The tone of the first excerpt, the piece from Al Gore's book can best be described as One of the clearest signs that our relationship to the global environment is in severe crisis is the floodtide of garbage spilling out of our cities and factories. What
some have called the "throwaway. society has been based on the assumptions that endless resources will allow us to produce an endless supply of goods and that
bottomless receptacles (.e., landfills and ocean dumping sites) will allow us to dispose of an endless stream of waste. But now we are beginning to drown in that
stream. Having relied for too long on the old strategy of "out of sight, out of mind," we are now running out of ways to dispose of our waste in a manner that keeps
it out of either sight or mind.