A few years ago I went to see the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” which was Al Gore’s life story told through a series of vignettes in which he was sitting with his feet in a river pretending to type feverishly about green house gas on an Apple iBook.  Some of it was about how his parents or his uncle raised cattle, and some of it was about how when he wasn’t inventing the internet, he was fighting tooth and nail to get other people from the South to worry about global warming, which they didn’t.

I went to see the movie with my parents in a theater in Vermont that serves yeast on its popcorn.  The only thing I found funny about the movie was that Al Gore spent much of it driving around rural Tennessee in the back seat of an 8 mpg Cadillac, iBook in hand, writing down his ideas about the need for shared sacrifices, such as, for example, buying more efficient cars. 

But the overall oddity of Gore’s movie was that he acted like now that he wasn’t holding the second-highest office in the world or running for President he finally had the bully pulpit of independent movie theaters necessary to bring about real change, which he was apparently planning to do by stimulating outrage among the kind of people who put wheat germ on their breakfast cereal.

Despite my skepticism at his oddly-timed attempt at revolution I was glad that people were starting to care about the environment. I was glad because even during my lifetime people have had a mixed relationship with the planet.  As an example of this mixed relationship I note that as recently as 1989 I was involved in a fund raiser that involved accepting $5 donations from my neighbors, writing the donors’ names on index cards, and then attaching the cards to hundreds of balloons and then releasing those balloons into the air so they could end up caught in trees or floating in lakes and rivers.  The primary purpose of this exercise was to raise about $400 for a field trip, but we later learned it had a second purpose which was to kill turtles who mistook balloons for jellyfish.

As it turns out, the 1990’s were a great time to be a jellyfish because it was also at this time that turtles started mistaking plastic 6-pack holders for jellyfish, which supposedly resulted in their having their beaks locked shut, which made it very hard for them to complain about the balloons.  Once the environmental movement started in earnest, I remember there was a huge push to cut through each of the six rings so that in the event that the 6-pack holder somehow got into the ocean from your trash can in Vermont, the turtles might still waste time and effort chasing plastic but wouldn’t die.

This tradition of balloon launches ended when I was in 6^th grade – perhaps because of the outcry about the turtles, or perhaps because it would have occurred to someone who didn’t know anything that asking your neighbors for money to help you buy trash to throw on someone else’s lawn was setting a bad example for children.

Even though most kids in the country were selling magazines or candy bars or running bake sales, the powers that were at my school were for some reason, very keen on the notion of fund raisers that involved releasing things.  So keen, in fact, that by the end of my time in elementary school instead of the balloon launch, I participated in the inaugural “Trouts away” event, which, aside from confusing children about how to pluralize trout, was a chance to gross out the girls by kissing the fish before putting them in the river.  Given the high price of hatchery trout I doubt if the launch was an actual fund raiser, but it did raise awareness of the fact that trout are slippery.

I seem either to have underestimated Gore’s timing, or the impact of his film, because these days the environment is the only thing anyone talks about.  Last week I went to a Senate debate which was exclusively about “climate change.” This debate included the term “ocean acidification,” and a spirited discussion of “cap & trade” even though none of the candidates had any idea what they were talking about.  To be honest, I'm not totally clear on it either, but I think it has something to do with American businesses paying people from other countries to reduce emissions so we don’t have to change anything.  I can't say I agree with the candidates that an easily-manipulated financial market of polluting privileges is the best solution to our problems, but I should probably cut them some slack since they were probably sponsoring balloon launches a short while ago.