Book Report on Earth in the Balance by Al Gore - Essay Example

Everyday there is a threat posed to our climate, water, soil, and diversity of plant and animal life. A passionate, lifelong defender of the environment, Gore describes in brave and unforgettable terms how human actions and decisions can endanger or safeguard the vulnerable ecosystem that sustains us. Al Gore's passion for the environment started when he was a boy growing up on a farm. His parents taught him the importance of soil erosion, having to stop river gullies before they got started.

His mother read Rachel Carlson's book, Silent Spring in 1962 and he remembers how she told everyone the dangers of pesticide abuse like DDT are doing to the environment. She had emphasized to him and his sister that the book was different from others, and it was important. As a student in college his professor Roger Revelle had introduced the idea of carbon dioxides threat on the global environment. Revelle started sampling the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 1958 only to watch it rise from 315-360 parts per million.

The cover of Earth in the Balance is strikingly meaningful in black and red with the globe displayed at the background right. The book mainly touches topics on the globalecologicalsystem, dysfunctionalcivilization, climateequilibrium, and GlobalMarshallPlan. In writing this book, Al Gore said, "The time has long since come to take more political risks - and endure more political criticism - by proposing tougher, more effective solutions and fighting hard for their enactments." The book is arranged into three sections: the first describes the plagues; the second looks at how we got ourselves into this mess; and the final chapters presents solutions.

By way of introduction, the book talks about the importance of the 1992 Earth Summit. This was a world-wide meeting to discuss and implement a new generation of global treaties aimed at promoting sustainable economic progress and healing the relationship between civilization and the fragile ecological system of the Earth. At the summit the Bush administration declined to sign the treaty to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, hence disappointing many other countries. The book soonest ships in the desert, talks about Al Gore's many travels and horrifying discoveries that are murdering our environment.

First, Al Gore went to the Aral Sea which at one time was the 4th largest and now to an irrigation scheme to grow cotton in the desert it has greatly diminished. Then he spoke of the white sea in 1990 where millions of starfish where killed because the military dumped radioactive waste. All across the world, mysterious mass deaths have been happening in our oceans; some scientists say it is because of accumulated environmental stress. The Trans-Antarctic Mountains was Al Gores next stop to see for himself the studies of the effects of glaciers.

He discovered from ice core samples that a small reduction in one country's emissions from the Clean Air Act had changed the amount of pollution found in the remote and least accessible place on Earth. He recounted that in 1989 the Amazon rain forest was being burned to provide pastures for fast food beef. The amount burnt added up to the state of Tennessee, killing thousands of species. According to Al Gore, a record of living species of plants and animals are now vanishing around the world one thousand