicaä leads by example and attempts (following Donna Haraway) to relate to her non-human environment rather than viewing it as a resource. She understands that in a catastrophic environment, survival can only ever be co-evolution (‘becoming with’) and that humans are just as much a part of extremely fragile assemblages (cf. Anna Tsing), i.e. ecological and economic structures, as all other living beings.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is therefore Ghibli’s eco-film par excellence, even though it was actually produced before the world-famous film studio was founded. The WWF’s involvement in the film is in itself enough to fuel discussion for many more blog articles, but let’s just mention it in passing here. A certain romanticism of nature does seem to shine through in the end, when the resolution of the conflict between humans and Ohmus is simplified to a communication problem that can only be solved by a mythically transfigured saviour. The film illustrates in a textbook manner how human ways of living can affect the ecosystem. However, the fact that this insight cannot be followed by a happy ending because ecological self-regulatory processes do not adhere to human time frames, has its own tragedy that is not resolved. What remains is the vague hope that future generations will have a better life.

Hayao Miyazaki (1984): Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind [Film]. Japan.