Thomas Friedman announced that green is the new red, white and blue to a crowd of about 1,350 people Wednesday night at John R. Emens Auditorium.
Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist, was the second speaker in the Bracken Environmental Speaker Series sponsored by the provost and president's office along with Gaylor, Mutual Bank, Old National Bank and STAR Financial Group.
In his speech, he talked about his latest book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America."
Friedman said the book was not about energy and the environment.
"It is actually a book about America," Friedman said. "It's a book about my own concern that my country had lost its groove at some point in the last couple of decades."
America gets its groove back by solving the world's biggest problems, which stem from the world getting hot, flat and crowded, he said.
Friedman related hot to global warming, flat to the rise of middle classes all over the world and crowded to population growth.
Five global trends arise from the heating, flattening and crowding of the world, Friedman said.
They include a shortage of natural resources, petro-dictatorship, climate change, energy deprivation in poor nations and a shortage of biodiversity.
"I think these five trends, these five mega issues are really going to be the most important and defining issues for our global community in the 21st century," Friedman said. "And how and whether we rise to the challenge of these trends will determine the stability or instability of the planet in the 21st century."
The solution is a green revolution which will require innovators and world leaders to lead the way, he said.
"If we manage to pull this off, it'll be the greatest industrial project mankind has ever undertaken since the Tower of Babel," Friedman said.
Charles Wenner said he thought the presentation was great but wished Friedman would have offered clearer answers.
"I feel maybe it was a little short on actual positive solutions on some of the problems, it was more of a we-just-need-to-get-everybody-together sort of thing," Wenner, a junior actuarial science major, said. "But I guess it's a little hard to come up with specific solutions to something of this nature."
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