The "Great Disruption"

In his New York Times column earlier this week, Thomas Friedman asks some disturbing questions about our current economic woes:

"What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”"

Friedman is careful to frame his column — which has been getting a lot of web traffic and comments — as ultimately optimistic. But he relies on a premise that I think most readers will find rather surprising and Casssandra-ish: that we’re overdrawing on the Earth’s resources, much in the way we’ve overdrawn on our economic assets.

Friedman is evolving as a pundit from a free-market flat-earther to somebody who is obviously becoming increasingly alarmed by the state of the world. His column this week is very much an illustration of how it's no longer possible to delve into our relationship with the global environment without drawing conclusions that make you seem like a raving fanatic to those who have yet to delve.

As a culture, there is something dysfunctional about our attention span on this issue. The information is all there. But I guess denial is so much easier.

(Stephan Faris covers the environment for GlobalPost. His new book, Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley, will be excerpted soon at GlobalPost.)

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/environment/090312/the-great-disruption