« How to spot an "Eco-Fraud" when shopping 'green.' | Main | New York City bans plastic bags »

This past Monday, Al Gore gave his acceptance speech to the Nobel Committee for the prize he received this year. It was an utterly astounding speech, one of the most inspiring he's ever given. Send this link on, or print it out and show it to family and friends and colleagues. It's truly remarkable, as it starts:

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life's work, unfairly labeling him "The Merchant of Death" because of his invention - dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

He continues:

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

But can we make it right? Do we have the collective will to change? Gore finishes with:

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door."

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?"

Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?"

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

So let us renew it, and say together: "We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."

Read the entire speech. You won't be disappointed.

Name (required)
Email
Website
Remember personal info? Yes   No
Comments

home | music | democracy | earth | money | about | contact

site design by Matthew Fries | © 2003-08 Consilience Productions. All Rights Reserved

Consilience Productions   World Financial Center  One North End Avenue, Box 1951  New York, NY 10282  (212) 352-0176