"The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual." -- Al Gore

It is impossible to read large sections of Vice President Gore’s 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit," without thinking, "Why isn’t this guy running for president?"

Not the cautious, plodding, pre-packaged incrementalist who is the actual Democratic candidate, but this guy: the earnest, well-informed author and visionary, startled by a personal tragedy into revealing his true feelings about what he refers to as "an ecological holocaust." Not the cynical New World Order technocrat who negotiated access to Russian oilfields for American corporations, but this guy: who knows to the depth of his being that human addiction to fossil fuels is "forcing a profound and disruptive change in the entire global climate."

Well, in the inner struggle for the vice president’s soul, we can only hope the good side wins—especially if he winds up with a promotion in November. (We already know from the League of Conservation Voters which side of the Force Darth W has pledged his allegiance to.)

But Gore is right that the "inner crisis" of civilization he talks about, and which is manifest in his own internal contradictions, is indeed a reflection of humanity’s confused spiritual understanding.

In a chapter called "Environmentalism of the Spirit," Gore does a fairly shrewd job of sketching out the history of this confusion, and relating the modern environmental crisis to the ever-widening split between science and religion at the center of Western (now global) culture. Taking note of the call to environmental "stewardship" found in many religious traditions, he places most of the responsibility for this split on scientists and philosophers, Plato in particular. But this is off the mark.

Most likely for political considerations, Gore’s book goes easy on America’s dominant Judeo-Christian culture and its effect on nature, blaming any environmental lapses in that tradition on heretics like the ancient Gnostics and former Interior Secretary James Watt. He readily acknowledges the profound influence of Platonic philosophy, with its separation of mind and body, on Christian belief. But he touches only briefly on the gender issues that are central to understanding the relationship between humanity and nature in the Judeo-Christian mindset.

Although it is true that Genesis, the first book of both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, contains clear and useful messages about the appropriate role for humans in nature and about the sanctity of creation (for example, Gore interprets the story of Noah to mean: "Thou shalt preserve biodiversity"), a deeper reading of the text reveals some fundamental conflicts. To understand these conflicts, we have to delve back to the period before Genesis was written.

Scholars have known for decades that, contrary to the popular tradition which holds that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, there were actually a number of writers and editors involved in the production of these texts. What is also known is that earlier versions of virtually all the stories in Genesis can be found in ancient Semitic literature predating the Hebrew scriptures; and that these earlier stories are likely based on even more ancient tales from the Neolithic period, when Goddess-worship was practiced throughout the known world.

This sacred mythology was so deeply revered that, despite centuries of priestly editing and rewrites, traces of the original language remain in Genesis today. The most striking example is the Hebrew word for "God" used in the very first verse of Genesis: "Elohim." Taken directly from the language of the Ugarites, the people who originally inhabited Canaan, this word consists of a masculine root (El) with a feminine plural ending, and meant literally, "the gods." It was a reference to the supreme council of the gods of the Ugarite pantheon, all of whom represented various aspects of nature — including the thunder god, Yahweh, the later focus of Hebrew monotheism. (Conservative modern scholars explain the plural form of Elohim as a reference to divine "majesty." They ignore the feminine part.)

"You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods: on high mountains, on hills, under a spreading tree. You must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, set fire to the carved images of their gods, and wipe their name from that place."

No one who makes a regular practice of barbecuing sacred cows is likely to be elected US president. So, having criticized in his book both the industrial economy and that most sacred American fetish, the internal combustion engine, Gore has earned a measure of forgiveness for the timidity of his peek at the spiritual crisis undergirding our environmental woes. As most of us realize, being tagged an "extremist" is trouble enough in American politics, much less an "ecofeminist." But the fact is that the spiritual sickness that afflicts Western culture goes much deeper than the cold and abstract scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment, and farther back than the pagan philosophers who inspired it.

I believe the only cure for our world’s spiritual crisis is a shamanic journey to the darkness at the heart of the most sacred literature of Judeo-Christian culture. The planet’s only hope is to find (which we can, even in that same literature) the legendary Philosopher’s Stone that will again unite spirit and matter, human and nature, male and female, Father God and Mother Earth, driven apart so long ago like Adam and Eve from the Garden, by a desolate, cruel and lonely form of monotheism.