Twelve by Twelve Read Free

government incentives, will save us from environmental collapse, Friedman further argues, by inventing clean technologies to allow for the increased global consumption.
    It’s not an argument to be taken lightly. Though world inequality is unfortunately on the rise, the “flat” system has led to quick economic growth in certain countries like India and China. In our ever more interconnected world, environmental and human rights horrors can be more efficiently exposed. In theory, a world that’s flat gives us previously unimaginable intellectual and economic freedoms, so why was I feeling the Flat World blues?
    Friedman didn’t invent a flat world, but rather his metaphor articulates a truth about the way we have come to imagine the twenty-firstcentury. The metaphor carries a host of negative connotations: The world has hit a flat note. Industrial agriculture creates a flat taste, and multinational corporations flatten our uniqueness into Homo economicus serving a One World™ Uniplanet. A once-natural atmosphere has been flattened by global warming: every square foot of it now contains 390 ppm of carbon dioxide, though up until two hundred years ago the atmosphere contained 275 ppm (and 350 ppm is considered the safe upper threshold for our planet). Rainforests are flattened to make cattle pastures; a living ocean is depleted and flattened by overfishing; vibrant cultures are steamrolled to the edge of extinction. Have the well-rounded objectives of America’s Founding Fathers — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — been flattened to a single organizing principle: the unification of greed?
    When the 5K race was over, I left the awards ceremony and looked into the lifeless water of the lake beside Dow Chemical. Since returning to the United States, I felt something wasn’t right with me. I’d been a squid out of ink, the joy squeezed right out of me. I closed my eyes and traveled back to Bolivia, to the banks of Lake Titicaca and the particular moment I’d remembered while sitting with my mother.
    It happened just three months back. Two friends, she American and he British, were getting married. They’d lived in Bolivia for years, working with the country’s indigenous people, and an Aymara shaman was going to marry them. Before the ceremony began, I stood with the shaman as we admired the most extraordinary sky, a rusty orange-and-red blend, and the famous Andean lake, which was the size of a small sea, its unseen far shores in Peru. We stood at thirteen thousand feet, and the light cast a gossamer shimmer over three distant islands. Above them, the jagged Andes.
    The shaman looked out over the landscape and asked me, “What’s the shape of the world?”
    Farther up the lake, I saw the bride and groom mingling with other Bolivian and American friends, all dressed in their finest. Abouthalf the Americans lived and worked in Bolivia; the other half were just there for the week. Honamti, the shaman, was dressed in an olive jacket and jeans and looked nearly iconic, his long hair tied back in a ponytail, an ambiguous expression in his dark eyes.
    “The world?” I finally said. “It’s round.”
    “How is it round?” Honamti asked.
    I showed him, putting my two pointer fingers together in front of me and drawing a downward circle.
    “That’s how most people imagine it,” he said. “But we Aymaras disagree.”
    He was silent for a long moment. Alpacas and sheep grazed in the distance, shepherded together by an Aymara woman in a colorful, layer-cake skirt. A pejerey leapt from and plunged back into Lake Titicaca, sending out rippling circles. “We say that the earth is round, but in a different way,” Honamti finally said, and he traced an upward circle, the opposite of how I’d drawn it, beginning at his belly and finishing at his heart. He traced the shape slowly. Amazed, I watched it spring to life in the landscape. His upward stroke began with the lake, curved up the sides of the Andes, and