Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman's examination of global, social and technological forces might be sobering reading, yet it also holds hope for our planet.
THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE:
An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the
Age of Accelerations
Thomas L. Friedman
Allen Lane/Penguin Random House
By JIM SULLIVAN
We live in an age of accelerations says Thomas Friedman and after a few pages the reader wonders if we are heading to hell in a handcart.
Friedman is a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner for his The New York Times columns which reflect his extensive travel and contacts with those who matter in the world on politics, science and crystal ball gazing.
In fact the book is a 500-page column which reflects his journalistic instincts ensuring he tells the stories of taxi drivers, car park attendants, illegal immigrants and others who put a human face on the statistics, graphs and percentages which populate his text.
His thesis proposes that to arrive at a solution to our problems we need to understand the three largest forces affecting the planet's future.
The forces are Moore's law (that the power of microchips will double every two years), the globalisation of markets, and climate change (including biodiversity loss).
On almost every page there pops up a statistic which sends shockwaves down the spine. The planet's population in now 7.2 billion; in 2050 it will be 9.7 billion. Those extra two billion will be driving cars, using electricity and water and they'll need to be fed.
As an American he ponders the role of his country in the future and notes the comment of none other than Henry Kissinger who told a Senate committee in 2015 that "the United States has not faced such diverse crises since the end of the Second World War''.
The roll call includes rogue states like North Korea, murderous lone wolves, jihadists and cybercriminals. These last are the characters who can lock up your home computer until you pay a ransom.
But wait! All is not gloom and doom. Amidst the descriptions of disaster there's wealth of warm fuzzies. We may not all die of thirst as supplies of drinking water dry up.
Scientists have studied the Namib Desert beetle whose environment gets just 1.3cm of rain a year. The beetle survives by collecting condensation from the ocean breeze on the hardened shell of its wings. The scientists are developing a self-filling bottle which does the same thing.
The procession of similar solutions paraded by Friedman suggests there is yet hope for the planet and justifies his book's subtitle.
Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
