You may be right, and I don’t have the book right in front of me. But it seems that when it came out it had some really ludicrous figures in it. Like every year 10000 spiecies of life disappears form the planet. I wish I could give you an exact number, but it is something like this. If you do the math, by the second half of this century, every last spiecies will be wiped out, and earth will be a barren waste land.

When his book came out in the early nineties, it was widely hailed by those who were overly concerned about environmental destruction, and make it their number one issue, as a godsend. “Finally someone who is in a position to do something about the earth (a US policy maker) is saying this stuff. It proves what we have been saying all along.” While for everyone else, it was seen as alarmist. I tend to fall into the “everyone else”. I am not overly concerned about environmental destruction. It occurs, but the solution to the problem does not lie in “awareness”, which is a charitable interpretation of the motivations for writing this book. All the awareness in the world isn’t going to stop the icecaps from melting.

No… The solution is for the government, which Al Gore was a part of at that time, to begin punishing the companies that are detroying the environment. Did he argue for that in this book? Get the people who are doing the most damage to the environment and shut them down. That’s the solution. Don’t give them fines that they can just pay every single year, because it’s cheaper to do this than to fix their company so they don’t produce waste. Shut them down. And lock up those who made the decisions to dump the chemicals into our rivers, lakes, oceans and air. And don’t trade with companies who don’t do the same thing.

My problem with Al Gore’s analysis is 1) it is overblown, and 2) it proposes liberal solutions to the problem. Maybe incentives, (I mean giving companies more of our tax dollars) will help companies to clean up the environment… Maybe we can make people aware that these companies are destroying our planet, so the people who care won’t buy from them. If we could just get everyone together maybe they would elect a pro-environment candidate. Maybe if we just shop at the Whole Foods Market, and everyone eats organic, maybe we can end the use of pesticides. Maybe something I, as an individual, do will stop the hole in the ozone… Maybe there is something I can do… Yeah. Right…

This is NOT going to end environmental destruction. Those companies need to be taxed out of existance, and the money from that fiscal murder needs to be put into cleaning up the mess that these companies have made.

But, as I say, this solution is not even possible before the elimination of the system that needs this form of environmental destruction to even exist. We cannot talk about improving the environment before we end the system that needs its destruction to survive. Capitalism, encouraged by the federal government, and fertilized by our collective (as a society) desire for pragmatism, is the reason, right now, that the earth is being destroyed. It wasn’t always this way. But it is now, and that wholesale destruction came with the advent of industrialization and the rise of capital. It is a sufficient characteristic of maximumization of profit. You have to exploit the land, and get rid of waste as cheaply as possible in order to improve the profit margin. And you have to do those same things to keep prices low, in a capitalist-market system. Low prices are a primary demand of capitalist, materialist consumers. So you see, cleaning up the environment isn’t really what our consumerist society wants. If given the choice between a cleaner environment (and higher prices) and a dirtier environment with lower prices, they will choose the latter over the former every single time, unless they are already predisposed to fighting for the environment, and then they are already spending more money than they need to for food anyway.

The liberal solutions of Al Gore will not work. The fact that people look at his book like it is the frickin bible, without it having ANY affect whatsoever on public policy should demonstrate the utility of this book. That is why I lambasted it more than 10 years ago when it came out, and that is why I STILL feel that way today. Yeah, duh, we all know our environment is crap. So what do you suggest we do about it, Mr. Gore? Oh… become aware? Well, we’re already there. Vote environmental candidates in? Yeah, like they can stand up against the almighty dollar… Not buy from places that destroy the environment? Well, then our lives become spartan, and everyone else still buys from them, and they still make money anyway.

No. The answer is to get rid of capitalism. Working for environmentalism, alarming everyone about things that are happening without providing solutions that will work, this is all a distraction to what we should be doing. Only after we get rid of the system we have today, can we even address environmental destruction, or racism, or sexism, or any other social ill that plagues our society. Before we actually are able to lift ourselves outside of the paradigm that blocks us from thinking of different solutions to our country’s problems, there is no way we will be able to address the problems we face today.

We need to begin seeing environmentalism and consumerism as two completely mutually exclusive terms. We need to see environmentalism and materialism as two mutually exclusive terms. We need to see environmentalism and capitalism as two mutually exclusive terms. That is, we cannot have both, it has to be one or the other. And while people like Al Gore come out with books that suggest that we can have both, we, as a society continue to suffer and die and get birth defects, and choke on the air, and lose crops and forests to acid rain, and bake under the sun, and drown when the ice caps finally melt and flood 16 million people out of New York City. While Al Gore suggests with his book that we can maintain our current system (maybe not our current consumption levels) AND have a clean environment, we will all die trying to see that as a reality.

The REAL reality is that you cannot do both. They are fundamentally different propositions, and they are antagonistic toward one another. You cannot have liberalism and environmentalism. You just can’t do it. You can’t have “free” enterprise and have a clean environment. You can’t have a “free” market and have a clean environment. You can’t have capitalism and have a good place for anyone to live. It just don’t work that way. These categories are merely roadblocks, and until we get them out of the way, the environmenalist “car” will be stuck at the first one, and we will spend our days and nights there with it, dreaming about the land of good and plenty that awaits us, while we wait for the boulder called “capitalism” in the road to erode down far enough for us to get our car over it.

I just want to say, Dan, that I have a very good reason for saying the things I said about Gore’s book. It is pro-liberal propaganda and I don’t buy it. It’s like a lot of books written by politicians- designed to get you to buy into their positions to put them in a better spot for the next election. Al Gore may be very serious about the environment, and I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But just how serious is he really, when he doesn’t even want to address the single largest factor in environmental degradation- which is capitalism?

Doc