Thomas Friedman’s Earth Day Lecture at Brown University

For Earth Day, Thomas Friedman, the well author and journalist spoke at Brown University. He joined the New York Times in 1981 as a financial reporter specializing in petroleum industry and economy news and has won the Pulitzer Prize 3 times to date. His work has covered “the Middle East conflict, the end of the cold war, US domestic politics and foreign policy, international economics, and the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat. Today, his foreign affairs column appears two times a weekly in the Times. Friedman’s reporting specifically on sustainability appeared on the Discovery Channel in the documentary titled, “Green: The New Red, White and Blue.”

His lecture focused on outlining the book he’s been working on entitled “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” His first time releasing any public information about the book, and started off by telling the audiece that is we really “go green,” the United States could be the “strongest, most innovative and entrepreneurial country in the world. He also added that we’d be solving a problem that everyone is facing, the issue of becoming sustainable. Friedman declared that 2007 was the “beginning of a new era, marked by a convergence of individual flames that have come together into a fire. It’s a perfect storm between global warming, what I call, global flattening and global population growth.” His theory is that rising temperatures, access to more information and population growth have all created a real awareness of the issue are also seen as a “tipping point,” and people are starting to take action. After years of neglect and expending resources, our current generation with the problems we have today. He made the analogy of our current situation as a society being “a monster truck with the gas pedal stuck.”

Friedman described that we’ve gone from BCE to CE and to now ECE, which is the “Energy Climate Era.” Outlined in his 3 goals to meet the challenges of the Energy Climate Era are, “clean energy, efficiency and an ethic of conservation.” He discussed his skepticism of the “green revolution,” stating that we’re in something more of a “green party” if anything. After doing a Google search for “easy ways to go green.” he found titles such as “10 Ways to Save the Earth and Money in Under a Minute” and “10 Ways to Green Up Your Sex Life: Vegan Condoms and Solar Vibrators.” The real revolution, he say’s will come but you’ll really know it. He made the comparison that the real massive change will occur “like the IT revolution” in the sense that businesses and our economy will “either change or die.”

Design Mind

Frog Design recently hosted an event at their San Francisco office titled “The Many Shades of Green”. The talk included a range of perspectives on the green movement afoot, from the global picture to change on an individual level. The video is now posted on Frog’s site.