Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, made his movie debut, two months ago at the Sundance Film Festival in the documentry
An Inconvenient Truth. The movie tells of Gore’s growing passion over the past 30 years for the environment and the need to reverse global warming.

[At] the heart of Davis Guggenheim’s film, [An Inconvenient Truth], is this elegant multimedia lecture itself, where Gore indisputably correlates CO2 emissions with exponentially rising temperatures, already responsible for dramatic climactic shifts like ice-cap melting, drought, and rising sea levels. Interwoven with this riveting public address are intimate moments revealing the poetic, searching side of Gore as he struggles to define his purpose in the aftermath of the 2000 election. .This is activist cinema at its very best, for it serves to popularize and demythologize a problem long obscured by those most threatened by the solution. With humor and searing intelligence, Gore outlines crucial steps we must take to avert impending disaster and proves that inaction is no longer an option–in fact, it’s immoral.— Caroline Libresco

In addition to this, Gore recently spoke at the TED conference in Monterrey, CA where he received more raving reviews. This time it was for the moving speech he gave about global warming and the importance of everyone becoming educated and taking immediate action to protect our environment. He made clear that this is an issue that concerns everyone and, from the reports, convinced all that were in ear shot.

One of the more poignant points that Al Gore made in last night’s powerful speech about global warming was that a lot of people move directly from a state of denial about this issue to one of despair. People in the first state don’t go out and try to change things because they don’t see a problem. People in the second state are often no more inclined to act because they think the situation is hopeless. The fact that these are the two most stable cognitive states on this issue probably explains why a lot of people do, in fact, remain in denial. It’s human to avoid pain, and therefore perhaps natural to subconsciously choose a state of denial over the daily trauma of despairing for the future of humanity.

The main body of the speech musters a great sense of alarm about a formidable enemy (and by the way, I’ll use the present tense in the discussing the speech from now on because Mr. Gore indicated that it’s an on-going project that he’s presenting in as many forums as possible). To convert that alarm into an energized determination to do something, Mr. Gore needs to be equally persuasive in arguing that the enemy can actually be defeated. In light of this, perhaps the most important part of the speech is the tantalizing glimpse of hope that he offers at the end.

I have to admit that I still need to watch, An Inconvenient Truth, and that I am still trying to find a website where I can read his full speech (I found websites that had podcasts of the speech, but they were asked to take them down by TED before I had a chance to listen to them). Nevertheless, what I have read about both the movie and the speech say that Gore is very well educated on the issue of global warming and its compelling nature. My hope is, that those that watch An Inconvenient Truth or were able to listen to a speech he has given (or will hear a speech he gives in the future) will be persuaded to change their lifestyle to one that will help save our planet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at 8:32 am and is filed under Environment, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.