GORE-ISMS
Words of Wisdom from the Vice
President
All Quotations are taken from Earth in the Balance
(page numbers in parentheses)
- "Now warnings of a different sort signal an environmental
holocaust without precedent. But where is the moral alertness that
might make us more sensitive to the new pattern of environmental
change? Once again, world leaders waffle, hoping the danger will
dissipate. Yet today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht
is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin. We are still
reluctant to believe that our worst nightmares of a global ecological
collapse could come true; much depends on how quickly we can recognize the
danger. How much more evidence is needed by the politic to justify
taking action?" (177-78)
- "The strange absence of emotion, the banal face of evil so
often manifested by mass technological assaults on the global
environment, is surely a consequence of the belief in an
underlying separation of intellect from the physical world."
(258)
- "The struggle to save the global environment is in one way
much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this
time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only
ourselves as allies." (275)
- "The Pacific yew can be cut down and processed to produce a
potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of
lung, breast, and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly
die. It seems an easy choice -- sacrifice the tree for a human life --
until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each
patient treated, that only specimens more than a hundred years old contain
the potent chemical in their bark, and that there are very few of these yews
remaining on earth. Suddenly we must confront some tough
questions. How important are the medical needs of future
generations? Are those of us alive today entitled to cut down all of
these trees to extend the lives of a few of us, even if it means that this
unique form of life will disappear forever, thus making it impossible to
save human lives in the future?" (119)
- "We now face a crisis entirely of our own making: we are
drowning in information." (200)
- "Vast amounts of unused information ultimately become a
kind of pollution." (201)
- "It is not a coincidence that we have a crisis in education
coinciding with our surfeit of information. Education is the recycling of knowledge, but we find it
easier to generate new facts than to conserve and use the
knowledge we already have. So when faced with the problem of ignorance,
we immediately create more and more information without seeming to realize
that while it may be valuable, it is no substitute for knowledge -- much
less wisdom. Indeed, by generating raw data in much larger quantities
than ever before, we have begun to interfere with the process by which
information eventually becomes knowledge." (201)
- "Just as war has been a part of civilization for thousands
of years, so too has our age-old practice of exploiting the earth
for sustenance, for food, water, shelter, clothing, and our other basic
needs." (206)
- "Ironically, it is our very separation from the physical world
that creates much of this pain, and it is because we are taught to live so
separately from nature that we feel so utterly dependent upon our
civilization, which has seemingly taken nature's place in meeting all our
needs Just as the children in a dysfunctional family experience pain
when their parent leads them to believe that something important is missing
from their psyches, we surely experience a painful loss when we are led to
believe that the connection to the natural world that is part of our
birthright as a species is something unnatural, something to be rejected as
a rite of passage into the civilized world. As a result, we
internalize the pain of our lost sense of connection to the natural world,
we consume the earth and its resources as a way to distract ourselves from
the pain, and we search insatiably for artificial substitutes to replace the
experience of communion with the world that has been taken from us."(231)
- "we must make the rescue of the environment the central
organizing principle for civilization." (269)
- "The waste crisis is integrally related to the crisis of
industrial civilization as a whole." (147)
- "the waste disposal crisis stems from our lost sense of
place within the natural world." (159)
- "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." (234)
- "When giving us dominion over the earth, did God choose an
appropriate technology? ... one is tempted to answer, the jury is
still out." (238)
- "Our bodies and our minds . . . are hardly perfect
technologies." (212)
- "part of the solution for the environmental crisis may well
lie in our ability to achieve a better balance between the sexes"
(213)
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