A Crisis as Real as Rain

By LANCE MORROW

TITLE: EARTH IN THE BALANCE

AUTHOR: AL GORE

PUBLISHER: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN; 407 PAGES; $22.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: A work of intelligence and passionate authenticity.

Senator Al Gore had just turned 40 years old. His presidential campaign had broken up in the primaries the previous spring. Then, as he reports, "one afternoon in April 1989, I walked out of a baseball stadium and saw my son, Albert, then six years old, get hit by a car, fly thirty feet through the air and scrape along the pavement another twenty feet until he came to rest in a gutter." The child, at first near death, eventually recovered. It was in his son's hospital room in Baltimore that Gore began writing Earth in the Balance.

Since the book arises in part from a moment of personal crisis, it speaks with a certain passionate authenticity, a ring of the unfakable that is rare enough in the (usually ghostwritten) outpourings of politicians. The American public, much afflicted by sound bites, has all but abandoned hope for intelligent life in Washington. It may be impressed by Gore's sustained intellectual concentration and mastery of his subject, the environment. Gore has studied it a while. In the 1988 campaign, the Senator held the wedding guests with his glittering eye and talked about such obscurities as the greenhouse effect and the thinning ozone. Another candidate said he sounded as if he were running for national scientist.

The subjects are less obscure now. In Earth in the Balance Gore writes, "The global environmental crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future."

Gore has produced a labor of statesmanship, evangelism and scientific exposition. He does not so much break new ground as organize a wide variety of material and experience to state the case of environmental urgency and the need for change, for what he calls a "Global Marshall Plan." He has digested books, made friends with experts and traveled. Gore went, for example, to the Aral Sea in Central Asia -- 10 years ago the fourth largest inland sea in the world, now dead, its fishing fleets stranded surreally in dry desert. The water that once fed the Aral was diverted in an ill-considered irrigation project to grow cotton. Gore traveled to the vanishing Amazon rain forest and to the globe's other environmental Stations of the Cross. He knows too much, however, to indulge in mere sentimentalism about Earth-Motherhood, or to join a doctrinaire rush to simplification.

In drawing a line connecting the individual to the global, Gore here and there sounds as if his inner Ancient Mariner had lingered too long in adult- children seminars with John Bradshaw, and humankind might 12-step the earth green again. Still, the vocabularies of the recovery movement open interesting windows upon a civilization that is dysfunctional, much given to denial, addiction, co-dependency and brutal nature abuse.

If the future (to use Gore-esque imagery) remains as dark as a mine shaft, humankind has at least begun to notice the alarming accumulation of dead canaries about its feet. In part because of his son's accident -- and perhaps in part because of George Bush's overwhelming popularity in the polls after Desert Storm -- Al Gore decided to sit out the 1992 campaign. Instead of Gore for President, the public has his book, which is itself an act of leadership.