Inventing Al Gore by Bill Turque

Author:Bill Turque
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

15

Gore in the Balance

AFTER pledging to make his life less career-centered and more family-friendly, Gore embarked on one of the more career-centered, family-unfriendly pursuits imaginable—writing a book. He had contemplated writing a book about the environment since the 1988 campaign, but the emotional fallout from Albert’s accident, combined with his own midlife turbulence, elevated the project into something more personal. This would be more than an earnest treatment of a pressing policy issue—it would be part of his therapy. In the summer of 1990, with the help of New York literary agent Mort Janklow, Gore signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin to write Earth in the Balance.

Once he had been reelected in November to a second Senate term against minimal opposition, Gore holed up in his parents’ Methodist Building apartment and produced a 711-page draft (whittled by editor John Sterling to slightly over 400) by mid-1991. He had a running start—portions of the manuscript came from speeches and op-ed pieces he had already written, and he was aided by a full-time researcher and a hefty supporting lineup of scholars, including the Smithsonian’s Lovejoy, Michael McElroy, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Nobel Laureate chemist Sherwood Rowland. He wrote nights, weekends, and in whatever holes his official schedule created, keeping such odd hours at the Methodist that Alabama Senator Howell Heflin, who also had an apartment there, took him aside and expressed his concern about what his young colleague was up to. “I’m worried about you, son. You go home and see your family,” he counseled.

Politicians with presidential aspirations usually play it safe when putting words to paper, lest those words return to haunt them in the middle of a campaign. For the ever-cautious Gore, Earth in the Balance was an especially remarkable achievement—an environmental call to arms, a midlife confessional, and a meditation on spiritual poverty in a bloated secular world, written with a hortatory urgency that places it firmly in the tradition of Rachel Carson and Jeremy Rifkin. It remains by far the most revealing self-portrait he has ever offered. At a publication party thrown by Reed Hundt at his home, about forty guests gathered around to hear a few words from the author. “I hope you like it,” said an excited Gore, “because that book is me.”

Earth in the Balance is the essential Gore: thoughtful, earnest, ambitious, crammed with facts, moralizing, hyperbolic, and breathtakingly grandiose. The pages are charged with the evangelistic fervor of a man who believes he can save the world. “We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization,” Gore writes, calling for “an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action—to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment.” Gore casts a host of environmental problems—plundered rain forests, overused pesticides, unrestrained dumping, proliferating greenhouse gases, and a punctured ozone layer—not merely as long-term threats but as manifestations of a comi ng apocalypse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.