Reaction to "Hot, Flat, and Crowded"

415 Words2 Pages
HOT, FLAT, and CROWDED Thomas Friedman, through this book, reveals many energy and environmental aspects of today’s world culture that are ruining life as we know it. He also suggests what he believes are the directions to be taken to reverse, slow, and change our affect and mentality about energy, environment, and society. However, it seems more of a call on America and its role in the future. All that he reveals as the effect humans have had on the environment since the industrial revolution is quite frightening. Non of it is anything we have not already heard in bits andpieces, but hearing it summed in all the areas in total from agricultural methods, use of natural resources, developing nations and their industrialization, the multiplication ofconsumption rate because of population explosions, and the mentality that allows it to continue, all together paint an extremely bleak picture for the earth and the life it sustains. Having accumulated all these horrible facts together in a justifiable criticism of humans, a view that has been more and more popularized over the last few decades as scientific evidence continues to build, he then diverts this criticism of all humanity to an implied obligation of our country specifically to be the lead in correcting it. Even though industrializing as we know it began in Britain, and its innovation and improvement came from ideas out of Germany, it was America that first exploited it to its fullest capacity, and combined with American capitalism led the world in what we now know as the beginning of our self destruction. Because of this, he implies it our responsibility to led us out of this self destruction pattern. He talks about the American life style and how as other nations begin having the American type life style, the earth cannot
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