Al Gore has a lot of friends. Some of them have famous names, but others are anonymous as in, "A friend brought me back this photo of..." And he has an Apple notebook computer. But most of all, he has a slideshow.

He's been taking the slideshow on the road for a couple of years now, prompted by the "hard blow" of his loss in the 2000 presidential race, which "brought into focus the mission I had pursued all these years." That mission being to make the world aware of the pressing danger posed by global warning.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is a combination of extracts of that slideshow interspersed with personal reminiscences, such as those about his life as a child spending four months of every year on his father's farm, where they raised tobacco and bred Black Angus cattle. "I had a dog here. I had a pony here. I could shoot my rifle here."

Al Gore is a man on a mission indeed. Having set himself the goal of communicating the urgency of the problem very clearly, he's working hard at changing people's attitudes one person at a time. He's taken into consideration all the obstacles people might put in the way of him getting through to them. He wants to come across as one of them. That's what the reminiscences are there for.

Ever the politician, Planetary Al even quotes Winston Churchill at one point:

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing, and baffling expedience of delays is coming to a close. In its place, we are coming to a period of consequences."

For the most part, An Inconvenient Truth succeeds in bridging the science--which is represented graphically in the slideshow and in film of the changes being wrought in the Earth's environment--to the immediacy of the problem. At the same time, he's careful to make such a huge problem still seem like something a person can hold in their hands.

Gore wants you to come along for the ride, and having coaxed you on board, he wants you to understand that:

"This is a moral issue. It is *your* time to seize this issue. It is *our* time to rise again to secure our future."

I hope Americans flock to this movie, and I hope they come away from it with a clear sense that purposeful action can be taken on a personal level to reverse Earth's lurch towards instability--both climatic and social.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE--