 (The title is a reference to Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 work "Verklärte Nacht" that presaged his pioneering work on atonal music; Schoenberg was an Austrian Jew who would move to the United States to escape the Nazis).In 1989, Al Gore, then a senator from Tennessee and later Vice President of the United States, wrote of an "ecological Kristallnacht" in the New York Times.He opined that events then taking place, such as deforestation and ozone depletion, prefigured a greater environmental catastrophe in the way Kristallnacht prefigured the Holocaust.