A Mind Both Whole and Green

Bill Clinton has made the presidential campaign interesting by picking Al Gore for his running mate. Gore is one of the few U.S. politicians who has studied environmental science, who shows up at important environmental events, who has been a consistent, informed, level-headed influence on the nation’s environmental policies.

No one has to guess what his environmental beliefs are, nor where they came from. They’re laid out beautifully in his book “Earth in the Balance.”

“We routinely choose to indulge our own generation at the expense of all who will follow,” Gore writes. “The engines of distraction are gradually destroying the inner ecology of the human experience. Essential to that ecology is the balance between respect for the past and faith in the future, between a belief in the individual and a commitment to the community, between our love for the world and our fear of losing it--the balance, in other words, on which an environment of the spirit depends.”

This does not sound like the language of a national political candidate. The challenge before Al Gore now will be to go on sounding like himself, instead of like a poll-directed, handler-manipulated candidate.