This is the third from the last paragraph of Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, originally published in 1993:

If it is possible to steer one’s own course—and I do believe it is—then I am convinced that the place to start is with faith, which for me is akin to a kind of spiritual gyroscope that spins in its own circumference in a stabilizing harmony with what is inside and what is out. Of course, faith is just a word unless it is invested with personal meaning; my own faith is rooted in the unshakeable belief in God as creator and sustainer, a deeply personal interpretation of and relationship with Christ, and an awareness of a constant and holy spiritual presence in all people, all life, and all things. But I also want to affirm what people of faith from long ago apparently knew and that our civilization has obscured: that there is revelatory power in the world. This is the essence of faith: to make a surrendering decision to invest belief in a spiritual reality larger than ourselves. And I believe that faith is the primary force that enables us to choose meaning and direction and then hold to it despite all the buffeting chaos in life.

Thus we have Gore’s animistic premise for environmentalism: Every thing—including every rock and piece of dirt—is alive and has a spirit.

Gore reveals himself to be an utter mystic, more mystical than the bible-thumping religious fundamentalists whom the political Left ridicules and despises.

How are we to know that the holy spirit in the piece of dirt would rather sting us in the eye than be included in a cement wall of a nuclear power plant? How does the holy spirit communicate to us? Through what medium does the piece of dirt dictate its commandments on how we should surrender our reason, our pursuit of happiness, and our lives to it? Through the priest of environmentalism, Al Gore. Al Gore knows what dirt wants, and he will tell the rest of us.

For the best analysis of the monstrous evil of environmentalism, read Ayn Rand’s anthology of essays, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Here is an excerpt from one of those essays, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” originally published in 1971:

Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears. In that sense, man is the weakest of animals: he is born naked and unarmed, without fangs, claws, horns or “instinctual” knowledge. Physically, he would fall an easy prey, not only to the higher animals, but also to the lowest bacteria: he is the most complex organism and, in a contest of brute force, extremely fragile and vulnerable. His only weapon—his basic means of survival—is his mind.

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.