MB -
Subject 32341
"...
c.horn: Whoa!! The possible destruction? Is it or isn't it?
Gore: Living species of animals and plants are now vanishing around the world one thousand times faster than at any time in the past 65 million years. A hundred extinctions each day.
c.horn: Okay, what is your specific evidence of this?
Gore: One doesn?t have to travel around the world to witness humankind?s assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. A few miles from the Capitol, for example, I encountered another startling image of nature out of place. Driving in the Arlington, Virginia, neighborhood where my family lived when the Senate was in session, I stepped on the brake to avoid hitting a large pheasant walking across the street. It darted between parked cars, across the sidewalk and into a neighbor?s backyard. Then it was gone. But this apparition of wilderness persisted in my memory as a puzzle; Why would a pheasant, let alone such a large and beautiful specimen, be out for a walk in my neighborhood?
c.horn: Do tell!
Gore: I didn?t solve the mystery until a few weeks later, when I remembered that about three miles away, along the edge of the river, developers were bulldozing the last hundred acres of untouched forest in the entire area. As th woods fell to make way for more concrete, more buildings, parking lots, and streets, the wild things that lived there were forced to flee. Most of the deer were hit by cars; other creatures--- like the pheasant that darted out into my neighbor?s yard --- made it a little farther.
c.horn: Hmmm.. Kind of like what happened when they bulldozed the forest to build your home?
Gore: Now I remember that pheasant when I take my children to the zoo and see an elephant or a rhinoceros. They too inspire wonder and sadness. They too remind me that we are creating a world that is hostile to wilderness, that seems to prefer concrete to natural landscapes. We are encountering these creatures on the path that we have paved --- one that ultimately leads to their extinction.
c.horn: Sir, I hate to contradict you, especially after that fascinating personal anecdote, but pheasant are not extinct. Do you have any other evidence?
Gore: While scuba diving in the Caribbean, I have seen and touched the white bones of a dead corral reef. All over the earth, coral reefs have suddenly started to ?bleach? as warmer ocean temperatures put unaccustomed stress on the tiny organisms that normally live in the skin of the coral and give the reef its natural coloration... In last few years, scientists have been shocked at the occurrence of extensive worlwide bleaching episodes from which increasing numbers of coral reefs have failed to recover. Though dead, they shine more brightly than before, haunted perhaps by the same ghost that gives spectral light to an elephant?s tusk.
c.horn: Stress --- it?s a killer
Gore: And what about all the other mysterious mass deaths washing up on beaches around the world? French scientists recently concluded that the explanation for the growing number of dead dolphins washing up along the Riviera was accumulated environmental stress, which, over time, rendered the animals too weak to fight off a virus.
c.horn: So which was it --- stress, or a virus? You know, I get the sense that you are not too much fun at the beach.
Gore: With our backs turned to the place in nature for which we came, we sense an unfamilier tide rising and a swirling around our ankles, pulling at the sand beneath our feet. Each time this strange new tide goes out, it leaves behind the floatsom and jetsom of some giant shipwreck far out to sea, startling images washed up on the sands of our time, each freash warning of hidden dangers that lie ahead if we continue our present course.
c.horn: Any good news?
Gore: At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late fall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked mand peeling , he pointed to the annual layers of the ice in a core sample from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. ?Here?s where the US Congress passed the Clean Air Act,? he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D.C., even a small reduction in one country?s emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest and least accessable place on earth.
c.horn: The Clean Air Act!!! You think the Clean Air Act showed up in the ice? Sir, if you see things like that in the ice, what do you see in the sky?
Gore: On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset -- and if you are watching from a place where pollution hasn?t blotted out the night sky altogether --- you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This ?noctilucent cloud? occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of the buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere.
c.horn: Also known a natural gas. As in natural.
Gore: Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past, all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmospheres, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun?s rays still strike long after tsunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them. What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky?
c.horn: You?re talking about the clouds, right?
Gore: Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men tear tusks from elephants? heads in such quantity so as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness..."
Regards, Don |
