Kansas and Al Qaeda
Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times compares the Middle West of the United States to the Middle East of the Arab world. While making a documentary relating the drought in Kansas to the rise of food prices that helped trigger the recent Arab uprisings, Friedman found another powerful insight: monoculture farms in the U.S. and monoculture societies in the Middle East both engender dangerous circumstances. He writes, “Pluralism, diversity and tolerance were once native plants in the Middle East — the way the polyculture prairie was in the Middle West. Neither ecosystem will be healthy without restoring its diversity.”