Inconvenient truths and convenient oversights

First off, thanks to Stowe for my new design and very cool new header (happy Christmas to me)!
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Having never seen the film An Inconvenient Truth, I decided to buy the book when I saw it on a bargain shelf a few weeks ago. And I've had (perhaps not surprisingly) a very mixed reaction to it.

First off, there is no doubt in my mind that people in general and Americans in particular need to seriously curtail our polluting/ trashing everything with chemicals/ clear-cutting forests/ strip-mining for jewelry/ raping the earth in myriad other ways. On the one hand, I'm appalled by how much crap I produce or use in the course of my daily life (chemical shampoo, gasoline, disposable food packaging, cell phone, chemical cleaning products, cranking up the heat, etc., etc., and I don't even want to know how many rain forests have been destroyed to make all the books I own), and on the other hand, I'm amazed that the earth has managed to straggle on without falling to pieces long ago.

Al Gore gave me some good ideas. As mentioned in the previous post, I bought reusable tote bags at Kroger, and I have been using them at other stores as well. If I only buy a few items, I have been asking not to have them bagged. I am sorting my recycling. (My Denver friends tell me they have curbside recycling; they toss everything into a bin and it gets picked up with the trash and they don't even have to sort it themselves! In Savannah, you have to not only sort it, but drive way the hell out to the ghetto to find the one place where you can recycle everything. So that's gonna be the real challenge for me.) I got biodegradable bags for dog poop (provided, of course, that the puppy, whose name is now Bishop, ever decides to poop somewhere outside my house). I've been using post-consumer, non-bleached recycled paper towels and non-chemical cleaners (the problem is many of them are ammonia-based, which isn't so good with cats). I even bought recycled cotton wrapping paper for Christmas gifts.

Surprisingly to me, I already was doing more stuff right than I realized, which is kind of cool.

Gore advocates CFLs (compact fluorescent lightbulbs), but I heard from another reliable source that although CFLs last far longer, they also contain dangerous levels of mercury that we should not be tossing away in landfills. I need to do more research to find out whether this is true. If it is, it's hugely disturbing.

A lot of Gore's suggestions either 1) cost far, far more disposable income than I have (you know, getting new appliances, re-insulating your house, buying a hybrid car), and/or 2) involve taking political action. And while I know laws need to change, I'm very distrustful of politicians and lawmakers. I guess I am more of an advocate of grassroots, personal decisions, so that's where I am right now.

The whole politician problem plays into Gore's book, too. Even though he claims he has retired from public office, he's still a politician. He devotes a disproportionate amount of text to talking about himself, his time in office, all the wonderful things he did, and how he has always been a forward-thinking advocate for the environment. All of that might be true, and some of it is useful background, but it became cloying after awhile. It's definitely overkill.

He's also disgustingly disingenuous about certain things--the most offensive, to me, being his handling of Hurricane Katrina. Katrina may have been caused by global warming, and New Orleans would not have flooded without Katrina. But I think it's a virtual certainty that the worst of the devastation wasn't caused directly by the hurricane; it was because the levees had not been built to standard and broke. And the storm could well have lost a lot of velocity if the wetlands hadn't been constantly eroded for the past century, and had been able to absorb more of the water. Multiple administrations--including Clinton/Gore--lied about the levees and did nothing to stop destruction of the wetlands. So it's a little hard to stomach the way he manipulates images of people on cots in the Superdome and the flooded city to underscore his argument about global warming. He conveniently ignores the role he and his administration played in failing to prevent the crisis.

I noticed in at least one case, too, that his "before" and "after" photos of a vanishing glacier weren't shot at quite the same distance. There's no doubt the glacier had noticeably and significantly shrunk in the second photo, but the lens covered a broader area, too. Barren slopes on the side of the glacier added to the look of desolation. The slopes weren't in the first photo, so you couldn't tell how much had melted and how much hadn't been there in the first place. That subtle manipulation of the perspective wasn't even necessary; the images clearly made the point they were supposed to make, so why manipulate it at all?

In the end, I am glad I read the book, but I'm a little disappointed too.