Letters to the Editor

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Doomsayers like Al Gore and Jared Diamond aren't doing the environment much good. To save the earth, we need to stop blaming and start celebrating ourselves.
  • This is spin

    for the purpose of selling a book, or a career. It has nothing to do with clarity or reason; it is posturing, and it is picayune. Gore's great achievement - Nobel, please - was to take a complicated, virulently ignored and urgent subject and make it a household phrase. It has entered the consciousness of Americans in just a few years, and now exists as a real topic, with anyone free to offer meaningful solutions. The authors might have done this, rather than merely positioning themselves for media ops. That doesn't just make them contrarians - it makes them jerks.

    Gore's argument does not end with doom, it ends with the possibility of solutions, of communal action, and even success, like our moonwalks. To have self-knowledge of the results of one's actions, as a species and a culture, and to act on this wisely, is potentially another giant step for mankind.

    Did these guys, like la Paglia, not watch the movie?