Sorry, Al Gore, the care for nature is not humanity’s most pressing concern. The most pressing concern is one Al Gore, a vice-president, should have acted upon while in office. Let me point out the greatest and most imminent threat to humanity that we appear so afraid to take on.
Morality 2.0
Al Gore’s commitment to fighting global warming is commendable, regardless of hard evidence supporting or denying such a supposition. In the same way, being kind and considerate does not require proof to be practiced, even when evidence can and, on occasion, should negate a stance of compassion. Evidence, or any other degree of enforcible compliance, is not the proper impetus or compass for morality.
We, as humans, must do our best not to soil the planet for other living creatures and not saddle the next generation with our abuse of planetary resources just because we can. With the same morality by which one should not lick a birthday cake, everyone else is supposed to eat (yes, I saw it happen), just because one could. Moving morality aside, like the megalomaniac cake-licker-in-sheep’s-clothing, you will discover such behavior has an unreconcilable impact on the solidarity you depend on for survival.
Call Me Al
Al’s call to action directed at young people, to keep our imprint on the planet top of mind is essential, albeit the oligarchy of grown, gray-haired men he has led (as a Vice President and wannabe President of the most powerful country in the world) is precisely to blame for such ignorance.
Why does a man with so much power and connections appear strikingly powerless in cleaning up the mess his generation was responsible for creating? All while openly tossing such responsibility over the fence to the next generation in a desperate appeal to innocent disciples of make-believe who pay dearly to hear Al speak.
The lesson we must learn from Al’s powerlessness is that a broad-based appeal to morality is not what produces leadership to break the norm of current imperfection. Authentic leadership does not come from putting up a slideshow presentation to induce morality. Instead, authentic leadership comes from intelligent and considerate people, in the words of Albert Einstein, changing the causal systems that determine what man can discover.
In other words, not our morality needs to change, but our behavior – induced by the rewards granted by our man-made systems—the systems at the root cause of why we behave the way we do.
Wrong Leadership, Wrong Agendas, Wrong Outcomes
As such, I vehemently disagree with Al Gore’s statement in a recent video interview published in The Huffington Post about how “global warming is far and away from the most serious crisis we face.” He could not be more wrong. Our most inconvenient truth is the one that requires us to take ourselves on, to fundamentally reinvent the systems by which we induce desired human behavior. Cause over consequence.
Earth will survive for another 3.5 billion years; how long we as a species partake on that ride depends first and foremost on how well we manage ourselves.
