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April 23, 2004|Volume 32, Number 27



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Former Vice President
Al Gore discussed environmental deterioration in a formal talk and informal gatherings during his visit to campus as a guest of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.



Al Gore decries 'collision' between
civilization and the environment

From the disappearing Arctic ice cap and snows of Kilimanjaro to rising sea levels that threaten to engulf much of the coast of Bangladesh and swallow the Florida Keys among other sites -- at the present rate of global warming, the Earth is headed for catastrophe, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore warned a packed audience in Battell Chapel on April 14.

Using cartoons, graphs and pictures of Earth from the moon, as well as an occasional ironic statement, Gore laid out the case that the planet is in trouble.

To underscore the dangers of humanity's collective complacency, Gore -- author of the seminal "Earth in the Balance" -- showed a cartoon of a frog leaping out of a glass of boiling water in which he had suddenly been plunged. In contrast, he offered the image of a frog sitting in a glass of tepid water that stays put as the temperature of the water rises to the boiling point. Humans, Gore suggested, are like the latter, doomed amphibian.

Gore, who spoke as a guest of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, pointed to the disastrous heat wave in Europe last summer, which left thousands dead in France alone, records dating to the American Civil War showing an accelerating increase in the Earth's temperature and evidence of an alarming rise of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

"We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the Earth," Gore said, noting that there are three chief human factors that have precipitated that collision.

A population explosion, which has seen the number of people in the world increase from around 2 billion following World War II to 6.3 billion today, is a primary culprit, Gore contended. The exponential growth in population not only depletes the planet's natural resources but is the major cause of global warming, he said.

The second way that civilization is contributing to its own demise, he asserted, is the scientific and technological revolution. Taking weaponry as an example of that revolution, Gore pointed out that within a relatively short time, humans have gone from using bows and arrows to nuclear weapons as their armaments of choice. Nuclear weapons, however, have had a positive effect because their incredible capacity to destroy has forced humankind to re-examine how it conducts warfare, said the statesman.

Gore argued that this same elevated consciousness might transfer into the technology of everyday life. Scientific advances have allowed people to bend nature to their will, but the same advances can have drastic consequences, he said, illustrating his point with a photograph of a dried-up crater of the Aral Sea -- the unintended result of a massive irrigation program.

The third and, Gore argued, most reversible cause of the collision between humankind and the environment is lack of political will. The former vice president pointed to the advances in people's environmental consciousness since the first Earth Day in April of 1970 and to legislation designed to reduce the use of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons as examples of triumphs of political will for the good of the planet.

The current lack of political will in the United States, he argued, represents a major shift in values at the highest echelons of authority. "The rule of wealth and power has been substituted for the rule of reason," Gore said, characterizing the environmental policies of the present administration.

Gore began his presentation with the iconic 1967 photograph "Earth Rise" taken from the first unmanned spacecraft to land on the moon. He ended it with a picture of the planet from a distance of 3.7 billion miles. Contrasted with the 1967 "close-up" of the Earth, the planet was a barely perceptible dot in the last image -- a reminder, noted Gore, that to survive, the human race will have to change its perspective.

-- By Dorie Baker


T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Study shows how brain unconsciously processes images

Freshman cartoonist illustrates Washington Post column

Al Gore decries 'collision' between civilization and the environment

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Columnist to discuss why press failed on 9/11 and Iraq

New research on human conflict is focus of international conference

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Engineer Csaba Horváth, a pioneer in chromatography, dies

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Service, symposium to honor scientist Robert Macnab

Conference to explore work in the field of American Indian studies

Symposium will re-examine seminal essay by . . . Robert Cover

ITS support specialist to perform in 'Hamlet'


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