Director James Cameron discussed his plans for the Avatar sequel yesterday, not with CNN, People, or Entertainment Weekly, but with Democracy Now – the political program hosted by Amy Goodman.

The interview with the director came as a result of an award he was given yesterday by indigenous activists in Ecuador – an honor Cameron said means more to him “than any Academy Award or Directors Guild Award or anything else. It’s… the most important thing, because you know you’re communicating.”

What Cameron communicated with his blockbuster Avatar, a kind of computerized blend of Dances with Wolves and Medicine Man, was clear: the film tells the story of an indigenous species called the Na’vi, who resist the private military force of a powerful corporation trying to mine a valuable mineral on the Na’vi’s planet of Pandora. One soldier, recently paralyzed, finds his legs and his soul among the Na’vi and eventually joins them.

People all over the world had an immense reaction to the film, surprising even Cameron, and many related to the situation of the Na'vi. But he recognizes that the response was largely emotional.

“I don’t think that’s enough in this situation,” Cameron told reporter Aaron Mate on Goodman’s program. “Because Avatar doesn’t teach you anything specific. It only gives you an emotional reaction, a sense of moral outrage about the destruction of nature, about the destruction of indigenous people, culture and so on. So I think people need action items... specific things. They need specific information about what’s going on, and they need specific action items about what to do about it. So you’ve got to talk about it. There’s got to be a dialogue.”

To that end, Cameron is aligning himself with indigenous struggles he says “mirror the story told in his film.” This past weekend he attended the Ninth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City, and just returned from Brazil, where he joined protests against construction of the Belo Monte Dam. Opponents of the dam claim it will devastate indigenous communities in the Amazon, displacing more than 25,000 people. 

A born-and-raised Canadian citizen, Cameron also acknowledged that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he considers "unethical," were intended as an undercurrent in Avatar. He told Democracy Now:

“I feel that this whole climate change thing is never really going to get solved unless we really have full-cost accounting and we fully burden the cost of what we’re doing. By ‘what we’re doing,’ I mean burning fossil fuels and so on. When you pay for all the military actions necessary to secure our oil supply lines and to secure our way of consuming energy here in North America, that’s what you’re paying for.

“And why are we there militarily? 70 percent of our oil comes from offshore sources. We’re dependent on it. We put ourselves into a situation where we have to take these unethical military actions.”

So how does all this translate into sequels of Avatar?

For the next film, Cameron plans to go underwater and focus on the ocean on Pandora, saying “it will be equally rich and diverse and crazy and imaginative.”

Speculating about a third film, Cameron may venture beyond Pandora, possibly exploring another solar system -- visioning again a whole new world.