Ain't easy being green. (Letters).

Stephanie Mencimer may be correct in her premise that Al Gore could be elected president in 2004 if he adopts an environmentalists platform ("Weather 'tis Nobler in the Mind," July/August), but she offers no reason to believe Gore would ever do so.

In thousands of hours of pounding pavement on behalf of a dozen Green candidates, including myself, I have never heard anyone coherently answer my perennial question: What has Gore done in public life to indicate that he has even read, let alone understood, Earth in the Balance?

On the contrary: He pledged, on behalf of his running mate in 1992, that the Clinton administration would block EPA licensing of the world's largest toxic waste incinerator, several hundred feet from the elementary school in East Liverpool, Ohio. That was one of the first promises President Clinton broke; the Democrats had accepted five-figure contributions from the incinerator's parent company. Now children in East Liverpool are contracting rare types of eyeball cancer.

It will take a lot of crass revisionism to obscure the fact that a vote for Gore is a vote for cancer; for inaction on the modest Kyoto Protocol; for dismissal of regional EPA heads who had the temerity to scrutinize pollution permits; for dutiful silence when Clinton broke his promise to veto the Gorton Amendment suspending environmental protection in our national forests; for a foreign policy fixated on underpriced oil; for socialization of private companies' radioactive waste (and the liability for it); and, above all, for the radical deregulation of trade in which G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, Dan Quayle, and Gore all colluded, empowering the World Trade Organization to prevent environmental protection altogether. Why should we now expect this guy to develop any credibility on environmental issues?

MIKE LIVINGSTON
Takoma Park, Md.

I shake my head whenever I see the media on the left deconstruct Al Gore's campaign. It seems as if they think that Gore was running in a vacuum. There was no consideration of the subtle positioning required of a Democrat in a resoundingly Republican media culture. Gore's reluctance to expose his environmental message to the media vultures was, as far as I was concerned, a matter of pragmatism. The mainstream media still had its claws out from the Clinton impeachment and was ready to dig into any liberal ideas. I felt that Gore was wise to protect his precious environmental message from right-wing screams of "Extremism," and "Stale '60s rhetoric" that would have inundated mainstream TV.

What surprised me most about that election year was the amazingly virulent attacks on Gore from the left. I had subscriptions to The Nation, The Progressive, and In These Times. After months of extreme frustration from reading the constant attacks on Gore (without any real dissection of Bush and his platform) I had to terminate all three subscriptions. I think that if the left-leaning punditry could have expressed any positive reportage about Gore, he would have won in a landslide.

And until the Green Party can muster something beyond petulant attacks against progressives like Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), they cannot be taken seriously by anyone concerned with the disaster that is the Bush Administration. It is time to get serious about the future of our country and to get positive about Al Gore. His environmental passion is still strong and most of all, he has been proven prophetic about what would happen if George W. Bush won.

MARK THOMPSON
Duvall, Wash.

Sadly, blame for mishandling of the environment is--along with corporate malfeasance--equally shared by members of both parties in Congress. Remember that it was Rep. John Dingell, looking out for his Michigan constituency, who helped block improved vehicle emission standards this past spring.

Still, Gore's environmental background is something that could help him overcome Bush's biggest electoral strength: namely, the view that he is the right person to defend the nation against terrorist activity. In particular, Gore's knowledge of environmental issues and his experience with them gives him a blueprint to show to the nation as a way out of our dependence on foreign oil and the extremists that dependence spawns. While his environmental views may not appease the most virulent of hawks looking to take on Saddam Hussein, it does provide a vision for U.S. citizens who want a better future for their children than more drilling in Alaska can create.

JIM ALLEN
Scottsville, Va.