In his latest book,
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal
of Civilization, Thomas Homer-Dixon sets out a theory
of growth, crisis and renewal of societies and explores how
converging energy, environmental and political-economic stresses
could cause a breakdown of national and global order –
a social earthquake that could affect millions of people.
 However,
Homer-Dixon contends that such a breakdown does not have to
be catastrophic and argues that it could even open up extraordinary
opportunities for creative, bold reform – if we’re
prepared for them when they arise.
Despite a potentially dire outcome, Homer-Dixon
emphasizes that if people are well-prepared, they may be able
to exploit less extreme forms of breakdown to achieve deep
reform and renewal of institutions, social relations, technologies,
and entrenched habits of behaviour.
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. Tad 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
Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of
Civilization (Knopf, Island Press, 2006), The
Ingenuity Gap (Knopf, 2000), which won the 2001 Governor
General's Non-fiction Award, and Environment,
Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton University Press,
1999), which won the Caldwell Prize of the American Political
Science Association.
Learn more about Thomas Homer-Dixon and his work here.
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Tad's last two books have explored one fundamental
question: what are the factors that allow societies to cope
and deal successfully with complex change and unexpected shocks?
 Since
writing his first book, Tad has come to the conclusion that we will
not close the ingenuity gap (the gap between the problem and
our ability to solve it) any time soon. Lack of progress in
many areas will produce social stress to create crises in
the future. However, it is in these moments of crisis where there
is the most energy and innovation to close the ingenuity gap.
Things tend not to be continuous in societal
change. The most adaptive systems (e.g. ecological,
economic, social) are those that are comfortable with crisis
and can adapt,or even thrive, during times of crisis.
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The world around us seems to be getting increasingly
complex and the problems we face more dire. The recent gas
shortages and rising gas prices, the “shuddering stock
markets”, and the recent “ China shock”
all come to mind.
Complex systems have many parts or components
that are connected through causal relationships.
One of the things complexity theorists have realized is that
complex systems exhibit behaviours that can not be just understood
through individual parts. The whole is actually more than
the sum of its parts.
In complex systems, we see multiple things
happen simultaneously. It's the combination of factors - the effects of each being multiplied by those of the others - that make the change or
crisis moment that much more serious.
The rising connectivity and speed of our
societies escalate the power of small events to combine to
create moments of crisis. The rate at which we move matter,
energy and information has increased exponentially in the
last few decades. The individual units within our complex
systems are much more powerful than they used to be. For example,
a standard laptop computer now has more conversional power than
the technology used by the U.S. Department of Defense in the
1970s.
It’s an unusual world and we are at
the cusp of big changes.
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In the book, Tad explores five “tectonic
stresses” that could lead to a catastrophic breakdown
of national and global order, a “social earthquake”
of sorts.
The five stresses are: energy, economic,
demographic, environmental, and climate.
Energy is particularly crucial because energy
is our master resource. When energy is scarce and costly,
everything a society tries to do (e.g. grow food, obtain fresh
water, transmit and process information, and defend itself)
becomes harder.
There is a relationship between energy, complexity
and the growth of societies. Tad explores this relationship
in the book by examining the Roman Empire and the energy crisis
it faced; Rome couldn't grow enough food outside its urban
boundaries to sustain a rapidly growing and increasingly
complex urban society.
Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is a
measure of the amount of energy you get back from a unit of
energy invested to create energy. When oil was first discovered
in Texas, oilers received 100 barrels of oil back for every
one barrel invested. Today, the EROI ratio is only 17 to 1. In Alberta's tar
sands, the EROI ration is only 4:1. As the EROI declines, a society’s
development trajectory becomes unsustainable. Diminishing
returns indicate a system reaching its tipping point at which it will soon become unable to sustain itself.
Our economic model is one based on a growth
imperative. And though none of us are any happier, we are
hooked on growth. Since the Great Depression, we have used
economic growth to maintain social and political stability
and decrease friction. That's something we will have to reconsider
as we shift to a post-petroleum age.
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The theory of panarchy
was initially developed to understand the life-cycle of forests;
all complex systems - human or ecological - become increasingly
complex and connected over time, but this inevitably increases
rigidity and hence vulnerability to external shocks. In particular,
we are vulnerable to combined shocks.
Tad believes society is reaching the upper
limits of its capacity for complexity, therefore some form
of breakdown is inevitable.
We have a tendency to adopt management processes
to control our environment, but management philosophy is often out
of sync with our new world and the problems we have created
for ourselves.
The incremental approach of management philosophy
simply will not work in a complex environment because it never
confronts powerful vested interests. This means that when
we have trends in the economy or social system that could
take us in the wrong direction, it's unlikely that we will
be able to divert them. This is why we don't see aggressive
action on energy, climate change or income inequality.
Tad suggests that we go "beyond management."
It is at times of crisis when we finally face society's deepest structural problems, and success or failure depends on the collaborative action people take in those moments.
Yeats wrote: “The best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If
we want to make sure that extremists don't capture terrain
in those moments of crisis, non-extremists need to think now
about what direction to push things. Social systems are most
fluid in that moment; they can be pushed positively or negatively.
Having a good outcome depends on how we exploit those tendencies.
The possibility of management is small. Management
assumes you can predict the future and control individual
elements to create the desired future. But we do not have
a clear idea of how systems work. The complexity paradigm
forces us to be more prudent about what we know, how we predict
the future and how to manage the systems that manage our survival.
Experiment – learn what works and what
doesn’t. The most likely sources of hope are in local
efforts to create change. The best responses and the most
aggressive responses to poverty alleviation, economic distress,
social exclusion, environmental restoration, etc. are happening
locally.
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There is hope for the future.
Look for moments of contingency -
At times of crisis, things are fluid and there are great opportunities
for change. Franklin Roosevelt used the Great Depression as
an opportunity to reform the economy and lay the foundation
for U.S. economic power for the rest of the century. In Western
Europe, it laid the foundation for fascist states to emerge.
It's likely that the planet will be impoverished because of
lack of resources in next hundred years, but we can live humane
and prosperous lives because of the decisions we make in moments
of crisis.
Develop a prospective mind
and work across boundaries and disciplines on interconnected
problems.
Build resilience –
Plan for “non-linearities”. We want systems that
don't collapse like a house of cards when hit by severe shock.
To capitalize on sudden shock, we need to build resilience
- encourage diversity and experimentation. Knowledge developed
at that time could prove invaluable. The world is very fluid
– change can happen quickly if the will to do so is
there
Plan for the future - Become
comfortable with surprises. The key is to achieve a “constrained”
breakdown or “graceful failure”, rather than a
catastrophic breakdown - less severe types of breakdown could
open up extraordinary opportunities for creative, bold reform
of our societies .
Surprisingly, Tad advises that we continue with most, if not
all of our current management activities. All of us, including
community organizations, need to think about what we will do if the world experiences dramatic change. It is not implausible
that we will have energy spikes in the future. We can lay
out now a considerable range of possibilities. The fact is
that we are just not thinking about them. If we do, we'll
be better prepared. We will have built-in contingencies.
We cannot assume the future will be an incremental
difference from the present. We must continue with attempts to do
cross-sectoral work, but we also need to invest resources in thinking
about responses to significant shocks. They are going to happen,
and most of us simply aren't going to be prepared.
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When we increase resiliency, we reduce the ability
of outside shocks to produce catastrophic crisis. We can increase
resiliency in the following ways:
- Increase autonomy - Increase the ability
of individual units within a system to take care of
themselves. For example, in Ontario, we're almost entirely
reliant on grid energy. There are things we can do to
decrease our dependency. Each household could provide
its own energy through its own resources (e.g. solar
panels on roofs).
- Loosen the coupling within systems -
For example, Tad advises that we increase inventories.
We've moved to a just-in-time production system in all
manufacturing systems and have phased out on-site inventories.
The whole inventory system is tightly controlled. This
has allowed for increased profit and efficiency, but has also
lead to increased vulnerability. If streams of supplies
are cut off, communities need to be able to take care
of themselves.
- Increase the redundancy of vital elements within
the system - Look at the way networks are linked
together. When we map them out, we can see the critical
or hub elements. These are the elements that would cause
a crisis in the system if they were removed from the network
(e.g. electrical substation, particular computer in a
network). We need to have backups or redundancies for
those critical hubs so that our systems are less vulnerable.
Small things can make a big difference and
a lot of small things can add up to big changes!
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The
Upside of Down - The official site of Thomas
Homer-Dixon’s #1 Canadian non-fiction bestseller, The
Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of
Civilization; features book excerpts, study and teaching
guides, and a short film based on the book.
Thomas
Homer-Dixon.com – Learn more about his
background, teaching, writing and research; discuss the ideas
and concepts in The Upside of Down on his online
forum.
Sustaining Social
Innovation – Part of Tamarack’s website,
this section has been developed to track the evolution, growth
and learning of a group of Canadian practitioners who are
concerned with applied dissemination and sustaining social
innovation.
- Panarchy: A Conversation
with Frances Westley - Westley, who heads
the Nelson Institute for Environmental studies, shares
her thoughts on social innovation and panarchy, a concept
that has emerged from ecology that can be useful for understanding
change processes in organizations, systems and societies.
- Complexity: A Conversation
with Brenda Zimmerman – Zimmerman,
a professor with the Schulich School of Business at York
University, explores the links between complexity, science
and social innovation. She describes how complexity can
encourage us to create optimism and to recognize progress
which is not necessarily visible from traditional management
perspectives.
Tad also recommended reading:
- Joseph Tainter. The Collapse of Complex Societies. (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
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