Bleeding Piece of Earth

An Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore stars in the documentary directed by Davis
Guggenheim.

Reviewed by Gerald Carpenter

This is truly a great film on a worthy subject. It is an
eloquent mass-mailing to the citizens of Earth: The system is
blinking red. Our so-called civilization has contracted a
life-threatening illness known as global warming — brought on by
human activity — and all the present signs indicate our condition
is critical. In a decade, give or take a year or two, it will
become terminal.

This is the knowledge Al Gore has been carrying around since his
college days, in the 1960s. As a freshman congressman in the 1970s,
he held the first hearings ever on the subject of global warming.
After his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988
(remember Michael Dukakis?), he began to work up a touring
slide-show presentation about it, but then Bill Clinton took him to
the White House in 1992, and he was pretty busy after that.

In 2000, when he was elected president but prevented from
serving, Gore went back to his main mission, which was to alert as
many of us as possible to the danger we are in — and to point out
ways to do something about it. When he made his PowerPoint
presentation to a group of Hollywood movers and shakers, one of
them — Laurie David — decided that it needed to be put on film, and
An Inconvenient Truth is the result.

The film is a brilliant exposition of the major features of the
problem. There is an evangelical element to Gore’s presentation,
which the autobiographical episodes serve to heighten and
underscore (like the Protestant conversion narrative known as a
“relation”), but there is nothing preachy about any of it. Seldom,
if ever, have graphs and still photos and other bits of scientific
data been so moving, so profoundly frightening.

Quentin Tarantino’s partner, Lawrence Bender, played a key role
as a producer, and Davis Guggenheim has done a spectacular job of
making a motion picture out of it. But it is Al Gore’s passion, his
vision, that holds it all together. We are going to owe him a lot,
I hope. I sometimes wonder why he bothers.

See An Inconvenient Truth. Now.