How is Fast Food Nation like Collapse?

Collapse is a book about how societies destroy the environments that make their own survival possible. Fast Food Nation is about the travesties perpetrated by the fast food and meat industries. How in the world are the two alike?

In one section of Collapse, Jared Diamond describes two oil fields. One is everything that everyone loves to hate about the oil industry. The other is operated by Chevron and is what everyone wishes the oil industry could be like: respectful of the environment, minimizes ecological interference, etc. At least in part, it was in anticipation of public perception and legal regulations regarding environmental sustainability that Chevron operates this particular oil field in this way: they know that they're going to have to one day (probably sooner rather than later) and so they set up the oil field from the start to comply with laws that are likely to be passed at some point in the future.

I made the association to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation for this reason: just as there are easily foreseeable regulations in the oil industry, so too is there public sentiment favoring more humane treatment of animals. So the indictment of the food industry is perhaps a wake-up call for that industry to voluntarily become more humane before regulations are enacted that force them to do so.

MMW/SatC

Am I crazy, or do the last forty seconds of the Medeski, Martin & Wood song Reflector from End of the World Party (Just In Case) sound like a groove-tastic version of the Sex and the City theme song?

Gore/Card/Friedman/Clarke Started It All - Part 3

Richard Clarke also wrote a fictional account of a near-world-war-three in the near future in Breakpoint. The global politics and technological advancements closely follow the trends discussed in Al Gore's and Thomas Friedman's books. Richard Clarke was the counter-terrorism czar whose warnings were ignored prior to 9/11. He has thought about how terrorism may occur in the digital age possibly more deeply and realistically than anyone else.

These four books all went really well together. It was a complete coincidence that I happened on them at the same time. And I recommend them all.

Gore/Card/Friedman/Clarke Started It All - Part 2

Moving from non-fiction to fiction:

The left/right clashes of Al Gore's book are taken one step further by Orson Scott Card's fictional account of a second civil war in the near future in Empire. The first two thirds or so was very realistic; it only became sci-fi in the last third or so, when flying machines and giant exoskeletons showed up for war.

Gore/Card/Friedman/Clarke Started It All - Part 1

I had a series of four books in a row that gave me the idea for this blog. Here's part 1 describing the four.

Al Gore's The Assault on Reason was a great indictment on the current administration's disdain for logic- and evidence-based decision making. Only one part of the book was disappointing: where he discussed how the internet would change the future of information exchange. This is where Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat took over. He showed how the exchange of information and commerce is now astoundingly global. Both are deeply thoughtful analyses of current political and economic trends.