Fantastic book, very much ahead of its time. More people should listen to Al Gore.

About what you would expect from the man who thinks he started everything that is good in the world. If you buy into his world view you will love, if you look at it with an open mind and a critical eye you will see it is severely flawed.

Interesting

Read this one shortly after it came out. Surprised I had forgotten I read this until now considering I voted for Gore 4 times; 1988 Democratic Presidential primary in Ct, 1992 and 1996 for VP and 2000 for Prez.

Clearly shows Gore's committment to environmental issues not just to the publication date of the book but back to the 1970's when he had House hearings on this subject. We should have listened to him then, we should listem to him now.

We are in trouble and need to become more "earth" conscious

I read this in college way before the global warming hype and it scared me then. So relevant today.

This book first appeared in 1992, when I read it. You could call it the book that awakened the ecology movement in America, and the Senator's name as the author gave the movement some cachet. Sen. Gore mentions P.T. Barnum in his writing, and I believe its an apt comparison in my mind: Barnum and Gore. Pseudo-scientific scare tactics masquerading as fact.

The book provides a great overview of many environmental problems the world has experienced or is currently facing. I was expecting it to be more of a discussion on climate change, but it delved into all kinds of topics that one would pick up in an introductory environmental sciences class. For someone with vary little background in this field, I would highly recommend this book. For those who are already pretty well versed in the topic, the book will seem pretty repetitive with what the reader already knows. From what I can remember from "An Inconvenient Truth", there is a lot of cross-over between that and the book.

Read and learn.

Amazing, prophetic & illuminating. As a whole, this book illustrates in detail how humans have both negatively affected the global environment while also showing how we can turn the ever growing calamity around if we can all manage to work together.

This personally is an incredibly momentous book, Al Gore emphasizes the dire importance of the environmet, the global situation and the fundamental issue with our mental attitue towards climate change and environmental destruction, I love this book and the fact that it was written in 1992 emphasizes its importance as the magnitude of its message seems to increase with every given year. Al Gore can be commended for confronting the global issue from various perspectives be it economic, historical, philosophical or spiritual. Simply put its inspiring. However I do critize him for having somewhat long winded metaphors and illustrations even if they seem poetic, His resolution of a Global Marshall Plan is definately over-ambitious, (especially if it directly opposes the corporate mind) And I find his focus on the US' role rather than a global community a little dreary, this also goes along with his conflict towards Bush. All in all, love this book.

“We learned, for example, that in some areas of Poland, children are regularly taken underground into deep mines to gain some respite from the buildup of gases and pollution of all sorts in the air. One can almost imagine their teachers emerging tentatively from the mine, carrying canaries to warn the children when it’s no longer safe for them to stay above the ground.”

This is an actual quote. From a book. Written by a Nobel Prize Winner.

It came out around the time I lived in the US on my one year cultural exchange program. I was bored to death and entertained myself with inventing crazy stories about Poland and feeding them to gullible American teenagers who went to school with me.

I told them that although the shops in Poland are open all week, you can only buy things on Mondays. It's a part of government program against poverty and it stops people from buying too much shit they don't need.

Also told them we keep lots of farm animals in our flats and houses even in cities because their body heat keeps us warm at night. The government provides one cow-radiator for a family but if you have some money you are sure to buy a sheep or two to supplement that. Especially in winter.

So when Al Gore says 'we learned' I think he means he had an exchange student from Poland in his school.