Background Analysis of  "Ships in the Desert"

 

"Ships in the Desert" is taken from Al Gore's book Earth in the Balance. Al Gore, born in 1948, is an American author, politician, and environmental activist. He served in the U.S. Army from 1969 - 1971. Politically, he was a Democratic member, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from Tennessee from 1977 - 1985, as a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1985 - 1993, and as the 45th Vice President of the United States from 1993 - 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He also ran for President in 2000 but lost to George W. Bush Jr. despite winning the popular vote.

 

Gore has been deeply concerned about environmental issues. His two main books on the threat and solution to global warming, Earth in the Balance (1992) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006), have had a significant impact. In "Ships in the Desert", he aims to draw people's attention to the urgent environmental crisis.

 

The context of the article is the global environmental degradation that was becoming increasingly evident. During this time, issues like ozone depletion, global warming, and the destruction of natural habitats were emerging as major concerns. For example, the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970 in the United States to deal with air pollution, but environmental problems were still escalating and becoming more complex.

 

The Aral Sea, which is a key example in the text, was once the fourth - largest lake in the world in 1960, located in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. However, due to human activities such as excessive water diversion for agriculture, it had been shrinking rapidly, becoming a prime example of environmental destruction. This real - world environmental disaster sets the stage for Gore's exploration of the causes and solutions of the environmental crisis in the article.

 

The environmental problems described in the text are not isolated incidents but part of a global trend. The destruction ranges from the Antarctic, where the ozone layer was thinning, creating a "hole" that allowed the sun to glare at midnight in an abnormal way, to the Arctic with its melting ice due to global warming, and to regions around the equator and everywhere else. These issues were no longer just local or regional but had reached a global scale, threatening the entire ecosystem and human civilization.