Conscious Choice: Gore's Book Back in Print

June 2000 | News of the Earth

Gore's Book Back in Print

by Dave Aftandilian

In 1992, Senator Al Gore published a book called Earth in the Balance — just before he was chosen as Bill Clinton’s running mate. The book spent twenty-eight weeks on the bestseller list, according to its publisher Houghton Mifflin. It earned its author praise from most environmental groups and derision from many conservatives. In it Gore sounded an early warning about global warming, and laid out a practical plan for coping with it while simultaneously strengthening the economy.

Now Earth in the Balance is back in a new edition, reissued on the thirtieth anniversary of Earth Day this past April, together with a new foreword by now Vice-President and Democratic party presidential nominee-to-be Al Gore. While many conservative republicans are champing at the bit to attack Gore about the book, most environmental groups haven’t had much to say about the reissue. This is a shame, because the new foreword demonstrates unequivocally that Gore hasn’t backed down from his environmental ideals during his eight years as vice-president, even though the environmental record of the Clinton administration leaves a lot to be desired in some areas.

First let’s take a look at what anti-environmentalists are saying about the book. Grover Norquist, a conservative activist with Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), was quoted in the New Republic as saying that "we’ll tie [the book] around the neck of our friend." He tried to do just that with a piece on the ATR Web site entitled "Did Al Gore Say It? Or Was It the Unabomber?", which intersperses quotes from Earth in the Balance with excerpts from the Unabomber Manifesto. Maybe I just don’t have my elephant-colored glasses on straight, but I didn’t see a hell of a lot in common between the two sets of quotes (click here to check them out for yourself).

Other Republicans seem to think Earth in the Balance would make becoming neckwear for Gore too; Scott Reed, who managed former Senator Bob Dole’s campaign for the presidency in 1996, told the Los Angeles Times that Gore’s environmental record "is an issue Republicans plan to wrap around his neck." And Clifford May, communications director of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times "I think [Gore] will be seen by anybody who reads his book as an environmental extremist — somebody who wants gas prices to go up, somebody who wants to take middle-class people out of their SUVs and to prevent inner-city people from moving to the suburbs. And his view of America as a dysfunctional society should give everybody pause."

You’d think that the environmental community would be leaping to Gore’s defense, but no such luck. Many environmentalists question Gore’s environmental leadership, given the less-than-stellar environmental record of the Clinton administration, from the timber salvage rider Clinton failed to veto to Gore’s continuing support for international "free trade" schemes, despite mounting evidence that NAFTA, the WTO, and other such agreements favor industry over the environment at almost every turn.

Gore’s free market, public-private partnership approach rubs a lot of left-leaning liberals the wrong way too. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, for instance, describe Gore as a "corporate welfare environmentalist" in one of their "Focus on the Corporation" columns for his support of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. Gore says the partnership "commits the big three automakers in our country to getting new vehicles into the marketplace that have three times the efficiency of today’s vehicles," but Mokhiber and Weissman charge that the program "is supporting research that the industry could easily do on its own" and "gives participants an effective exemption from antitrust laws."

By keeping quiet on the environment, Gore isn’t helping instill much confidence in him among environmentalists, either. Not only has he said very little about environmental issues so far on the campaign trail, but he also doesn’t exactly give them top billing on his campaign Web site. When I visited the home page (no longer in service), none of the "news items" talked about the environment, nor was "environment" listed under the sidebar menu for "Al Gore on the Issues." You have to go to the agenda subpage to find Gore’s environmental stands, and even there the environment is buried toward the bottom of a long list of issues (however, the introductory paragraph on the agenda page does say that "[Gore] has worked hard to strengthen our economy while also protecting the environment").

Of course, once you manage to find Gore’s environmental message on his campaign Web site, it sounds pretty darned good. But the point that a lot of environmentalists seem to be forgetting is that you don’t have to search on the Web for Gore’s message on the environment when you can pick up the new edition of his book in just about any bookstore in the country, and judge what he has to say for yourself.

I had a lot of misgivings about whether Gore still had an environmental conscience after eight years of courting industry for compromise after compromise during the Clinton presidency. But reading his new foreword to Earth in the Balance put most of my fears to rest. Not only does he make it clear that he understands the science, economics, and interconnected nature of environmental issues more deeply than any other politician I can think of, but he also clearly feels a sense of duty to help instill a new ethic of environmental stewardship in the United States.

For instance, Gore writes that "We have to make the next ten years the Environment Decade, in America and around the world.... We have to strengthen, not weaken, environmental protection across the board, from global warming to stabilizing world population.... Polluters should pay to clean up the pollution they’ve created rather than impose the burden on taxpayers.... We have to expand the right to know to every area where pollution of any kind threatens public health.... We must continually act before crisis hits, before a species is on the edge of extinction, to safeguard habitats that are essential not just for one or two creatures but for the whole life web of the ecosystem. Tens of millions of acres are now being managed for the first time with the benefit of wildlife centrally in mind, and if I have something to say about it in the years ahead, we’ve only just begun.

"We must establish a new environmental ethic for public lands management.... This has to become not the policy of one or two administrations but the permanent commitment of the whole nation — to make as many new deposits as we can in the national bank of our public lands. Nor can we forget the second half of the equation: where we permit the commercial use of public lands, we must no longer give away their treasures. The public must get a fair return. That’s one of the toughest and most important battles ahead of us. I’ve proposed reform of the 1872 law that lets big mining companies extract‘hard minerals’ from public lands without paying a dime in royalties...."

Does all that mean Gore is a raging Green, out to destroy the economy to save the Earth at all costs? Of course not. As Gore points out in the new foreword, the choice between the environment and the economy is a false one: "The big lie in this debate is that a good environment is bad economics. That’s one of the reasons I wrote Earth in the Balance. One of its central themes is that in fact we do not face harsh choices between economic growth and saving the environment. We ought to seek, and we can find, sustainable growth that doesn’t undermine human health or the natural ecosystems that support life on this planet."

On point after point in his foreword, Gore seems to reveal and glory in his true green colors. Though he has sometimes been accused of lacking a political backbone, he certainly displays one here. Consider the closing paragraph: "For those who want to attack my view, let me save you the trouble of reading the entire book. On pages 325 and 326, I wrote:‘It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.’ It is possible; it needs to be done; it will create more jobs, not destroy jobs. I’m proud that I wrote those words in 1992, and I reaffirm them today."

Compare that to George W. Bush’s environmental message, if you can even call it that. Gore wrote the book on the environment — and this new edition proves he meant every word he said.

Community Legislative Information Service of Illinois

On March 1, 2000, a new tool that Illinois citizens can use to become better informed about state legislation affecting their communities debuted on-line at www.LegInfo.org. Sponsored by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), the project’s official name is the Community Legislative Information Service of Illinois. The project grew out of a broad-based coalition of organizations that came together several years ago to develop a common agenda on a number of neighborhood issues such as education, safety, housing, and community development. The groups figured that they could achieve more working together than they could separately, and to prove it they produced a joint report and call to action entitled "Building Our Communities."

Now five neighborhood groups have come together again in LegInfo.org to share their expertise with the public and to work together on issues of common concern. Each of the site’s member organizations — Chicagoland Transportation and Air Quality Commission, National Center on Poverty Law, Statewide Housing Action Coalition, The Donors Forum of Chicago, and Voices for Illinois Children — provides weekly updates and analysis of pending state legislation. These updates are both posted on the Web site and sent by e-mail to anyone who has joined the LegInfo.org e-mail listservs.

According to Stephen Perkins, director of LegInfo.org and associate director of CNT, the idea behind the project is "to make it easy for citizens to get more involved in the state legislative process, so that they can go to one place and learn what’s happening" in a variety of interrelated areas. Currently the site and the e-mail listservs focus on legislation involving children, housing, nonprofit issues, poverty, transportation, and air quality. More issues will be added in the fall, probably including schools, open space, and perhaps others.

I found the site well designed and easy to use. From the main page you can click on one of five icons to learn about pending legislation in a particular area, or you can go directly to a description of one of the bills featured as one of the week’s "top legislative concerns." The main page also has links to the Web pages of the Illinois General Assembly, the State of Illinois, Project Vote Smart, and a description of how a bill becomes a law. You can sign up to receive updates on pending legislation, including emergency alerts for upcoming votes; if you sign up, you’ll also receive an e-mail telling you what legislative district you live in and who your elected representatives are.

I clicked on "Transportation and Air Quality" from the main page. That took me to an overview of the organization that provides information on this issue — the Chicagoland Transportation and Air Quality Commission (CTAQC) — as well as links to "Important Legislation," "Issue Areas," "Related Legislation from Other Issues," and contact information for CTAQC. Clicking on any of the bills under "Important Legislation" takes you to a brief description of the bill, an explanation of why it’s important, an analysis of it, information on its current legislative status and sponsors, and a link to the full text of the bill on the State of Illinois’ Web site. Clicking on any of the "Issue Areas" on the page — Tollway Reform, High Speed Rail, and Gas Tax Policy — provides a general description of the issue area and links to important legislation concerning it.

The one thing the site doesn’t provide is contact information for any elected officials. Citizens can use the site and the e-mail listservs to better educate themselves about the issues, but what they do with that information is their own concern; LegInfo.org doesn’t recommend any specific actions. Quite a few people have already checked out the site — more than 1,300 visitors since it opened in March. Several hundred of them have also signed up for at least one of the e-mail listservs.

LegInfo.org is a great resource for everyone interested in how what’s going on in Springfield impacts what happens in their own neighborhoods. As Perkins puts it, the site "shines a little spotlight on Springfield. It’s hard to hold the legislature accountable if you don’t know what they’re doing, and it’s hard to know what they’re doing." LegInfo.org makes it a lot easier.

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