Twenty years ago, I interviewed a writer from the Soviet Union, a dissident of sorts, allowed to travel to the West for the first time under glasnost. A week or so later, I met a sculptor who had been imprisoned for several years in his native land, a South American right-wing dictatorship. A common ardor united these victims of contrary tyrannies, a love for the land and a concern for its welfare. For years their work had dodged the censors because they couched their critiques in environmentalism.
Since then, I've encountered countless artists whose work, whether otherwise political or not, either honored the Earth or prodded others to do so. Meanwhile, authors, musicians and even filmmakers have taken up the theme, to varying effect. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) tried to cloak global warming in the gaudy garb of a special-effects thriller, and even took a figurative swipe at a know-nothing government. It was among a number of overt or canny political films in 2004, which also saw the advocacy documentary reach a new crest. This was partly due to the film festival circuit, which programs and rewards documentaries. In Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, it has given us an engaging collage of politics, environmentalism and biography.
Several months ago, waiting for that libertarian ode to the lie, Thank You for Smoking, I sat in front of several young guys who made clever comments during the previews. They sat quietly through the trailer for An Inconvenient Truth, but one of them piped up at the end, "Brought to you by the man who invented the Internet." Heh heh.
To return a moment to those glorious days of hanging chads, as An Inconvenient Truth does briefly, let us stipulate at last that Al Gore never made that claim, although a statement in an interview, taken out of context, makes it seem he did. He was influential, rather, in promoting legislation that helped make the Internet the nearly universal-access juggernaut it has become. Interest in technology has always informed Gore's politics. An Inconvenient Truth makes clear that his concern about global warming, which goes back to his college years, has been the central theme of his political life.
An Inconvenient Truth is mostly Gore's multimedia lecture, given all over the world, the story of him updating it as he travels, and his story. It fairly pleads with audiences to care that the biggest lie going, aside from spin and promotion as decent pursuits, is that global warming poses no problem. Gore and director Davis Guggenheim show the sloughing of glaciers and melting of polar ice fields and they convincingly graph the data. Gore is at ease and a lively lecturer, as many have taken care to note, adding "if only ..." He ascends in a cherry picker to mark a graphed projection of average temperatures, the terminus of a trendline already clearly rocketing away from 600,000 years of planetary history.
But the administration, the one we're enduring instead of Gore's, has something like contempt for science, and the interests it serves have strategized a doubt-inducing campaign. No consensus, they insist.
They've been aided in this by a scientist-turned novelist, Michael Crichton, Harvard M.D., whose 2004 novel, State of Fear, plays into a tactic of the campaign, analogizing environmentalists and terrorists. Or Nazis. Or communists. The book includes Crichton's nonfiction broadside, alleging lack of consensus. Noting that "Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla. ... called the book 'the real story' of climate change, the Seattle Times contacted 18 climate scientists and 16 of them blasted Crichton's analysis. An Inconvenient Truth goes one better by showing unanimous agreement in juried articles on the topic. It also puts the lie to the hurts-business line. Think Toyota and Honda, then think GM, Ford. Really, fighting global warming could be a global business stimulant.
Thus a nonpartisan, non-ideological response seems possible. If concern for the Earth can unite artists in opposing oppressions, surely a threat to life as we know it can rally the right as well as the left. Signs are small but notable. Vanity Fair, in it's "Green Issue," featured Rev. Richard Cizik of the Evangelical Climate Initiative. As Chuck Salter reports in Fast Company, Cizik "and his fellow environmental evangelicals are now a force to be reckoned with."
Maybe it's wishful thinking, but consensus on Al Gore's inconvenient truth could be the tonic that clears our political mind of its disastrous taste for ideology over science. And maybe, as many sneer, he's running again. But poignancy tinges An Inconvenient Truth—what if, indeed. How would Gore manage the twin threats of terrorism and global degradation? An Inconvenient Truth shows that a comprehensive, truly global, approach to economic justice is needed to combat warming. That could be an effective counter-terrorism program, too.
So, yeah. What if?
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.