Thomas Friedman got his start at The New York Times reporting on the civil war in Lebanon four decades ago and has won three Pulitzer Prizes writing about conflicts and the human condition across the globe.
But on Tuesday when Friedman, now a Times columnist and bestselling author, delivered the Kenner Lecture to a packed house at Lehigh's Zoellner Arts Center, he suggested that humanity's best hope may be found in lessons from the natural world.
Friedman has visited numerous pristine ecosystems with great biodiversity and sees them as models of connectivity that human societies need to emulate to thrive. The ecosystems that were surviving climate change "were those that build complex adaptive networks with healthy interdependencies where they network together to maximize their productivity, adaptability and resilience," he said.
Friedman's freewheeling talk, titled "The Big Trends Shaping the World Today: Economics, Technology and Geopolitics," touched on the war in Ukraine, artificial intelligence, authoritarianism, human rights, global trade, China, Russia and, perhaps surprisingly, optimism.
Read the full story here: https://cas.lehigh.edu/articles/thomas-friedman-explores-global-challenges-optimism-kenner
