Earth in the Balance
Gore was the U.S. Senator when he started writing his first book Earth in the Balance. His 6-year-old son was involved in a serious car accident in 1989, which shook him up and caused him to reevaluate all his priorities. Gore described this life-changing event as “a trauma so shattering that [he] views it as a moment of personal rebirth.” This inspired him to look and dig further into the environmental crisis and wrote this book while his son was in recovery.
Earth in the Balance was first published in 1992 and made it to The New York Times Best Seller list. It also won the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 1993 Book award. This award-winning book explains the world’s ecological predicament and describes a range of policies to deal with the most pressing problems. There are three parts in the book. The first part examines the physical manifestations of the global environmental crisis. The second part analyses the nature of societal relationships with the environment. The last part discusses suggestions for practical actions to address the relationship flaws mentioned in the second part.
Under Global Marshall Plan, Gore proposed specific ideas on how to save the global environment through the five strategic goals framework, which is considered to be one of today’s key strategies of initiative:
- Stabilizing of world population
- The rapid development of environmentally appropriate technologies
- A comprehensive change in the economic “rules of the road” by which we measure the impact of our decisions on the environment
- Negotiation & approval of a new generation of international agreements
- A cooperative plan for educating the world’s citizens about our global environment
Gore also expressed his opposition to adaptation to global warming in the book as it is akin to a “kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins”.