Ecological Discernment, Religious Insight

In the United States Senate, Al Gore has a record of environmental leadership. Yet when this young, ambitious senator from Tennessee made his run for president in 1988, he tried to be all things to all people, appearing vacillating and immature to most.

A year later his 6-year-old son was struck by a car and hung on the edge of death for a month. The senator and his wife camped anxiously at the hospital, then spent more months nursing Albert back to health.

Gore credits this time with changing his own life. He was drawn more deeply to his family, and to life itself. He realized that, since "a rapidly deteriorating global environment...threatens absolute disaster," his political behavior had been inadequate to the crisis of this age. Gore concluded not only that "the very foundations of our civilization" must be changed, but also that he needed to begin this reform within himself. He remembered a phrase from Mahatma Gandhi: "We must be the change we wish to see in the world."

The first fruit of this personal crisis appears as Earth in the Balance, a book remarkable for its ecological discernment, religious insight, and political courage.

GORE HAS VISITED AREAS of environmental crisis, from Uzbekistan's Aral Sea, now desert-dry, to America's toxic waste dumps, to the threatened polar ice caps. Quite obviously, he has listened attentively to experts in many fields.

Gore's analysis of air pollution's impact upon atmospheric structure, global warming, sea currents, weather patterns, and agriculture, is particularly thorough and insightful. Beneath the huge Antarctic ozone "hole" (three times the size of the continental United States), school children in Queensland, Australia, are required to wear scarves and broad-brimmed hats to shield them from ultraviolet radiation that causes cancer and cataracts; while in Patagonia, at the tip of South America, hunters harvest rabbits blinded by cataracts and fishermen catch blind salmon.

Pollution-induced increases in worldwide temperatures, projected into the 21st century, are nearly as great as the temperature gain from the last ice age, 17,000 years ago, to the dawn of the 20th century. "The artificial global warming we are causing," writes Gore, "threatens to destroy the climate equilibrium we have known for the entire history of human civilization," devastating ecosystems world-wide, accelerating the extinction of species, threatening agriculture, and disrupting the fabric of human civilization.

With such a base of information, Gore offers a fundamental critique of the modern technological system. "Often, when we seek to artificially enhance our capacity to acquire what we need from the earth, we do so at the direct expense of the earth's ability to provide naturally what we are seeking." We have become a "dysfunctional civilization," where consumption of material goods is an addiction.

Gore rejects the radical pessimism of Deep Ecologists who see human society as a cancer upon the biosphere, yet he must raise the question, "When giving us dominion over the earth, did God choose an appropriate technology?" Gore fashions a thoughtful response that draws from the Bible and his Southern Baptist heritage as well as the best in contemporary theology.

Human "dominion" implies that the Earth belongs to God. Gore recommends a reinvigorated monotheism within which God, human beings, and nature are viewed in a moral triangulation: each understood in relation to the other two parties. "By experiencing nature in its fullest -- our own and that of all creation -- with our senses and with our spiritual imagination, we...can perceive the image of the Creator vividly."

AL GORE'S POLITICAL conclusion is that "we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization." Much as the "Cold War" conditioned social decision making from the late 1940s through the 1980s, so the environmental crisis must galvanize worldwide politics in the generation at hand.

Gore develops the metaphor of a "Global Marshall Plan" to rescue the Earth. He identifies with Winston Churchill who, in the years preceding World War II, summoned the world to confront a danger that most politicians preferred to deny until catastrophe was upon them.

In the final chapters, Gore responds to the environmental crisis with political recommendations. He is convinced that "the promotion of justice and the protection of the environment must go hand in hand in any society," and he pleads for Third World relief from debt. But his recommendations for changes within poor nations sometimes appear more radical and insightful than the prescriptions he is willing to offer affluent societies.

Nevertheless, no other American politician has approached the incisiveness of Gore's environmental analysis, nor the courage of the recommendations in this book. Sojourners readers who despair of tawdry "piety on the Potomac" will find Gore's theological wrestling particularly refreshing.

As I write, it appears that America's vision-less president may derail the 1992 "Earth Summit," delaying worldwide efforts to cope with environmental degradation; while other presidential candidates back-pedal from the deep waters of global crisis to hug the polluted shallows of negative charge and counter-charge. Earth in the Balance may help you to guard some hope through a season of scorched-earth politics.

Richard Cartwright Austin was an environmental theologian with the Appalachian Ministries Educational Resource Center (AMERC) when this article appeared. He was farming organically with workhorses in the mountains of southwest Virginia.

Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. By Sen. Al Gore. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992. $22.95 (cloth).