NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5828

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Subject: IF: Earth in the Balance
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/** nfd.ifeatures: 31.6 **/
** Written  8:55 am  Jul 25, 1992 by ihandler in cdp:nfd.ifeatures **
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Book Review / 2450 Words

Earth in the Balance:
Ecology and the Human Spirit
By Senator Al Gore
Houghton-Mifflin
New York City, 1992
407 Pages, $22.95

By Carl Davidson
Insight Features

   If American political life was blessed with the presence of
a powerful Green Party, its activists would be hard-pressed
to find a better candidate to field for the White House than
Senator Al Gore of Tennessee.

   That's the conclusion one comes to after reading the
Senator's recent bestseller, `Earth in the Balance.'  The
book is a deep and comprehensive analysis of the global
environmental crisis, along with the political and economic
structures behind it.  What's more, it summarizes and
presents a progressive, even radical, agenda for what to do
about it.

   "Although the press has scrambled to portray Mr. Gore
as an environmental `moderate,'" says Fred L. Smith in the
July 17 Wall Street Journal, "a close look shows he is quite
radical."

   Unfortunately American Greens don't quite know what to
make of Al Gore, since many of them are still debating
whether to engage in electoral politics supportive of any
candidate at all.  Likewise, American progressives generally
are as alienated, divided and confused about their options
as everyone else this year, given how the three-way dead
heat between President George Bush, Arkansas Gov. Bill
Clinton and the populist billionaire from Texas, Ross Perot
has now reverted back to a highly volatile two-way race.

   Clinton's choice of Gore as his Vice Presidential running
mate, in this context, caused eyebrows to be raised in all
camps:   Why two white guys from small states in the
South?  Why two "baby boomers" at once? Isn't his wife,
`Tipper,' the right winger denouncing Rock n' Roll?  Who is
Al Gore anyway?

   What Gore's `Earth in the Balance' shows is that Clinton
probably made his wisest decision to date by picking the
Tennessee Senator  as his running mate.  In fact, it is
probably one of the few times in American history when a
presidential contender picked someone substantially more
qualified than himself as second-in-line to run the country.

   The conventional wisdom among political pundits has
Gore pegged as a typical moderate Southern Democrat
firmly ensconced in the right wing of his party.  They stress
his membership in the Democratic Leadership Council, his
support for Israel, his belated but important support for
Bush in the Gulf war, and especially his heated polemics
with Jesse Jackson in the 1988 race.

   All this leads them to conclude that Gore is essentially a
clone of Clinton, minus a few "character issue" negatives.
Gore is a Vietnam vet and considered a family man faithful
to traditional values.

   If the standard liberal-to-conservative litmus tests are
applied to Gore, the conventional wisdom holds.  But these
are unconventional times, when the persisting global crisis
of both capitalism and socialism doesn't yield to the usual
solutions. As a result, a lot of the old left-right labels often
conceal more than they reveal.

   In this regard, the Senator's book reveals two important
dimensions to his outlook.  First, he is a futurist; he
believes we face an imminent global "ecological holocaust"
brought on by the maturation of the industrial revolution.
The earth's only salvation as a livable habitat, he insists,
lies in the merging of the worldwide movement for
democratic empowerment with advanced, sustainable
technologies. Second, he is a truth seeker with a first-rate
intellect and an open spirituality; he wrote most of the book
himself, particularly the more analytical and philosophical
passages.

   For those familiar with ecological issues, the book's
opening chapters do not contain much new information.
For newcomers, however, Gore does a fairly effective job in
summarizing the complex interconnections between ozone
depletion and greenhouse gases, deforestation and
population growth, and global versus local pollutants. He is
especially forceful when insisting that political leaders must
learn to think ecologically, seeing the interconnections of
the parts and the whole:

   "The entire relationship between humankind and the
earth has been transformed," explains Gore, "because our
civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global
environment, not just a particular area....Our challenge is to
recognize that the startling images of environmental
destruction now occurring all over the world have much
more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us.
They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in
scope and more serious than any we have ever faced."

   From Gore's perspective, what is the "underlying
problem?"  Basically, he sees the potential for ecological
disaster built in to the unrestrained expansion of the
industrial revolution and the classical economic theories that
have guided it.

   "Our economic system is partially blind," says Gore. "It
sees some things and not others....Consider the most basic
measure of a nation's economic performance, gross
national product (GNP).  In calculating GNP, natural
resources are not depreciated as they are used up.
Buildings and factories are depreciated; so are machinery
and equipment, car and trucks.  So why, for instance, isn't
the topsoil in Iowa depreciated when it washes down the
Mississippi River after careless agricultural methods has
lessened its ability to resist wind and rain...

   "When an underdeveloped nation cuts down a million
acres of tropical rainforest in a single year, the money
received from the sale of the logs is counted as part of that
country's income for the year.  The wear and tear on the
chain saws and logging trucks as a result of a year's work
in the rain forest will be entered on the expense side of the
ledger, but the wear and tear on the forest itself will not.  In
fact nowhere in that country's GNP will there be an entry
reflecting the stark reality that a million acres of rain forest
is now gone.

   "This ought to strike anyone as alarming, if not absurd.
Yet when the World Bank, the IMF, regional development
banks, and national lending authorities decide what kind of
loans and monetary assistance to give countries around the
world, they base their decisions on how a might improve
the recipient's economic performance. And for all these
institutions, the single most important measure of progress
in economic performance is the movement of GNP.  For all
practical purposes, GNP treats the rapid and reckless
destruction of the environment as a good thing!"

   In addition to criticizing classical political economy's false
treatment of natural resources as "free" and "unlimited" on
the production side, Gore also blasts its failure to treat the
hidden costs of waste on the consumption side:

   "Every time we consume something, some sort of waste
is created, but this fact is forgotten by classical economists.
When we consumes millions of tons of chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) each year, are they gone?  If so, then what is
eating the hole in the ozone layer?...It is almost as if the
ultrarational `economic man' of classical theory actually
believes in magic.  If our economic goods are produced
from natural resources that never have to be depreciated
because their supply is limitless, if the production process
leaves no unwanted by-products whatsoever, and if our
products disappear without a trace when they are
consumed, then we are witnessing powerful magic indeed."


   Gore not only shows how classical political economy fails
to meet its own standards of rationality.  He goes on to
deepen the critique by employing some of the latest
breakthroughs in scientific thinking:

   "Not long after Newtonian physics led to a revolution in
our understanding of cause and effect, the model of the
world implied in Newton's science was lifted wholesale into
politics, economics and society at large.  Many are now
convinced that in a similar way, the insights of Chaos
Theory will soon be absorbed into political science and
social analysis."

   Gore stresses the importance of what scientists call
"positive feedback loops" in hastening the rate of change.
He explains how the power of modern technology is
magnifying the role of human activity itself as a feedback
loop in the global ecosystem.  The issue then becomes
whether this activity will remain blind and destructive, or
become ecologically conscious, healing and constructive.

   In several passages, Gore turns his analysis into an
excellent polemic against the Bush administration. He
exposes George Bush as an "anti-environmental" president
only interested in delaying serious solutions to the crisis:

   "The Bush administration talks loudly about the tendency
of a free marketplace to solve all problems.  But many of
our markets are highly regulated, often in hidden ways.  In
the case of the paper industry, for instance, taxpayers
currently subsidize the manufacture of paper products
made from virgin timber, both a the largest single purchaser
and by further subsidizing the construction of logging roads
into national forests.  In addition, the federal government
pays the entire cost of managing the forest system,
including many activities that exclusively benefit the timber
industry...

   "The current administration also ought to do a much
better job of encouraging appropriate technologies....Japan,
for example, is already implementing an ambitious plan to
cultivate what it believes will be a massive global market for
new technologies for renewable energy and environmentally
benign processes."

   Gore does not shy away from the issue of industrial
policy, which the Bush White House has blasted as a
means of introducing socialist or social-democratic planning
principles into the relations between business, labor,
government and society in general.  Gore spotlights the fact
that the conservative right, far from being true advocates of
laissez-faire, has sustained itself for decades by spoon-
feeding itself with a military-industrial policy.

   "The United States has almost always had an industrial
policy for the military," Gore points out. "In fact, the first
contracts for what is now called mass production were let
by the government to Eli Whitney for the manufacture of
rifles with interchangeable parts."

   What Gore wants in its place is a green industrial policy
that protects the environment, promotes sustainable growth
and promotes social justice.   All this is elaborated in what
he calls a "Global Marshall Plan." He outlines five strategic
goals: 1) stabilizing world population, 2) creating
appropriate technologies, 3) redefining economic yardsticks
to measure true costs and environmental impact, 4)
renegotiating global trade agreements, and 5) establishing
educational institutions for empowerment on a global scale.

   "Green Taxes" and "Carbon Credits" are typical of
dozens of innovative proposals in the overall plan.  A green
tax would either encourage ecological sound activity with
tax breaks or punish harmful activity with penalties.  Carbon
credits allowing nations the right to use fossil fuels would be
assigned on the basis of population. Since the advanced
countries would rapidly exhaust their credits, they would be
compelled to shift to renewable sources of energy while
temporarily making do by purchasing unused carbon credits
from the third world.  This would enhance a shift of wealth
from North to South while making the transition to
renewable energy at the same time.

   Ironically, the strength of Gore's Global Marshall Plan
highlights an inner contradiction in his book.  On one hand,
he overglorifies the free market's triumph over communism.
On the other, his main criticism of capitalism is its failure to
plan.  Gore even calls his global proposal the "central
organizing principle" for the decades ahead, comparing it
with the global leadership and planning that went into the
defeat of fascism in World War 2 and the allied economic
recovery afterwards.

   Gore also tries to have it both ways on the fight for
democracy. On one hand, he attacks the "totalitarianism" of
Mao, Deng, Stalin, Hitler and Hussein, lumping them all
together as opponents of the "free world."  On the other, he
wants to extol the virtues of the World War 2 antifascist
front, but distorts it in the process. He ignores the fact that,
when all is said and done, it was the Soviet Union and
China that delivered the main blows and made the greatest
sacrifices against German and Japanese fascism. Despite
the crimes and shortcomings of the Soviets and Chinese
against human rights, it's still an injustice to lump them in
with Hitler.

   Gore's failure to break with the corporate liberal cold
warrior mentality while pushing an arms control, human
rights and green agenda goes a long way toward explaining
his vacillating capitulation to Bush in the Gulf crisis.  For
example, he devotes a whole chapter to drawing out an
analogy between addiction to drugs and addiction to cheap
oil. But when Middle East issues are pushed front and
center, he joins in a one-sided defense of Israel and the
enablers of the energy monopolies.

   But Cold War politics is really a side issue in `Earth in the
Balance.' The philosophical core of the book is a polemic
against the alienators of humanity from nature, ranging from
Plato to Reagan's environmental czar, James Watt. Its "new
environmentalism of the spirit" displays Gore's attempt to
bring morality back into science and politics, and the new
age into old time religion.

   Watt, says Gore, "was once quoted as belittling concerns
about environmental protection in part because it would all
be destroyed by God in the Apocalypse.  Not only is this
idea heretical in terms of Christian teachings, it is an
appallingly self-fulfilling prophecy of doom."

   Within the green movement, Gore takes on the so-called
Deep Ecologists, who, at their worst, see people as as virus
infecting the biosphere or, at their best, see no special
place for humanity in the evolutionary hierarchy.  Gore
draws an interesting parallel between them and the French
philosopher, Rene Descartes, showing how both alienate
human consciousness from the natural world.  While the
Cartesian outlook served to unleash the industrial
revolution, the intention of Deep Ecology, however, is to
reverse it.

   Gore is very much in favor of high technology as a
means to sustainable and ecologically sound economic
growth.  His spirituality, however, lead him to insist on
reformulating classical economic categories. For example,
he argues that private ownership is fine, but only if it is
reshaped into "stewardship." This mean adding the moral
dimension of care for the sake of others or for the Common
Good to the holding of property.  Likewise, the concept of
domination over nature needs to be recast as "dominion,"
which restrains power relationships within the bounds of a
common community.

   Despite these Biblical themes that Gore traces to his
Baptist roots, the focus of `Earth in the Balance' remains a
manual on practical politics and the need for radical
change. Anyone wanting to formulate or measure sound
environmental policy will find the Senator's program to be
an execellent starting point.

   While Gore has the best voting record in Congress on
green issues, he criticizes himself for being to wishy-washy
in the past.  He points to a personal crisis in his family life,
the near-death of his young son in an auto accident, as
having pushed him to a new and deeper understanding of
the need to take a stand on one's core values in life, even
if it means going against the tide.

   Progressives who are justifiably scornful of the rightward
lurch of many Democratic Party politicians will find much
food for thought is this well-crafted work from the pen of a
patrician Senator from Tennessee.

                  -- 30 --

   Carl Davidson is director of Networking For Democracy, a
Chicago cooperative working to enhance the media and
computer skills of grassroots public interest organizations.
** End of text from cdp:nfd.ifeatures **