Toyota is a Japanese based international automotive company that recently has based many of its ad campaigns on being “green” and eco-friendly. This stems from the fact that it was one of the first to successfully mass produce a hybrid vehicle, the Prius. In this commercial Toyota is advertising the fact the third generation Prius has an air conditioning and ventilation system that is solar powered. In the ad the Prius is featured sitting in the desert under the sun at an oasis. The sun and the trees and water of the oasis are made up of people that are dressed in different colors and stacked on top of each other or bunched up in order to represent these natural elements. In this commercial we see what Noel Sturgeon calls “nature as commodity” and “nature as virtual reality” (Sturgeon 25).
We see nature presented as a commodity in the tag line, “What if we could use the sun to help keep us cool?” In this we see that nature, seen in the solar power, is seen as something that should be harnessed in order to better our lives and keeps us comfortable. While this technology is very eco-friendly it is displayed in a way that makes nature seem as something less than it is.
We see nature as virtual reality in this commercial in how the majority of the natural elements in it are actually humans in costume. Toyota uses a group of acrobatic contortionists that work together to shape things such as the sun, trees, and what seems to be a body of water. From far away one can barely tell that the images created are not as they appear and are instead human forms; this would be considered virtual reality and demonstrates Sturgeon’s trope of “nature as virtual reality.”
This commercial demonstrates Sturgeon’s point that the modern environmentalist movement uses somewhat negative and false stereotypes of nature to promote its cause, as the commercial though advertising an innovation that is very environmentally friendly while talking of nature as a commodity and picturing it in an unreal way.
A. Bernstein
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Environmental Issues in American Lit & Culture 
I agree with your analysis that the commercial is advertising the harness of nature for our own use. It’s interesting to me that you chose “Nature as virtual reality” from Sturgeon because we were having trouble in class thinking of what that means, but I think this commercial was accurate in that. When the contortionists first started becoming trees, when they were all brown, it reminded me a little of Stonehenge, and you can interpret that from when Sturgeon stated that natives are closer to nature…or maybe the mysticism in Stonehenge relates to the magic of the Toyota?
Not only do I really like this commercial but I really like your analysis. I love how you actually incorporated the ideas of virtual reality and nature as commodity into your analysis, especially since that was a tough concept to grasp in the reading. I definately agree with pretty much every point you made about the ad. I just think it is interesting how we also had a print ad for the same automobile in class and we discovered that all of the people stacking together to form the different aspects of nature were all white. It makes you wonder what the ad is trying to achieve by not using an race of color. It also, personally, makes me wonder if it is the same case in this commercial.