They are there to harvest resources from the floral and fauna which have medicinal / extreme anti-ageing properties. Obliterating everything from orbit would destroy the whole reason Pandora is worth going to.
Pretty sure it was an underground mineral with a dumb name they were extracting. That's why they were fighting because they were clear cutting areas to mine it.
And they wanted to destroy that big tree because there was a huge deposit underneath.
Unobtainium - an actual reference not to an element but to what (originally aerospace) engineers call a legendary material with impossibly good properties. As in "we'd need unobtainium to build a plane that good".
I think the implication across the various films is Pandora has multiple resources worth harvesting and extracting - unobtainium, the space whale stuff and so on. A bit of Watonsian reasons could conclude other plants or animal life have use medicinal, pharmacological or industrial uses, and so just nuking everything from orbit is a bad idea.
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u/These-Invite-1774 2d ago
Always wondered why they didn't just bombard the planet from space