The Eco-tist: Gore as green

Al Gore evidently believes that the world might come to an end if he's not elected president. How did he come to such an extraordinary conclusion?

The seeds of this conviction can be found at Harvard University. Back in the 1960s, when he was an underachieving-and intellectually malleable-student, Gore's two greatest pedagogical influences were oceanographer Roger Revelle and psychologist Erik Erikson. Revelle introduced Gore to the idea of the man-made "greenhouse effect"; Erikson's course taught Gore that Western civilization has been too "male" in its view of the world. Gore now apparently believes, combining the two perspectives, that what we need to save the planet is a woman's touch.

On the environment, especially, Gore is a creature of his times. In his 1992 manifesto Earth in the Balance, he reverently cites his mother's admiration for Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The period of Gore's intellectual formation, the mid 1960s, was also the heyday of alarmist predictions (by, among others, the Paddocks in Famine 1975! and Paul Ehrlich in The Population Bomb) of imminent global famine owing to overpopulation. The early 1970s, when Gore was in graduate school, saw the oil crisis, as well as the publication of the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth and E. F. Schumacher's neo-Luddite Small is Beautiful.

It was against this background of cultural demoralization that Gore was elected to Congress in 1976. He was a part of that era's movement to control technological progress: He opposed deregulating natural gas, favored stringent controls on the nascent biotechnology industry, and supported the creation of the costly and slow Superfund waste-cleanup initiative. Just as the nuclear-freeze campaign was revving up in the early 1980s, Gore began studying the arcana of nuclear-deterrence theory. He writes in Earth in the Balance that studying nukes led him to "a deeper appreciation for the most horrifying fact in all our lives: Civilization is now capable of destroying itself." This realization caused Gore to think "about the course of our nation and our civilization . . . I also began to think about what role I might play in determining that course."

Gore's millenarian spark is expressed most clearly in this book, reissued for the election year. The book calls on Americans to "become partners in a bold effort to change the very foundation of our civilization" and to "make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle of our civilization." Gore makes it clear that his crusade is not just to save the material world, but to save America's soul: "The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of our inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual."

Gore cites the resurgence of religious fundamentalisms-and the rise of various New Age creeds-as evidence of "a spiritual crisis in modern civilization that seems to be based on an emptiness at its center and the absence of a larger spiritual purpose." Gore's response is to offer his own version of a New Age creed as a way to fill the spiritual void: the rescue of the natural world from humanity's depredations.

Gore has thus joined the long list of millenarians who hector the rest of us that the world will come to an end unless society does what they command. Political scientist Richard Hofstadter tagged this demagogic apocalypticism the "paranoid style" of politics; political paranoids, he wrote, believe that all of humanity's ills can be traced "to a single center and hence can be eliminated by some kind of final act of victory over the evil source." For Gore and many other environmentalists, the contemporary focus of evil is the alleged ecological crisis, and the source of the problem is, in Gore's words, "our dysfunctional civilization": "In psychological terms, our rapid and aggressive expansion into what remains of the wildness of the earth represents an effort to plunder from outside civilization what we cannot find inside . . . [It] is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into vulnerable parts of the natural world."

Hofstadter said that the political paranoid "traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values." Similarly, radical environmentalists believe themselves uniquely capable of seeing the impending catastrophe, while the rest of unrepentant humanity remains stubbornly blind to the danger. "There is a seduction in apocalyptic thinking," historian Eric Zencey writes. "If one lives in the Last Days, one's actions, one's very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance." The mission of rescuing the environment lends a richer meaning to Gore's life than the ordinary business of government possibly could.

Of course, part of being a true believer is brooking no opposition. Gore's staff apparently orchestrated a smear campaign against atmospheric scientist Fred Singer, having one of Roger Revelle's colleagues claim that Singer had manipulated Revelle (Gore's own mentor!) into writing that man-made global warming is "too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time." (Singer's attacker later apologized.) In another extraordinary episode, Nightline anchor Ted Koppel revealed that Gore had sent over reams of disparaging material in an effort to get the program to investigate the motives of prominent climatologists who are skeptical of the global-warming disaster scenario. Nightline did investigate-and concluded that the skeptics were sincere and had reasonable scientific arguments.