Booknotes

Senator ALBERT GORE Jr. (Democrat, Tennessee; Author, "Earth in the Balance"): It's about a global ecological crisis that is, in my opinion, the most serious problem our world faces. It covers a lot of seemingly separate problems that are all part of the same underlying crisis. You know the old parable about the blind men and the elephant. One had ahold of the leg, the other the trunk, the other the tail and it took them some time to realize that all of these separate parts were parts of the same large entity. When I first got involved in studying about problems relating to the environment, I had so--some similar difficulties. I saw the problem of ozone depletion and climate change, toxic waste disposal, the rain forest destruction, all as seemingly separate problems. I've now come to the conclusion that they are all symptoms of a deeper underlying crisis, which is a collision between our civilization, as it's currently constituted, and the ecological system of the Earth.

The relationship between human beings and the Earth, as described in "Earth in the Balance," has been changed profoundly in our lifetimes: the population explosion, new scientific and technological inventions that magnify the power we have to exploit the Earth and a relatively new way of thinking that we are separate from the Earth, isolated individuals entitled to exploit it as much as we want. And that way of thinking is--is what really needs to be changed first.

Sen. GORE: Yeah, that is part of an experiment that was done to determine what is the minimum amount of information needed by the human mind to decipher an image. This, of course, is Abraham Lincoln. But when you see it close up, it just looks like a jumble of light and dark squares. When you--when you pull back from it, as we were a moment ago, the pattern is much easier to see. And our way of looking at the evidence concerning the global environmental crisis presents us with a similar challenge. If we just look at regional problems or local problems, they look like a jumble of meaningless data. But only by gaining the perspective which distance grants us, in time and space, can we see that the Earth is a unified whole and that it is now facing this unprecedented ecological crisis, which can be solved. And I--I--I wrote "Earth in the Balance" not only to describe the causes and the roots of the problem, but also the solutions for it. But the first challenge is to see it, to recognize it.

There's an old story about a science experiment involving a frog that's dropped in a pot of boiling water and it jumps right out. And then the same frog is put in a pot of lukewarm water, which is slowly brought to a boil, and the frog just sits there un--until it's rescued. The frog used to be boiled in this story, but I--I--I've learned how important it is to rescue the frog. But the point of that story is similar to the point of--of that graphic. The frog's nervous system is so primitive, it needs a sudden jolt, a--a sudden contrast to make the connection between the changed circumstances and the danger it faces and what it needs to do to save itself. And we're like that frog in that when we see and--and hear these signals from around the world--the disappearance of the Aral sea, the Love Canal, the garbage barge, the ozone hole. There's a very long list. The process of change they represent seems deceptively gradual in the context of a human lifetime. But in terms of history, it's actually very sudden and the question is: When are we going to jump? When are we going to put two and two together and recognize that we have a responsibility to the future to do something about it?

Sen. GORE: Mm.

Sen. GORE: I went through a change in my life when my son was almost killed a couple of years ago. It was a shattering experience for my family. He has had a miraculous recovery and we're very blessed and very grateful to all the doctors and the nurses who--who--who helped to make it possible. But during the long weeks when my wife and I were in the hospital room with him, I began to really look at life a little bit differently and ask questions about what's most important in life and, having already long since been deeply involved in this issue, I began to look at it differently also. Instead of seeing it just as an outgrowth of the new scientific and technological salt on the Earth and the population explosion which is adding one China's worth of people every 10 years now, I began to--to feel that the deeper causes are within our own lives as individuals. What gives us the notion that we are just isolated one from another with no responsibility to the future our children are going to live, no connection to the communities in--in which we live out our lives. And I began to explore, in a very personal way, what it is that leads to these false assumptions and how we can get on with the task of--of solving thi--this crisis and organizing a response that gives our children and grandchildren and generations to come an Earth that is not diminished and degraded by virtue of what we're doing in our short lifetimes.

Sen. GORE: Oh, he's doing great. He's had a full recovery. He--he's doing terrifically well. I might say that during that episode I learned something else, too. Those who had suffered the most in their own lives seemed to have the most to offer to my family and me by way of comfort and understanding. And the sharing, the prayers, the reaching out from so many people we'd never even met was a healing experience and--and a profoundly moving experience. In a sense, it gave me permission to fully experience my own grief, to allow myself to feel what--the enormity of--of--of what had happened and what we were going through, and I--I don't know, I'm--I'm in my early 40s and maybe it's a time when people naturally begin to question the--the arc of their lives. Certainly, that's the--that's the case with me and that--that experience brought a lot of things home in a way that caused me to ask different and, I think, better questions.

Sen. GORE: We have four children and our son is our youngest. We have a freshman in college and a 14-year-old and a 13-year-old, three girls and a boy.

Sen. GORE: Well, too close. It was a--a--when I--when I reached him, he had no breath, no pulse and two nurses who were off duty, working at Johns Hopkins, happened by and, thank God, they were able to...

Sen. GORE: We were at the opening day game in 1989.

Sen. GORE: We were in the hospital 30 days and then there were follow-up procedures for a long time and he needed microsurgery on his nerves in--several months after that. He lost the use of his right arm for quite awhile. Totally restored now. And then the physical therapy, which continued. You know, I did not realize how many--and this is my own failing, but it's something that you learn when you go throu--through an experience like that. I did not realize how many people I was working with on a daily basis who had gone through the same thing--maybe not exactly the same injury or tragedy, but emotionally they had gone through the same thing. So many families experience this and people that you meet in--in everyday life--they'll be walking down the street or in the office where you work--are sometimes carrying some very heavy burdens and not talking about them. But they're really having that weight on their hearts, even as they're going about their daily tasks, without saying anything about it. And I--it--my eyes were really opened to a lot of things like that.

Sen. GORE: Every single word of it. And people in my profession sometimes are suspect in that category. But, as you know, I was a journalist for seven years before I got into politics and I'm quite familiar with word processing and writing and--although I must say the difference between writing a daily story--or daily stories and writing a book was a difference that I did not fully appreciate until I got up to my elbows in this; and it is a different breed of cat.

Sen. GORE: There's a difference in the temporal reality. Stamina is--is one of the most important qualities you have to bring to the task. If you've got a--a long newspaper story, even a weekly story, and you get behind a little bit, you can pull an all-nighter and--and get it finished or you can just really buckle down and set aside the four to six to eight hours and get it done. With a book, particularly one like this, that's, of course, entirely out of the question. This was a three-year effort. The first two years were focused mainly on the research and organizing the task, talking with people, getting all the ducks in a row. And then immediately after the--excuse me, immediately after the re-election campaign of 1990--in November of 1990, after my own Senate re-election, I just cleared the decks and wrote in a very concentrated way, day and night, weekends, for a full year, after having gotten all the research lined up.

Sen. GORE: That particular image has not been seen, to my knowledge, anywhere but on the cover. It's an actual photograph of the Earth put together by a man named Tom van Sant. He selected, from thousands of satellite pictures of the Earth, images that gave a cloud-free view of every square inch and the--the large, flat version of that has been seen and, in fact, ha--has been used by National Geographic as the frontispiece of their new atlas of the Earth and in other places. But he put the images together in a--in a globe--onto a globe and this one, for example, is the only image I know of that shows a clear view of the North Pole, the arctic ice cap in summer.

One interesting feature of the picture, Brian, is that the Northern and Southern hemispheres are both in summer at the same time, because the pictures were taken over a three-year period and he selected summer exposures. If you look close--you can't see it with your cameras, but you can actually see down in South America--you can see the fresh water of the Amazon River coming--coming out into the south Atlantic there. It--it really is an extraordinary picture.

Sen. GORE: Lots. I've--I've engaged in a concentrated effort to go to the front lines of this ecological crisis over the last several years--the North Pole, the South Pole, the Amazon, the Aral sea--places where environmental tragedies are most visible, where the impact of our civilization on the Earth's ecology is easiest to see.

Sen. GORE: Well, a lot of them. There are people who I describe as resistance fighters--individuals who are standing in the path of the bulldozers, people who, like Chico Mendes, have been assassinated for the work that they have done.

Sen. GORE: He--he was a man in the Amazon region of Brazil who spoke out against the widespread burning and--and the cutting of the Amazon rain forest and organized those who live in the rain forest and around it to use the rain forest in a sustainable way, to harvest the renewable bounty of the rain forest. But wealthy landowners who want--who wanted to just burn it down and clear it for a year's worth of cattle ranching hired an assassin to kill him. More than 1,000 others were killed just in the last year, not as well known as Chico Mendes, but this is, in--in some ways, like a war.

These resistance fighters have no hope of winning unless their courage arouses the conscience of the rest of the world. And that is beginning to happen. I report on some of those in various countries who are becoming quite successful at getting the message out. We have this misconception sometimes that it's the developed world against the developing world, but just as some of the worst ecological catastrophes are in the developing world, some of the most eloquent spokesmen and spokeswomen for what can be changed are there, too. A woman like Juangari Matai in Kenya who has planted, with her organization, more than seven million trees in the last few years to help stop soil erosion, which is at epidemic, catastrophic levels throughout much of the Third World.

Sen. GORE: On eroded hillsides, in villages. And they choose indigenous species, native species that are genetically prone to do well in the climate and the region where they're planted.

Sen. GORE: Well, it's the--the seeds are not expensive. And her women's groups--that's how it started--in each village plant little nurseries themselves and then they--they compensate the people who plant the trees, not for planting the trees, but for ensuring that the trees survive. Only after they have reached a stage of growth that makes--makes it very likely that they--that they will stay there do they get the little compensation involved. But she raises the money herself.

Sen. GORE: They are two people who contacted me when I was in the House of Representatives many years ago about a--a funny taste in their well water. And they had done a little detective work on their own and had discovered that a chemical company from 70 miles away in Memphis had been trucking its chemical waste to the rural area where the Sterlings live and dumping it into shallow trenches wh--in a way that caused contamination of the water table. And after looking into it, I then chaired the first hearing on chemical waste disposal and we had the Sterlings come and testify and folks from a little community in upstate New York known as Love Canal, which later became, of course, a nationwide and even worldwide symbol for the problem of toxic waste disposal.

Sen. GORE: Marilyn Bullock is a very energetic woman, a mother from Henderson County, Tennessee, who woke up one Christmas Eve morning to the news--the startling news that her county had just been selected as the site for a chemical waste disposal landfill and a company had come in and secretly, through intermediaries, bought up the rights to 2,000 acres. And you talk about ruining somebody's Christmas, that community--that entire community rose up in arms and they said, `This is not going--going to be allowed to happen here.'

By the time I got there a few weeks later, the county courthouse, on the inside, was completely plastered with individual posters from schoolchildren. Every schoolchild in the county had done a poster about why the environment of that county had to be saved and how much they were opposed to letting this chemical waste be dumped there. And they didn't--I mean, the attitude was really extraordinary. They just said very confidently, `This is not going to be put here.' And they went about learning the facts related to chemical waste disposal; and they very carefully said, `We don't want to just save our own back yards, we don't want the kind of thing they're proposing here to be done anywhere in the country.' I--I responded to them by having a--a congressional hearing in a nearby city and some national experts on the problem came and said, `They're right.' And they had done their homework and the whole project had to be scrapped.

What's changing now is--is--is something very similar to what changed in that county when they woke up on Christmas Eve morning. All across this country, there are groups who are concerned about where a landfill or an incinerator's going to go because they feel their back yards are threatened. What's changing now is the definition of back yard. And when enough people make the connection, emotionally, not just intellectually, between the devastation of the global environment and their own back yards, we're going to then feel the same intensity brought to the global environmental questions that are now brought to these local environmental disputes.

One example, in your back yard, Brian, here in this studio, the air that we're breathing while we're talking has 600 percent more chlorine atoms in each breath we take right now than it did when you and I were born. And that's true at the North Pole and the South Pole and everywhere on Earth. In just 40 years time, we have multiplied by six the number of chlorine atoms in every part of the Earth's atmosphere. Now that doesn't hurt our health directly, but it does burn a hole in the ozone layer and lets in more ultraviolet B radiation, which suppresses the immune system and causes more cataracts and more cases of skin cancer and an extra 200,000 deaths from skin cancer here in the United States alone in the next few decades. Now that's in my back yard and your back yard, but in order to protect our back yards, we have to address ourselves to the changes taking place in the global environment. And kids are now beginning to make that connection. We've got to start making that connection, too.

Sen. GORE: Linda Draper is a--a really neat person whose family worked for years for the General Electric company. And she bought a GE refrigerator and it worked fine. And one day a serviceman knocked on her door and said, `We've got to tell you that there's a problem with the refrigerator you bought, but don't worry. We're going to replace the defective part before you have any problems.' And in a manner of speaking, the company was trying to go out of its way to--to do the right thing, it thought. But when the repairman started to change the compressor and put in the new one, he said, `Would you mind opening your kitchen window?' And she said, `Sure. Why?' And there was a loud whoosh. Those were the CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons, rushing out into the Earth's atmosphere.

Well, Linda had been doing volunteer work for an environmental group. She's very concerned about the global environment, and she figured out what was happening and she just went nuts. I mean, that's the wrong way to put it. She--she got very concerned, and she said, `What are you doing?' And then she dug into the facts and found out that the company was doing this with millions of these things and accounting for lots of chlorofluorocarbons going into the atmosphere and she just said, `Stop.' And she called the company. They didn't respond. She went to an environmental group. They did respond.

Sen. GORE: Yeah. That's right. And then she went to an environmental group. They came to me with Linda and explained the problem and they were prepared to have a nationwide boycott and--and I--of GE products. And I said, `Wait a minute. Ha--let me talk to the company.' And I did and--and we--we had a good conversation and I said, `Can't--isn't there some other way to make this a win-win situation instead of a--a lose-lose outcome?' And, to their credit, they bucked it up to the CEO level and they really put their thinking caps on and they came up with a--a very innovative solution. And as a result, there was no net increase in CFCs in the environment and they developed a new unit to scavenge chlorofluorocarbons any time a similar situation is faced by them or any other appliance manufacturer in the future. And they're now trying to lead the way on this particular question. So it--it--it turned out to have a--a happy ending and it serves as an example of a change that's happening with a lot of businesses.

Northern Telecom, if I can mention another one, is--happens to be headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. When the problem with chlorofluorocarbons was first addressed by the Montreal Protocol--that's the worldwide treaty that was signed in 1987--a lot of companies said, `You know, we can't ban chlorofluorocarbons. There's nothing we can do about it.' Northern Telecom said, `Let's get rid of them, whatever it takes.' And they went to work and just a few weeks ago they had a worldwide celebration. They beat the deadline by nine years and got completely rid of them and they found out in the process that the new process they developed is cheaper and the products have a higher quality as a result. And that's not unusual when companies pay attention to what--to the details of how they can eliminate wasteful pollution, they end up eliminating wasted money, too. And they drive creativity and come up with new discoveries. So there's a--there are a lot of hopeful stories in "Earth in the Balance" because some of the problems are so tough, they sometimes seem impossible to solve, but it's important to recognize that people are beginning to solve them. We can solve them. We must and we will.

Sen. GORE: As I said earlier, I've done a lot of introspection and soul-searching in--into the way I, myself, react to--to this problem and I'm a little more sensitive now--a lot more sensitive now to some of the things I do that are habits that are hard to break. I still drive my car more than I feel is right. I sometimes run to work now and I feel better for having done it, but--but I still use a--a car more than I should and--but I don't think that people should feel so guilty about things like that that they're just paralyzed from doing anything about it. I concede a certain level of hypocrisy, in that I am working on this practically all the time and yet the patterns that I still have in my own life still help to contribute to the problem. But I'm changing and my family is changing. And I want to see that public policy changes along with the commitment of individuals who are getting involved in this.

I've talked to some people who have gotten into recycling in a big way and have then become frustrated when the stuff they collect piles up and they can't sell it because the community in which they live hasn't gotten on the ball and put a good recycling program into place. You really do have to have both--the personal commitment, first to learn about it, and then to change the patterns in--in our lives and ye--and also you have to have the public policy framework that encourages and facilitates the kinds of changes that millions of people are anxious and ready to make.

Sen. GORE: Sure. On the Rules Committee, I--I've taken the lead in pushing forward a--a Senatewide recycling program. The architect of the Capitol was already on the case and it didn't take too much of a nudge but the Rules Committee was very actively involved on both sides of the aisle in pushing this forward and now we--we're going to have a--a very effective recycling program in the Senate. We...

Sen. GORE: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Sen. GORE: Paper, glass, cans. And we recycle in my home. I can't take credit for my family getting into that because my children led the way on that. And that seems to be a common pattern among the families that I talk with. It's sort of like seat belts. Your kids bug you to wear them and a lot of families are probably wearing them for that reason. Recycling is the same way.

And I might say this, too, Brian. What I've found in researching the book and in working on this problem is that kids are generally more active and more involved with this issue than older pare--than their parents or older Americans are. I ask them routinely in elementary schools, `Do you think you're more concerned than your parents?' And they always say--100 percent of them raise their hands and say, `Yes.' When I ask them why, they say, `Because we're going to be around longer than they are.' Sometimes the teacher will leap out of the side of the classroom and say, `We didn't have the facts. We didn't know everything that these kids are being exposed to.' But one of the reasons I wrote "Earth in the Balance" is to put in one place all the facts for anybody who is curious about why their kids are so involved in this issue and what families can do to address the issue.

Sen. GORE: Yeah. That's more of that introspection that I talked about earlier. I think that one of the problems with our political system, in both parties, is such a sensitivity to the short-term fluctuations in--in public opinion that a lot of elected officials are--are too timid and--and less willing to--to--to go out in front of public opinion and say, `Look, I've taken the time to investigate this problem and you may not yet agree with what I have to say, but I'm asking you to take the time to check what I'm telling you and then see if you don't agree.' That's called leadership. And I don't think we have enough leadership in either political party now, certainly not from--from President Bush on this particular question.

But let me just talk about my own experience. When I ran for president in 1988--you know I used to be the next president of the United States--and when I started that campaign, I said the number one issue in my campaign is going to be the global environmental crisis. And the next day, some of the pundits said, `How naive he is. This is not going to be an issue.' And, I guess, to an extent they were right. But I don't think they're right for long and even if they were right, looking back on that campaign now, I wish that I had been more willing to say in every single speech, right up front in the speech, `This is the main issue and I'm going to hammer away at it, even if the news media doesn't cover it or doesn't put it on the A list of issues.' I--let me use an analogy. The savings and loan crisis wasn't mentioned in that campaign either. But if one of us who ran had taken the time to dig into the facts of that before the election and had brought out the--the--the facts about the crisis to the people, we might have saved the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and had an impact on that election campaign in '88 in the process.

Sen. GORE: Well, one of the reasons why the Senate floor is practically deserted during most speeches is that most of my colleagues know that what will matter at election time is the 30-second commercials. And what will not matter very much, usually, is the long speeches that are made on the substance of the issues that we're dealing with. I do--I don't mean this as an advertisement for C-SPAN, but thank goodness that we do have a C-SPAN because, otherwise, nobody would ever hear those speeches at all. It's one of the only remaining links between the American people and the kind of government that our founders expected that we would have.

Just as technology is a big part of the problem where the global environment is concerned, technology is part of the problem where our political process is concerned. As we become more familiar with the technology of television and short commercials, I think some more creative ideas will emerge for using the technology to reclaim the meaningful dialogue that must take place between politicians and people, between elected officials and people.

For example, I've recommended that the key debates on matters of greatest import on the Senate floor ought to be scheduled consciously at a time when people are able to watch on television. I'd like to see C-SPAN in prime time competing with all of the other things that--that are on television with the--with the best, most passionate, most heated, most meaningful debates that the Senate has scheduled consciously for those prime-time hours. Then, when enough people started tuning in at that time, you'd get more senators and congressmen coming to the floor, jumping up to participate when a debate went in a--in a way that they didn't like and--and we would have a better chance to reinvigorate political debate in this country. But--but there's one ingredient that has nothing to do with technology, nothing to do with commercials, and that is a willingness of the individuals in the political system to--to speak what's on their hearts and--and to be willing to take a long-range view and--and--and really look beyond the next election or--or the next State of the Union speech or tomorrow's daily public opinion poll.

Sen. GORE: I'm not up for another four years.

Sen. GORE: I announced last August that I wouldn't run in 1992 and I said at the time that, in my opinion, President Bush was going to take a nosedive in the public opinion polls; and I said if I made the decision for political reasons, I would run. But part of the healing process my family's been going through that we talked about a little bit earlier has made me change the--the way I try to discharge my commitment to my family during this period when my family's a little more vulnerable than--than normal. Our whole family was hit hard by the accident that we talked about and it was just inconsistent with that healing process for me to rip myself out of their lives and go out on the campaign trail full time for two years or a year and a half or a year, whatever, and--and put my whole heart and soul into a presidential campaign. It was not the right thing for me to do, personally, this time around. I hope that I'll have another chance at some point in the future. I know that his--time waits on no person and I know that I may never have another chance like this one. Even if that's true, I'll never have second thoughts about this decision this year. But if I do have another chance, I will run for president.

Sen. GORE: I'd be a writer. I'd be a full-time writer.

Sen. GORE: Oh, it sure was. Well, I was a full-time writer for seven years, just before I got into politics. And I--I--I was in it long enough to get the--the printer's ink in my veins a little bit, and I really do like the process of writing. I'm one of those people who finds it easier to understand something in the process of trying to communicate it and express it. Not everybody's like that, a l--there are a lot of us, I know that for a fact. But I'm--I'm like that; and so I do like to--to--to search my own thoughts in the process of trying to communicate them to others.

Sen. GORE: Houghton Mifflin is a terrific publishing company. I've been so impressed with them. They're very conscious of their tradition of publishing books on the environment. They were the publishers of s--of "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson back in 1962. In fact, going farther back than that, they were the publishers of "On Walden Pond" by Thoreau. And they just have a very strong commitment to the overarching issue and the editor in chief, John Sterling, took a personal interest in the project. He became my editor. I worked with him, you know, the normal relationship--just every single day and since he is in New York and I'm mostly here, we really burned up the--the telephone lines going over every--every page. And I learned a lot from the editing process, because the editors I've worked with in the newspaper business taught me a lot, but as we were saying earlier, a book is so different. Rearranging the flow of ideas and concepts with an eye to the arc of a--of a whole book is something that--that is akin to an art. And I gained a tremendous amount of respect for what good editing is--is all about. And John Sterling really did a super job.

Sen. GORE: I think--I think most people write books as if they're going to be read from front to back continuously. I'm not sure everybody reads them that way. You don't. But the arc of a book is constructed according to that assumption. A book starts in a particular place and then takes the reader through the full text and then ends in--in the right way. And if your experience is, as mine was, in writing 30-word leads and relatively short newspaper stories, it's--you have to make a transition to--to--to capture that sense of how long the arc of a book is. My editor was very helpful in--in--in helping me gain that understanding. I wrote it in sections, not chapters. I mention that I took a couple of years before I actually started the writing process to organize research. I pasted things up on the wall and--and every area was a different part of the book. I ended up with 45 sections and then they were aggregated in--into chapters and actually there was surgery from time to time to rearrange the way chapters were put together. And that again was a--was a new experience for me.

Sen. GORE: Sure did. It was a big topic of dinner conversation in our family. And my sister and I were impressed by the intensity my mother brought to that subject. It was clearly different than other subjects that had made an impression on her. And what was different about it is that something you couldn't readily see or taste or smell or hear was being spread throughout the environment and having an impact that could only be perceived in the cycle of the seasons with the disappearance of songbirds in--in that case. And the songbirds are disappearing and, incidentally, one of the facts in the book is that if you measure the pesticide use in Rachel Carson's time and compare it to now, the world is using 13,000 times as much pesticide as it was when Rachel Carson wrote "Silent Spring."

Sen. GORE: She died of lung cancer. And she was the very first volunteer for the Peace Corps.

Sen. GORE: First ever. And worked with Bill Moyers and Sarge Shriver and Harris Wofford and the group that put the Peace Corps together. And she was a--a great person and I--I feel emotional just--just remembering how much she meant to me. She--when I first ran for public office, she told her husband she was going to have to take a few months away from--from him and came and took the toughest counties that I had in that district and--and just worked full time and really made the difference. I didn't write about this in the book, Brian, but when--when she died I had a lot of thoughts about lung cancer and--and smoking. There are 100,000 tobacco farms in Tennessee, but most tobacco farmers would prefer that their own children not--not smoke. And our country's been wrestling with that issue.

I think there's a parallel to this issue. There are some scientists who are employed by tobacco companies who still argue that there's no link between smoking and lung cancer. I don't think any of them has ever held the hand of somebody who died of lung cancer and breathed their last breath. If they did, they wouldn't continue to make such a facile and wrong argument. But you know, if you look at this--at the details of the science, they really don't know exactly how smoking causes lung cancer. But the weight of the evidence is clear--350,000 people a year die as a direct consequence of smoking cigarettes.

Now I said that it is an analogy. Our global civilization is now at the equivalent of a 10-pack-a-day habit. You know all those oil wells that were on fire in Kuwait, with the smoke blackening the sky? All of them put together on the worst day put less than 1 percent of the pollution into the Earth's atmosphere that we put into the Earth's atmosphere every day. And there's some people who say, `No problem. It's not going to cause any harm.' They're wrong. Dire Straits, the rock group, has a line in one of its song, `Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.' It's a psychological strategy like putting your head in the sand. And some people who are addicted to alcohol, for example, will see a string of drunk-driving accidents as unrelated misfortunes when, actually, they're connected.

Well, we look around the world now and we see these ecological catastrophes that are beginning to resume but what the comedian A. Whitney Brown called a nature hike through the book of Revelation, and yet a lot of people see them as just sort of unconnected misfortunes and wonder, `Well, what's going on?' They're connected. They're connected to a pattern of addiction. Our civilization is, in a very real sense, addicted to a pattern of consuming the Earth's resources in a completely unsustainable way. And just as with other addictions, there is an aspect of distraction involved. There's a certain frenzy in this attitude. You've seen the--the old--the funny poster, `He who dies with the most toys wins.' `Shopping is now a recreational activity.' Or--you know, there's a--and people who are constantly doing this are often not happy at all. People question whether their lives have a--have a deeper meaning. This is at bottom, in my opinion, a spiritual crisis. The--the assumption that we are separate from the Earth, separate from each other, separate from the communities in which we live, and that the only thing that matters is just get it while we can right now and don't worry about the future. That produces a very profound uneasiness in people and the environmental crisis is--is the single most serious manifestation of this deeper crisis.

Sen. GORE: I think we are connected to each other. I think we do have a--a larger meaning and purpose in our lives. I talk about my own religious faith in--in this book and my faith teaches that we are given dominion over the Earth but we're required to be good stewards of the Earth. And it--my faith teaches that the purpose of life is to--to glorify the creator of life. Other faiths state the same principle in different ways, but the underlying assumption is that we are part of something larger than ourselves and that our lives have meaning within a larger context. If we cut ourselves off from that larger context, whether it is defined in spiritual terms or whether it is defined in the terms an agnostic might use, a connection with future generations, perhaps, we--we are part of something that extends beyond the boundaries of our skin, beyond the--the term of our own lives. We are here because of what came before us and what happens after us will depend, in large measure, on decisions and choices that we make in our lifetimes. It's an illusion for us to suffer the conceit that we have no responsibility to those who come after us.

If--if I can just make one other reference to my own personal religious faith, there's a parable in--in two of the gospels that make up my faith about the un--it's called the parable of the unfaithful servant. It's a very simple story. The master of the house leaves on a journey and tells his servant, `While I'm gone, if vandals come and ransack this house or thieves come and steal my belongings, if you tell me you were asleep, that won't--will not be a good enough excuse.' I believe that this is God's Earth. I believe that we belong here but we have a responsibility to take care of it. And right now there is environmental vandalism on a global scale and many seem prepared to say, `Well, we were asleep. We didn't know what was going on. We didn't realize that--that we were causing such damage and allowing such damage to--to occur.' I think we have a responsibility to something larger than ourselves to stop this environmental vandalism.

Do you realize the--the leading scientists in--in the world now say that if the current rate of species loss continues, more than half of all the living creatures God put on this Earth will disappear within the lifetimes of our children. Extinction is a natural process, but now it's proceeding 1,000 times faster than it has ever happened in the last 65 million years, because of what our civilization is doing. And we've got to speak out and stop that. And we know how to stop it. The solutions are in "Earth in the Balance," and can be implemented as soon as a political consensus is formed, as it's already forming among young people, as it's already beginning to form in Europe, in Japan and elsewhere and as it will form here when more time passes and when we have new leadership.

Sen. GORE: Well, I've already reached that point. If I never sold a single book or never got it into the hands of a single reader, it would have been worth it for me because it enabled me to search my own heart, my own feelings and thoughts about this crisis and this challenge in a way that I would not have done otherwise. I'm, of course, very gratified with the extremely favorable reviews that are--are--have been coming in and the response, when people walk up to me at bookstores, and say, `I've already read it. I'd like you to sign it, but it really moved me,' and that's, of course, icing on the cake, and I--I'm very gratified by that. But--but the real payoff, if you will, would be if it contributed in some small way to speeding up the formation of that political consensus that I talked about earlier, which convinces the political system to move. See, I think the change in our political system is like change in the global environment. It doesn't always occur slowly. It builds toward a threshold and then the system adopts a new pattern. I think that when enough people become convinced that this has to be a priority, then the political system will start falling all over itself to come up with creative responses.

Sen. GORE: Well, it shouldn't be paid for by this country.

Sen. GORE: Japan, Europe, the oil-rich countries, this has to be a global effort. The first step internationally i--is to make the effort to save the Earth's environment the central organizing principle for the post-Cold War world, just as we bent every effort to defeat communism. Now, on a global basis, we have to develop this shared commitment to bend every effort towards saving the Earth's environment. That sounds and seems impossible to many right now, just as a few years ago it seemed impossible to expect the Soviet Union to disappear and all of Eastern Europe to be free and democratic and capitalist. But when enough people change their way of thinking about communism, then what seemed impossible became imperative. Now as more and more people are changing their way of thinking about the Earth's environment and our responsibility to it, what seems impossible will become imperative.

Sen. GORE: Thanks for doing such a thorough job, Brian. Appreciate it.