Earth in the Balance Book

Gore deserves some serious credit for writing this book in 1992, before it was in vogue to care about the environment. And though things are now worse than when this was written, this book still seemed valuable to me. I have, of course, seen An Inconvient Truth (some bits of which are taken from Earth in the Balance), but this book helped give me a fuller understanding of Gore's thoughts on the environmental crisis.

The first section--"Balance at Risk"--is the strongest. Here is where Gore lays out the major problems humanity is facing. Global warming and ozone depletion are at the top of the list, along with deforestation. The next section, entitled "The Search for Balance" too often wades into quasi-mysticism, but does make the legitimate point that in order to start to address the crisis, it would be helpful for people to feel some connection to the earth, beyond the desire to use the resources buried underneath it. The final section "Striking the Balance" calls for making "the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization." It is true that this is necessary, but Gore doesn't really illuminate the way in which such a change could be achieved. The stated goal would essentially require a wholesale remaking of society; that sort of thing does not just happen--it would require nothing less than the defeat of the most powerful instituions operating in the world--our corporate masters and the political and ideological structures that uphold them.

In fact, what makes the book bittersweet, is that Gore does truly seem to be passionate about this cause. I don't doubt his sincerity. But even after 8 years as the vice president of the United States, he managed to accomplish little in terms of serious environmental progress. Not only that, but the public's willingness to endure even a small sacrifice has not increased whatsoever in the decades since Earth in the Balance was originally published. In his 2000 campaign, Gore did nothing to draw attention to environmental problems for fear of being tagged a treehugger (a tag which was nontheless applied to him). And outside of environmentalist circles, public outcry about the Bush administration's awful environmental record is virtually non-existent. And even as I write this, $4 gasoline has prompted the republican party to press to drill for oil on every speck of US land and our coastal areas; evidently, they feel the public is behind them on this issue. If that is true--if we cannot even countenance paying what Europe has paid at the pump for years before we are willing to destroy every last natural place--then I fear that the struggle to maintain a livable planet is already over.

But I've wandered off topic. Earth in the Balance has some excellent pictures. The boats in the middle of the desert (which used to be the Aral Sea) are memorable, as is graphic from which the title of the book is taken--a Bush I era drawing of a scale with the entire earth on one side, and six bars of gold, apparently weighing an equal amount, on the other. If nothing else, Earth in the Balance will serve as a reminder that at least somebody was trying to sound the alarm about environmental catastrophe back when it still seemed possible to avert disaster.