Al Gore's Poem: A Tool

Al Gore is an artist, a climate change con artist.

He's made a fortune from his "artistry."

Mark Hertsgaard, Vanity Fair, writes:

In his almost 30 years of crusading against global warming, Al Gore has worn a variety of hats. In roughly chronological order these include: congressman, senator, author, vice president, traveling evangelist, filmmaker, investment adviser, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Now, with the publication of his new book, Our Choice, Gore has unveiled a fresh and most unexpected talent: the book’s opening chapter of concludes with a poem he wrote—21 lines of verse that are equal parts beautiful, evocative, and disturbing.

Beautiful? Evocative? No.

Disturbing? Very.

Here is how the poem begins:

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea

It’s odd that none of the reviews of Our Choice have mentioned this poem. Even my old friend Bill McKibben, the dean of America’s climate journalists, didn’t see fit to mention it, though Bill himself wrote a column a couple of years ago pleading for poets, musicians, and other artists to bring their talents to bear in the climate fight. Reviews of Our Choice have instead focused on the meat and potatoes of the book—its exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) survey of the best available solutions, technological and political, to the climate crisis.

My guess is reviews haven't focused on Gore's poem because it makes Gore seem like a lovesick teenager, in addition to the fact that there's so much else to address in the relatively cramped confines of a review.

Hertsgaard obviously admires Gore poetry and appreciates his style.

He explains that while Gore's book is packed with "science" (Note: That's highly debatable) and long, complex sentences, his poem cuts to the bone. It inspires.

...Gore wrote it, I’m told, because his editor nixed his request to include a separate chapter on the impacts of climate change. After all, Our Choice is supposed to be about solutions, not gloom and doom. (The most common criticism of An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that won Gore an Oscar in 2007, was that it was silent on what to do about global warming.) Undeterred by his editor’s ruling, Gore re-imagined his impacts chapter in poetic form.

The result is a surprisingly accomplished, nuanced piece of writing. The images Gore conjures in his (untitled) poem turn a neat trick: they are visually specific and emotionally arresting even as they are scientifically accurate.

Oh, good grief!

Here's Gore's untitled poem in its entirety:

One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun

Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea
Neptune's bones dissolve

Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly

Then dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning's celebration

Unknown creatures
Take their leave, unmourned
Horsemen ready their stirrups

Passion seeks heroes and friends
The bell of the city
On the hill is rung

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

Hertsgaard concludes:

Is Gore himself that shepherd? No matter. What counts is that the hour of choosing has indeed arrived and, as documented in Our Choice, we do have the tools to survive—if we choose to employ them.

I do not share Hertsgaard's opinion of Gore's poem. I'm not a fan.

However, I do agree that there are plenty of tools in the crusade to stop climate change. Perhaps Gore, the crying shepherd, is the biggest tool of all.