Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance”: A Free, Environment Friendly Copy (Almost)

Since the release of An Incon­ve­nient Truth, Al Gore has had quite a run. He first won him­self an Emmy, then an Oscar, and now the Nobel Peace Prize. Although the film rep­re­sents Gore’s most well known work on the envi­ron­ment, it’s hard­ly where his envi­ron­men­tal efforts began. His cam­paign goes back to the late 1970s, when he held con­gres­sion­al hear­ings on cli­mate change and green­house gas­es. And it moves through the 1980s and then the 1990s, when he occu­pied the Vice Pres­i­den­cy. In 1992, while oth­er polit­i­cal lead­ers quib­bled over the pros and cons of NAFTA, Gore put the envi­ron­ment on the nation­al agen­da, real­ly for the first time, when he pub­lished Earth in the Bal­ance: Ecol­o­gy and the Human Spir­it. (The Bush admin­is­tra­tion then took it off the agen­da, regret­tably.) Gore’s book became a nation­al best­seller, and it has since gone through sev­er­al new edi­tions, the lat­est hav­ing been issued just last year. You could buy the book, but the good news is that Google serves up large por­tions of the book online for free. It’s at a price you can’t beat, and it goes easy on the pulp. Have a good look. And also see below Gore’s com­ments upon learn­ing about the Nobel Prize.

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