The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization

The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization predicts a coming breakdown in national and global order. In his book,  Homer-Dixon presents a theory of the growth, crisis, and renewal of  societies, arguing that today’s converging energy, environmental, and  political-economic stresses could cause a breakdown of national and  global order. This could result in a kind of social earthquake that  could negatively impact billions of people.

Tectonic stresses, says Homer-Dixon, are largely unseen pressures  building up under the surface of our world, and could eventually erupt  into real threats in the future. A cluster of these concurrent threats  is emerging — including:

• energy stress, especially from increasing scarcity of conventional oil;

• economic stress from greater global economic instability and widening income gaps between rich and poor;

• demographic stress from differentials in population growth rates  between rich and poor societies and from expansion of megacities in poor  societies;

• environmental stress from worsening damage to land, water forests, and fisheries; and,

• climate stress from changes in the composition of Earth’s atmosphere.

Energy stress is particularly important because when energy is scarce  and costly, everything a society tries to do — including growing its  food, obtaining enough fresh water, transmitting and processing  information, and defending itself — becomes harder.

According to Homer-Dixon, we are steadily expending more energy to  get energy — known as the “energy return on investment”. This has  critical global implications because we’re using a large proportion of  our capital, wealth and economies just to produce energy, so we have  less left over to tackle our increasingly difficult problems such as  climate change.

The good news is, however, that this is not an inevitable outcome.  There are things we can do now to keep this breakdown from becoming  catastrophic. And some kinds of breakdown could even open up  extraordinary opportunities for creative, bold reform of our societies,  if we’re prepared to exploit these opportunities when they arise.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and  Conflict Studies and Professor in the Department of Political Science at  the University of Toronto.

He was born in Victoria, British Columbia and received his B.A. in  political science from Carleton University in 1980 and his Ph.D. from  MIT in international relations and defense and arms control policy in  1989. He then moved to the University of Toronto to lead several  research projects studying the links between environmental stress and  violence in developing countries. Recently, his research has focused on  threats to global security in the 21st century and on how societies  adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.

His books include The Ingenuity Gap, which won the 2001 Governor General’s Non-fiction Award, and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, which won the Caldwell Prize of the American Political Science Association.