Al Gore, Working With Flamingo Estate, Says He’s “Deeply Concerned” About Trump’s RFK Jr. Pick

“Looking back, unfortunately, everything the scientists warned us about that I presented in that movie on their behalf turned out to be dead right,” former vice president Al Gore told Vanity Fair recently, referring to his seminal 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. “We should listen more carefully to what they’re warning us will be in store in the years to come unless we take swift and bold action.” At Flamingo Estate owner and founder Richard Christiansen’s home on Saturday, the passionate environmentalist sat down with Christiansen, author of the new book The Guide to Becoming Alive, for an intimate conversation on the climate crisis, and what the path forward for solving it looks like, including the importance of the farmer-led movement for regenerative agriculture.

For Christiansen, to sit down with Gore was a dream. “I had originally asked him if I could interview him for the book, and scheduling-wise it couldn’t happen,” the lifestyle impresario tells Vanity Fair. Christiansen’s newly released book includes a collection of conversations with a variety of his friends, from Jane Goodall, Martha Stewart, Jane Fonda, Kelly Wearstler, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, and many more. You can read about lessons from the garden, including learning from trees, finding what ripens you, eating fresh foods, editing your life as you would prune roses, and many more indelible keys for an awakened life. So the opportunity to have this conversation with Gore in his home became the next best thing.

“I think a lot has shifted from when his movie first came out in a sense that the regenerative farming movement and some more awareness around food systems have really grown and blossomed since then,” says Christiansen, who has an amazing team, led by director of horticulture Hank Jenkins, to help him with the gardens. “And even though so many of the things that he talks about in that film and cares about have continued and gotten worse, one of the bright sides is that there is a much greater awareness around regenerative farming and farm practices than there was before, which is good news.”

Gore has used his time to go all around the world to promote solutions to the climate crisis, the greatest threat to our natural world. “If you’ve ever seen those pictures of the thin blue line on the horizon of the Earth when the astronauts look down on the Earth, that thin blue shell is where the oxygen is. That’s why it looks blue to us. And that’s where all of the global-warming pollution is spewed, and it’s only five miles high. If you could drive a car straight up in the air, you get to the top of that blue line in five minutes or less,” says Gore.

As far as the incoming administration goes, Gore believes that the fight will be an uphill battle. “The fact that solar electricity is now by far the cheapest electricity in the history of the world—far, far cheaper than any electricity you can get from burning coal or gas or oil—is something that will ensure the continuation of this clean-energy revolution. But it’s unfortunate that [Trump] has spread falsehoods about the reality of the climate crisis. For goodness sake, every night on the news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” he says. “If you just look at all of the climate-related extreme events, one right after another, people know that this is real. And the fact that the oil industry supports people who will lie on its behalf doesn’t mean that it’s not real. So we will have to gird ourselves for an even tougher struggle in these next four years.”

His worries extend to Trump’s Cabinet picks. Gore is “deeply concerned” about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, especially about his opposition to vaccines. “I’m concerned about anything that would reduce the protections our children and grandchildren have from these deadly diseases by using vaccines that have been proven to be safe,” shares Gore. “I think that on ultra-processed foods and a couple of other issues, we should listen to what he and others have been saying, including Michelle Obama, by the way, who pioneered the concerns in the White House years ago about ultra-processed foods and eating in a more healthy way.”

We’ve come a long way since Gore presented An Inconvenient Truth, but we still have a way to go. Christiansen says, “People can’t say it’s not true.”

“One difference now compared to [18] years ago is that the solutions are all available to us now. We have substitute sources of energy that can replace fossil fuels in every sector,” says Gore.