The Politics of Pollution : Books: In 1988, Sen. Al Gore found that no one wanted to hear about the environment. Now, he’s saying voters--and the world--can’t wait.

When Sen. Al Gore Jr. decided to run for the presidency in 1987, he bypassed more conventional issues and picked the environment as his major platform plank.

“When I kicked off my campaign in Washington,” recalls the Tennessee Democrat, “I said the environmental crisis was the most important challenge facing our civilization.”

He did well in the South’s “Super Tuesday” primaries, but as the crowded Democratic race wore on, Gore lost momentum. And despite his credentials as the leading Congressional voice on the environment, he found his global agenda going nowhere.

His speeches were ignored by the press--which dismissed thinning ozone as too exotic to interest the electorate (“not even peripheral,” scoffed columnist George Will)--and were ridiculed by fellow Democrats who at one point said he sounded as if he were running for national scientist.

Doubting his own political judgment and lacking the nerve to “keep talking about the environmental crisis,” Gore eventually downplayed his environmental focus. When he dropped out after 10 months, he was criticized, in part, for not having developed a clear, compelling message--on the environment, or most anything else.

Mr. Gore returned to Washington.

“I realized that what I had to say wouldn’t fit into an 8-second TV bite or even a 30-minute speech,” he says. So he’s written a book that he hopes will achieve what his candidacy didn’t: the galvanization of public and political awareness into large-scale environmental action.

In “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,” Gore blends an intellectual analysis of the environmental crisis and a prophetic call for spiritual reassessment with a detailed political blueprint for global cleanup.

Already, this book has environmentalists excited.

“I feel heartened for sure,” says Lester Brown, whose Worldwatch Institute scientists have been issuing State of the World crisis warnings since 1984. “I have the feeling that just by the force of his personality and the intensity of the effort, he’s going to focus public attention on the issues.”

It may be easier this time around. In the five years since Gore picked the environment as his platform, the subject is getting more respect. But candidates still prefer specific issues, like recycling, to the larger picture.

Global warming and species extinction are still too vague as campaign ammunition, says Los Angeles communications consultant Josh Baran. “You can’t see it or touch it or feel it. The good political issues are the ones that are 6 inches away.” Furthermore, he says, high-tech media have reduced voter attention spans.

“Nevertheless, I think it’s a duty of politicians, especially on the federal level, to bring in these complex issues. We avoid them at our total peril.”

Ironically, it’s the perilous issues that tend to get brushed aside. “The environment is sort of like the federal deficit,” says Rick Sullivan, a Washington public affairs consultant. “Everyone knows it’s a bad deal, but it’s so horrible we can’t contemplate it.”

If politicians skirt the topic of ecological disaster, they don’t get much help from the press, which tends to pounce on an Exxon Valdez disaster but often downplays the larger issues.

“So many of the stories are ambiguous or difficult to describe,” says Everette Dennis, director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University.

In his book, Gore describes the frustration during his campaign of “banging away at the issue and finding that not a single word would be reported.”

Dennis acknowledges the problem. “This says that we are not very good in reporting on complicated subjects. They are too complex for sound bites and not considered dramatic by TV newspeople.”

Boston political analyst Ann Lewis says that, in the 1988 campaign, Gore’s single-focus timing was off. “When a brand-new candidate is trying to become well-known, there is an agenda of presidential issues, and you have to take those into account,” says Lewis, former political director for the Democratic National Committee. “Also, it’s a difficult issue because you have to differentiate yourself from the rest of the candidates--nobody is (for) the greenhouse effect--and he wasn’t specific enough.

“But I think what Gore has been trying to do is right-on,” she adds. “The economy is the pressing issue now, but I believe the American public is really concerned about the environment and realizes it’s not just a luxury for those who can afford to go hiking.”

When Gore’s book proposal reached John Sterling’s office three years ago, Houghton Mifflin’s editor-in-chief sensed the timing was right. “We’ve seen a tide of environmental books in the last few years,” says Sterling, “but Sen. Gore’s is different for many reasons.”

It’s a comprehensive look at the global problem, he says, analyzing the environment from the viewpoint of politics, history, economics, human psychology, technology and religion.

Also, he says, Gore, a one-time newspaper reporter, wrote it himself, which is unusual; politicians usually rely on collaborators.

“But what’s really different is this,” says Sterling: “It’s an environmental warning written by someone who’s in a position to do something about the problem.

“Voters in this country are much more concerned about the environment than politicians seem to be,” Sterling says. “People seem really scared about where we are going, and they hunger for political leaders to take on the subject. It’s certainly puzzling why politicians seem to be so out of sync with the culture.”

Gore agrees. “I think rising within our culture is a profound uneasiness with the logical consequences of what we have been doing,” he says during a telephone interview from Washington.

Quoting a line from the rock group Dire Straits, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” he elaborated: “Just as an alcoholic denies the existence of his problem, and sees a series of auto accidents as an unrelated set of unfortunate coincidences, so we see the ozone hole, Alaskan oil spill and garbage crisis as isolated, unconnected events.”

He thinks such denial is largely generational. “I can go into any elementary school in the country and talk to young people who recognize that we live in a global world.” Only when adults recognize the enormity of the problem can there be an effective response, says the senator, who describes his book as a “declaration of an all-out commitment” to such an effort.

He recognizes that his book’s Global Marshall Plan, loaded with new programs and major policy changes, looks formidable, but insists he will fight hard for its enactment. Each of its five strategic goals--such as stabilizing world population and ramrodding development of alternative technologies--is supported by a detailed set of enabling policy changes.

“People look at this plan and think it is impossible--it can’t be done. But what if I had suggested two years ago that the Soviet Union would disappear, that Russians would embrace capitalism and people would gather in the Budapest city square and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’?

“What happened is that people realized that communism was stupid, looked around and found others agreed, and they reached a critical mass. That’s the change I expect to occur in respect to the environment. And when that happens, the political system will fall all over itself to respond.”

Should that occur, Gore, 43, will be there to lead. He chairs the Senate’s environmental and energy study conference and has written pioneer legislation including the 1989 World Environmental Policy Act.

Environmentalism and political activism seem natural paths for Gore, whose father, Albert Sr., was a Tennessee senator from 1953 to 1971. Albert Jr. first learned of the Earth’s fragility as a child on his family’s Carthage, Tenn., farm. His mother’s admiration for Rachel Carson’s classic “The Silent Spring” also made a special impression. “It made me think about threats to the Earth that are much more serious than washed-out gullies--but much harder to see,” he writes.

At Harvard in the 1960s, he was influenced by professor Roger Revelle, who first monitored rising amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and warned of global warming.

Gore’s book, in part, is a personal journey undertaken when he had just turned 40, had lost the presidential nomination and had seen his 6-year-old son fight back from a near-fatal automobile accident, giving the father of four, he says, “a new sense of urgency about the things I value most.”

This contributes to the underlying spiritual theme of “Earth in the Balance,” which emphasizes that the real crisis is the lost connection to the natural world, Gore says.

“I think that we have mistakenly bought into the assumption that we are isolated individuals, seduced to think that our principal goal is to control the world around us.”

What has been lost in the process, he believes, is the responsibility to future generations.

“Our founders talked openly about posterity,” he says, “but in politics today, if you stand on a podium and express concern about what’s going to happen in 200 years, it doesn’t strike many sparks.”

In retrospect, he says, it was a mistake to abandon the environmental issues in his presidential campaign and succumb to the “temptation of talking on things that would get some air time.”

If he runs again--and he says he would like the opportunity--he won’t lose his nerve.

“The integrity of the environment,” he says, “is not just another issue to be used in political games for popularity, votes or attention.”