Al Gore is Wrong (for me)
Part I: Breaking up is hard to do
I’m sure many of you saw the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” (“AIT”) — or are at least aware of the film. For many people, the film was eye opening at minimum and in some cases even life changing. At the very least, AIT was responsible for adding Climate Change to the public conversation around the warming globe.
Many of you also may know that we developed the official classroom curriculum for the DVD release of the film last fall. Topics Education, my firm, created a series of activities for high school classrooms that simultaneously met teacher needs and offered the content to students in a way that both entertained and educated them. This project was tremendously successful in just about every possible measure.
The program won two national awards, including one for best science curriculum, and some 60,000 teachers in the U.S. registered to download the free materials, reaching some 6 million students across the country — from sea to shining sea. AIT in the Classroom was a homerun. A grand slam.
Some of you also know that my relationship with Mr. Gore and AIT didn’t end with the classroom curriculum. I was one of the 900 or so folks in the U.S. selected by The Climate Project to go to Nashville to be trained by Mr. Gore and his impressive team of experts to give the slideshow. A photo of Gore and my team of southern evangelists hangs over my left shoulder and the certificate of training hangs over my right as I type these words. Meanwhile the Keynote presentation sits hogging nearly a half-gigabyte of space on my laptop hard drive.
Despite all of this, I’ve never given a full presentation. For a long time I didn’t know why. Scared? Lazy? Busy? No.
Unconvinced.
Unconvinced Mr. Gore’s approach is the right way to really compel behavior change for the majority of us — that is, more than that small percentage of the population who are (and have been) the dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists. Those folks already know this story. In fact many of them have been shouting from the rooftops some version of it since the 1970s.
But I’ve changed my mind. Or rather I’m no longer unconvinced. I’m certain. I’m certain that Mr. Gore’s message — and the way he’s telling it especially — is wrong for most of us.
It’s wrong because the AIT message is too much negative political attack ad, not enough optimism for our future. And I guess that makes sense, given Mr. Gore’s place in history. But that doesn’t make it effective — at least not in a sustainable way. Rather, I believe we want to move toward happiness, not away from sadness. We want to fight FOR something, not AGAINST it. We want fulfillment, not fear. We always have.
And that’s why Al and I have to break-up, and why I have to withdraw my support of his slideshow. Not because the accuracy of the content is off but because the dread that drips from these slides doesn’t work for me anymore. And without the right delivery, the content doesn’t matter. We want possibility, not pessimism.
What if Martin Luther King, Jr. had replaced:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
with
I have a nightmare that my four little children will never live in a nation where the content of their character matters more than the color of their skin.
Dr. King’s dream is so memorable, so iconic, and so inextricably linked to our history because it continues the hopeful vision laid out by our forefathers.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.
And that hopeful vision is exactly what I find missing from Mr. Gore’s slideshow. I spent two LONG days going through every slide in the deck in excruciating detail in Nashville and many, many hours since I’ve returned to North Carolina. In fact, I’ve been neck deep for the past 18 months. And for much of that time, I’ve been waking in the night to cold sweats (despite a winter thermostat set to 58°!), bothered by something I couldn’t put my finger on. Not anymore. I finally figured out why. Mr. Gore’s vision focuses on a hellish future not a hopeful one.
Perhaps there was a time not long ago when Mr. Gore’s message was needed. By me. And by many, many others. He does, after all, have an amazing gift of making esoteric scientific findings understandable to laypeople, and as a former vice president he certainly can command a stage. But now that the facts are in I believe his approach must give way to a different one. Now is the time to compel our friends, neighbors and even those with whom we have little in common to do something on the information we have. And if it’s true that people act in order to increase their own happiness, we need to provide them that opportunity. And if it’s true that people buy on emotion and justify with facts, then we must provide that tug on their collective heartstrings. Our history suggests that aiming toward a positive image, rather than away from negative ones is the way to accomplish that. We can do that.
We need to return to that hopeful vision of our future — of making the impossible possible — that all but defines what America has always strived to be and that has compelled so many great accomplishments in our nation’s great history. (Images of Victory Gardens, Dr. King’s speech, and footprints on the moon dance in my head.) We can do that again. It won’t be easy, but we can do it. Let’s paint a bright green vision of our future for America, and let’s work like heck to “live the life we imagined” in that future vision. And let’s start right now.
In Part II of this series,
I will offer ideas on how we can do that.
Originally published January 9, 2008
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[...] the previous installment of this multi-part essay, I suggested that we focus our environmental attention on hope rather than [...]