The Earth Is Full By Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman in his 2011 New York Times essay, “The Earth is Full,” argues that the Earth is becoming too populated and that various resources are being used up too quickly. Friedman first writes about the issue and how detrimental it can be, and then he goes on to attempt to influence the millennial generation to make changes in their daily lives in order to preserve the Earth for future generations. However, Friedman wasn’t as effective as he could be in doing so. He used rational evidence in his argument, but he did not use ethical nor emotional evidence to support his argument, and thus the essay is not as effective as it could be. Furthermore, probably around 50 percent of Friedman’s argument is quotes from an environmentalist named

Friedman uses a combination of scientific facts and statistics to better his argument. He includes one powerful statistic which is, “Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths,” or in other words as he writes, “One generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity” (Friedman 1). This is a very powerful quote that enhances his argument greatly because it specifically shows the reader how it’s not possible to continue living life as he/she does now. The Earth simply cannot sustain the amount of resources used for much longer. Thus, changes must be made in everyone’s daily life in order to make large scale global changes. Despite this substantial statistic, Friedman also includes basic science principles to show how the Earth cannot sustain the way it’s lived within now. He writes how the entire system of Earth can completely change just by doing a few minimal activities, such as cut down more trees, add more nitrogen to water, and add more CO2 to the atmosphere (Friedman 1). These three actions can greatly disrupt the social and economic ways of life, and force everyone to change their habits, but it’ll likely be too late. Friedman uses significant rational evidence in the form of statistics and scientific facts to support his argument on how the

Friedman includes a lot of economical evidence on how the world can change if nothing is done about this issue as well as how one issue leads to another bigger issue, but Friedman fails to include any true ethical evidence. Ethical evidence is essentially any evidence that deals with the question of what is the right thing to do, and Friedman doesn’t include anything like that in his essay. He should have included the fact that we must create a new sustainable economic model in order to preserve this planet for future generations. Population is something that is pretty hard to control, but we can completely change the way resources are used to help future generations out, since it is the right thing to do. Friedman’s failure to include ethical evidence in his argument is a large reason why his essay isn’t effective, and if he were to do so, then I believe more readers would conform to his