Instead of a pie in the face, which Thomas L. Friedman ducked at Brown University a couple of weeks ago, the student pranksters should have tossed a few tough questions to the bestselling author about his fading green bona fides.
For starters, take his ill-informed understanding of coal. Using his New York Times bully pulpit column, Friedman had the audacity to tour a strip mine in Montana last year, and then declare that our "green" future rested on the mirage of "clean coal," a delusional corporate slogan that blithely overlooks any environmental destruction (including the crime of mountaintop removal in Appalachia), transportation problems, major groundwater and waterway issues or an enduring mining safety crisis before the coal train even arrives at some futuristic power plant.
In an exciting period when Friedman's truly green counterparts in the rest of the world -- from Germany to Spain to Israel to the republic of Google -- are seizing the moment to pursue the daily breakthroughs in renewable energy sources, Friedman has tossed his green sensibilities out of the window by hopping on the dirty coal bandwagon and even cheering the development of still prohibitive and emissions-boosting coal-to-liquid technology.
As the self-proclaimed re-namer of the "new idea of green," Friedman should know better. He should have learned his lesson as a one-time cheerleader of ethanol. A couple of years ago, Friedman chided our nation for refusing to put our energy future into the corn and sugar basket. Just like his belief in the chimerical vision of "clean coal," Friedman failed to consider the environmental costs of ethanol, (including deforestation in Brazil and other regions for expanded cultivation), costly water use, and the ensuing tragic food staples shortage in his short-term vision.
Beyond our energy policies, perhaps the most telling aspect of Friedman's misleading green vision goes back to The World Is Flat, his 600-page roller-coaster version of globalization that has baited and hooked a vast readership, including the academic hosts of those pie-throwing yahoos at Brown University and at schools around the world.
In an exhaustive account of "how and why globalization has shifted into warp drive," Friedman describes the short swift time of information technology on earth, the complexities of globalization, the "triple convergence" of the free market, and the explosion of wealth in China and India that is "challenging the rest of us to run even faster."
In his theory of the triple convergence, Friedman holds up a small game company in Bangalore, India, as the perfect example that has enjoyed "enormous success" creating a game called "Saloon," based on a barman cleaning up a saloon in "an American Wild Wild West." Within a backdrop of 5,000 years of history and cultural achievements, in a country booming with green initiatives for sustainable development and village revitalization, Friedman claims this is "one of the most dynamic young pluggers and players" he has ever met in India.
Dynamic players? The next time he visits Brown University, or any campus, Friedman might want to sit in on a course on the life and times of Nobel Prize-winning laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the towering literary figure in India who pioneered reforestation efforts and the sustainable village movement nearly a century ago.
After dazzling his readers with an impressive breakdown of world markets and technological innovations since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Friedman arrives at page 460 in The World Is Flat with a moment of truth:
"To put it bluntly, I don't know how the flattening of the world will come out. Indeed, let me go even further and make a deeper confession: I know that the world is not flat.
Yes, you read me right: I know that the world is not flat. Don't worry. I know.
I am certain, though, that the world has been shrinking and flattening for some time now, and that process has quickened dramatically in recent years. Half the world is directly or indirectly participating in the flattening process or feeling its effect."
Friedman informs us that "as exciting and as visible as the flat Indian high-tech sector is, have no illusions: It accounts for 0.2 percent of employment in India. Add those Indians involved in manufacturing for export, and you get a total of 2 percent of employment in India." In essence, out of a billion souls in India -- 70 percent of whom still live in agricultural-dependent villages -- over 980 million are not plugged in and playing on his flattened field.
The "bad news," Friedman concludes, "in Africa today, as well as rural India, China, Latin America, and plenty of dark corners of the developed world, is that there are hundreds of millions of people who have no hope and therefore no change of making it into the middle class." For Friedman, the only hope for these "dark corners" is to enter the flat world of free markets, service and industry, get an English education and join the urban infrastructure.
And it is here that Thomas Friedman's hugely bestselling work is not only dead wrong, but dangerously ill-informed, outdated and an anathema to the green movement (and to students and faculty at campuses across the country).
"While he was sleeping," as Friedman entitles his first chapter, he overlooks the fact that more than 150,000 Indian farmers committed suicide during the same period of this high tech boom, due to debt, unfair trade practices, and the upheaval from corporate-controlled genetically modified seeds and cash cropping -- one of the most devastating assaults on green development in rural areas. In the process, on a worldwide level, more than one billion dispossessed people -- a third of the world's urban population -- have tacitly followed Friedman's advice and moved into the phenomenon of the global slums, without any possibility of work or future, creating what the United Nations has recently defined as a "silent tsunami" and irreversible urban disaster of choking pollution, waste and desperate violence.
Nearly a decade ago, The International Institute for a Sustainable Future in Bombay (Mumbai), anticipated Friedman's reliance on the most misguided and outdated anti-green urban legend: The urban world and high tech economy will ultimately absorb and integrate the rural villagers into the flat world. Instead, as the International Institute wrote in one of their reports: "The situation continues to worsen in every major city of India, as it does in the major cities of other Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Cambodia, where one out of three urban inhabitants lives in gruesome settlements. By and large, the urban conditions of the majority of people in the cities of Africa and Latin America are as mercilessly cruel as in India and Asia -- the only difference being the magnitude and the level of poverty...The dreams of the millions for ease and material abundance, has become a nightmarish curse. What is our vision of the kinds of cities, towns, and villages in which we want to live? How do we create human settlements that function as self-sustaining eco-habitats?"
Far more than a pie in the face, these are some of the hard questions from the green movement -- especially on his disingenuous touting of "clean coal" -- that Thomas Friedman has been ducking for too long.