 Earth in the Balance audio book cover | |
| Author | Al Gore |
|---|---|
| Published | June 1992Houghton Mifflin |
| Pages | 407 |
| ISBN | 978-0395578216 |
Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (ISBN 0-452-26935-0, paperbackISBN 1-85383-743-1) is a1992 book written byAl Gore, published in June 1992, shortly before he was electedVice President in the1992 presidential election. Known by the short titleEarth in the Balance, the book explains the world's ecological predicament and describes a range of policies to deal with the most pressing problems. It includes a proposed "Global Marshall Plan" to address current ecological issues.
Written while his son was recovering from a serious accident,Earth in the Balance became the first book written by a sittingU.S. Senator to make theNew York Times bestseller list sinceJohn F. Kennedy's 1956Profiles in Courage.[1]
In 1993,Earth in the Balance was released in paperback andaudiobook format on audiocassette tape.
It received theRobert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 1993 Book award given annually to a book that "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes - his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity."[2]
The book was followed byAn Inconvenient Truth, a book that was the companion for a movienarrated by Al Gore, shown at the 2006Sundance Film Festival[3] and released on 24 May 2006.
In the 2002Futurama episode "Crimes of the Hot", Al Gore himself references the book and its "far more popular" fictional future sequel,Harry Potter and the Balance of Earth.
TheGlobal Marshall Plan is a plan first devised by formerAmericanVice-PresidentAl Gore in his bestselling bookEarth in the Balance, which gives specific ideas on how to save the global environment.
Gore states: "The model of theMarshall Plan can be of great help. For example, a Global Marshall Plan must focus on strategic goals and emphasize actions and programs that are likely to remove the bottlenecks presently inhibiting the healthy functioning of theglobal economy. The new global economy must be an inclusive system that does not leave entire regions behind. The new plan will require the wealthy nations to allocate money for transferring environmentally helpful technologies to theThird World and to help impoverished nations achieve a stable population and a new pattern ofsustainable economic progress. To work, however, any such effort will also require wealthy nations to make a transition themselves that will be in some ways more wrenching than that of the Third World."
Source: Earth in the Balance, page 297-301
Global Marshall Plan: Five strategic goals "In my view, five strategic goals must direct and inform our efforts to save the global environment":
The idea is based on the post-WWIIMarshall Plan that saw the United States send billions of dollars toEuropean nations to rebuild their war shattered economies.
In order to further the idea of a GMP and to coordinate the various initiatives, NGOs, scientists, activists and groups in the field of development cooperation and global social justice the Global Marshall Plan Initiative was founded by members of theClub of Rome, the Club of Budapest, theEco-Social Forum Europe,ATTAC and other organisations in Frankfurt, Germany in 2003. The two main objectives are to find new ways and sources of financing in development cooperation, predominantly pursuing theMillennium Development Goals of theUN and the worldwide propagation of theeco-social market economy, which is considered to be one of today's key strategies of initiative.
In the book Gore expresses opposition toadaptation to global warming,[4] writing that adaptation represented a “kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins”.[5]
Al Gore forcefully declared his opposition to adaptation in 1992, explaining that it represented a "kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins".
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