Al Gore speech about Future of Life on Earth

Gore Video (Long Version)
Transcribed 7.18.07

There’s an old African proverb that says if you want to move quickly, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. We have to go far. Quickly.

What we’re facing is, properly understood, a planetary emergency, and the phrase sounds shrill, but it’s accurate. About 20-25% of the CO2 that’s being pumped into the atmosphere every year comes from burning forests. The forests of the Earth, particularly the rainforest, sequester an enormous amount of carbon and provide the unique habitats in which most of the living species on our planet are found. And the encroachment by human activities into the integrity of these areas is causing a loss of living species at a truly alarming rate. We are in danger of pushing the extinction rate up to levels that are comparable to the five great extinction events in the history of life on this planet. This time there’s no asteroid – it’s us.

We are part of that web of life and we destroy its integrity at our own peril.

But I’m optimistic nonetheless, because the political system has one thing in common with the climate system. It is also non-linear. It can cross a tipping point and then suddenly adopt a new and different pattern of dramatic change. I think we’re close to that tipping point.

And Conservation International has played and is playing a key role in so many countries around the world, and where the forests and the rainforests and the coral reefs and the living species and endangered areas are concerned, CI is playing such a crucial role. And the task of weaving together these partnerships and coalitions that cross international boundaries, there again CI is playing a crucial role.

This is the moral challenge of our time, and future generations will look back on the beginning of this 21st century and they will ask one of two questions. Either they will ask, “What in God’s name were they thinking? Didn’t they see what was happening? The scientists were telling them. The evidence was clear.” Or the question they will ask and the one I prefer they ask is, “How did they, at the beginning of the 21st century, find the uncommon moral courage to rise up and meet successfully this challenge that so many said was impossible to solve.”

Abraham Lincoln said in America’s darkest time, “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we will save our country.” And now again we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we will save our planet.