Last week I had the opportunity to watch Al Gore's live presentation of "An Inconvenient Truth" at Gammage Auditorium, and I was inspired. This inspiration did not come from the words of a man who should be president, his jokes at the expense of the current administration, or the history of his struggle to raise environmental awareness.
The graphs, figures and pictures of places affected by climate change were all much more effective in leading one to a troubling conclusion. The buzz around the movie points to something even more troubling: the truth isn't as important as the title or the speaker.
Most of the attacks I've seen on "An Inconvenient Truth" center on the man who spews his truth as the absolute truth. Most of the criticism says that he is overly dramatic and focuses too much on himself and his family in instances where the facts are more important.
However true it may be, calling Gore an arrogant blowhard or a hypocrite doesn't in any way invalidate the message. It doesn't prove that the production of excess greenhouse gasses has no effect on the temperature of our atmosphere.
As a civilization, we have the tendency to become wrapped up in the person, and not in the message. For example, many of the people who support "green energy" and praise Gore's film are liberal.
Likewise, many of the people who think the movie is a bunch of garbage and Gore is a hypocrite are conservative.
Both derive from our approach to fame, something our society has long struggled with. We have tabloids, television shows and even entire channels devoted to famous people. People tend to idolize or demonize celebrity, because it is a realm outside of their domain.
The sad thing is that this obsession with fame has transcended the realm of entertainment and breached the world of politics and news. However, as we have grown more and more comfortable in a dominant capitalist society, we have come to view money and glamour as the primary indicators of success and worth.
When phrases like "It's all about the Benjamins" become the staples of pop culture, when more young adults aspire to be rappers and supermodels than scientists and entrepreneurs, it should come as no surprise that people base their opinions more on flash than substance.
Ignore the names, ignore the rhetoric, and ignore the flash. Suddenly, the equation to global warming becomes very simple: we are cutting down many trees and burning many fuels that produce a known greenhouse gas.
The problem is that we are fundamentally altering the natural processes that deal with the conversion of greenhouse gas by destroying the plants that process it, and we are creating products that produce more of it by burning fossil fuels.
We are doing this without creating new processes to take care of our waste or process the excess greenhouse gas produced. To frame this in an overly simple analogy, we are filling a bottle of limited capacity with more and more toxic liquid while cutting holes in the bottle.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that there might be a problem.
The conclusion is simple: Drop your devotion to names and titles. What matters is who you are and what you do.
Your character and actions are what matters. Understand this, and you'll understand the fifth step toward finding the meaning of life.
Reach the reporter at: nicholas.vaidyanathan@asu.edu.
