Speak­ing at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty ear­li­er this week, Thomas Fried­man had to deal with some unfor­tu­nate extra-cur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties. As he took the stage, two stu­dents call­ing them­selves the “Green­wash Gueril­las” launched pies (video here) at Fried­man and large­ly missed. But they did leave behind some pam­phlets spelling out their motives. Accord­ing to The Brown Dai­ly Her­ald, the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning jour­nal­ist for The New York Times deserved this dis­rup­tion because of “his sick­en­ing­ly cheery applaud for free mar­ket cap­i­tal­is­m’s con­quest of the plan­et” and “for help­ing turn envi­ron­men­tal­ism into a fake plas­tic con­sumer prod­uct for the priv­i­leged.” Some­where the giants of rev­o­lu­tion­ary rhetoric are gri­mac­ing and won­der­ing what hap­pened to their once well prac­ticed art.

Now that I’ve got your atten­tion, I want to point you to a talk that Fried­man gave last year at Stan­ford — Green is the New Red, White and Blue (iTunes). The talk takes you into the heart of Fried­man’s com­plex think­ing about the envi­ron­ment (and all that the Green Gueril­las odd­ly take issue with). And it’s pre­sent­ed with the same intel­li­gence that you’ll find on dis­play in the sec­ond most down­loaded pod­cast on iTunes U: The World is Flat. (This sec­ond talk was pre­sent­ed at MIT, and it’s only exceed­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty by Randy Pausch’s soul­ful lec­ture, “Real­ly Achiev­ing Your Child­hood Dreams,” which we fea­tured on Mon­day.) Fried­man’s think­ing in the Stan­ford pod­cast (give it a lis­ten, you’ll be bet­ter for it) lays the foun­da­tion for his new book due out in August — Hot, Flat, and Crowd­ed: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew Amer­i­ca.

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