Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #160328 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With easy-to-understand terminology and a mountain of research, Toronto author Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap) faces down imminent, unavoidable and catastrophic threats to modern civilization, keeping a wary eye on mankind's chances to adapt. Methodically illustrating how the modern world is doomed to suffer a large-scale breakdown, Homer-Dixon enumerates the "tectonic stresses" on civilization-population growth disparities, energy scarcity, environmental damage, and economic instabilities-and the "multipliers"-increasing global connectivity and small groups' ability to enact destruction-that help propel them. Woven throughout are well-illustrated comparisons between the current state of industrialized nations-especially the U.S.-with the unsustainable complexities, and subsequent downfall, of the Roman Empire. With each page, humanity's situation seems more dire, but Homer-Dixon argues that the force of "catagenesis"-the "commonplace occurrence of renewal through breakdown"-means that good will come from the collapse of civilization as we know it. Unfortunately, he offers few practical suggestions as to how we can prepare for civilization's inevitable failure, and little evidence on which to hang hope. As a result, the book takes on a tone of doomsday prophecy directly at odds with its title. Where Homer-Dixon succeeds admirably is in explaining exactly why modern stresses are so worrisome and the outcomes that neglect could cause.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
“Thomas (Tad) Homer-Dixon is the giant-killer of overwhelming issues.”
–Toronto Star

“[Thomas Homer-Dixon] is just the man for the job. . . . The book introduces general readers to a number of key concepts pursued by Homer-Dixon in his academic studies on the links between population growth, environmental degradation and global security. It is his ability to delineate those links that makes The Upside of Down such a sobering and stimulating read.”
–Toronto Star

“Homer-Dixon [is] a magpie of knowledge.”
–Times Colonist (Victoria)

“Thomas Homer-Dixon . . . has taken off the gloves with humanity. No more talk of what might occur. . . . A crash is inevitable.”
–The Globe and Mail

“This is an ambitious book. . . . Those familiar with Homer-Dixon’s earlier work . . . will not be surprised by the wide-ranging scope and technical virtuosity of his writing. By any measure, this book is an impressive achievement. It is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book. . . . for those who want a clear and accessible overview of this catastrophist debate, and one with a Canadian flavour . . . this is a useful place to start.”
–The Globe and Mail

"For over a decade, Thomas Homer-Dixon has provided that rare thing: a bridge between leading-edge research and the lay reader. Now, addressing the great problems of our time, he points us towards a path forward."
–Robert D. Kaplan, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, author of Imperial Grunts and The Coming Anarchy

"Anyone who doubts the seriousness of the human predicament should read Thomas Homer-Dixon’s brilliant The Upside of Down. Anyone who understands the seriousness should also read it for Homer-Dixon’s insightful ideas about how to make society more resilient in the face of near-inevitable environmental and social catastrophes."
–Paul Ehrlich, President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, author of The Population Bomb

Praise for Thomas Homer-Dixon:
"Thomas Homer-Dixon is a sort of Bruce Chatwin of ideas. [His writing is] addictive."
–National Post

"The greatest strength of The Ingenuity Gap is in Homer-Dixon’s ability to illustrate the thin line between order and chaos, prosperity and starvation, or compassion and carelessness in today’s world. The book is a wake-up call to all citizens to take notice of our collective deterioration and therefore . . . it has the potential to be one of the most important and revolutionary books of recent years."
–Calgary Herald

"Thomas Homer-Dixon is one of the few people on the planet who could have tackled what he defines as the world’s overriding issue: the yawning ‘ingenuity’ gap between the need for practical solutions to complex problems, from global warming to Third World poverty, and the actual supply of workable ideas."
–Maclean’s

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Outstanding book
This is an absolutely outstanding book - passionate, original, and easily accessible. It's far better than Homer-Dixon's The Ingenuity Gap, which was in itself groundbreaking. Homer-Dixon has a striking ability to bring together diverse ideas and research into one larger and compelling theme. He is also one of the few people in the world who really grasps the complexities and dangers of the human predicament in its totality. Many readers won't like this book's argument - that some form of crisis in the future is now extremely likely, that we'd best get ready for it, and that (if we're lucky) it might ultimately produce some good - but after finishing this book I find these conclusions inescapable and largely correct.

The book is rich with new ideas, on practically every page. I do wish the author had given us more on how "open-source" architectures on the Internet could be the basis for new forms of democracy, and for mobilization of non-extremists, but clearly he's just beginning to work through these ideas.

If you want to know about the role of energy scarcity in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the sources of modern capitalism's unchallengeable obsession with economic growth, the causes of people's widespread denial of our global crisis, the relationship between rising complexity and social breakdown, or the real story on global income inequality - the list of subjects covered goes on and on - this book is unmatched. But don't expect that it won't challenge some of your preconceptions. The book is definitely not for intellectual sissies, nor for people whose minds are already made up.

Some interesting diagnostic points but scant solutions
Thomas Homer-Dixon can be credited for putting the term "environmental security" on the radar of policy makers and defense analysts more than a decade ago. His careful analysis of resource scarcity and its potential linkages to conflict found convergence with the work of veteran journalist Robert Kaplan, who wrote a subsequent essay and book called "The Coming Anarchy." (Kaplan is one of the cover reviewers in this book as well). This discourse gained traction with the Clinton administration but was subsequently contested by political scientists for perhaps being too linear and lacking complex multivariate interactions. Homer-Dixon then went on to write a book called The Ingenuity Gap in which he suggested a theory of technical innovation as being the determining factor in development disparities.

In this latest book, Homer-Dixon again considers global environmental crises and seeks to draw historical comparisons with Rome, the San Francisco Earthquake and other catastrophic events to understand the resilience of human societies. In some ways the title is reminiscent of the Taoist refrain that was frequently heralded after 9/11, that "disaster and opportunity have the same symbol." (In Chinese characters they are depicted by the same symbol as well).

Similar in cadence to Jared Diamond's book "Collapse," the book attempts to cover a wide range of fields and genres of literature. However, many of the ideas presented here have appeared elsewhere. For example, the analogy of plate tectonics that Homer-Dixon uses is similar to Lester Thurow's usage of the analogy in his book "The Future of Capitalism." The description of coupled systems and their vulnerability is borrowed from the sociological literature by scholars such as Charles Perrow and Dianne Vaughan (in her landmark study of the Challenger Launch decision).

The interdependence that coupled systems offer and their resilience is perhaps not given due credit in this volume. One of the great advantages of globalization is its ability to link distant lands and provide incentives for cooperation in times of stress. This theme is not explored much in this book.

While the prose is lucid, the writing is not magisterial for the scale of questions being considered. For that one must go to writers like E.O. Wilson or Jared Diamond. Nevertheless, the book is an interesting synthesis of grand ideas about the state of the world, and one which can be a useful complement to discussions of global change.

Reflecting in the fog
The key question in this book is raised in the very middle: "Why don't we face reality?" A major reason is that we are groping in a fog to learn what that reality is. Homer-Dixon likens our society to a driver careering along a country road in a dense fog. We can barely see what's ahead, but we're somehow confident that no mishap will befall us. We've gotten this far safely. As we drive, we're guided by the mantra of "endless economic growth". We have some idea where we've been, but remain uncertain about what lies ahead. Worse, we don't seem to care. Ignoring the warning signs indicating that all might not be well we continue along our course. In this excellent study of how our society is progressing and where it's likely going, the author clearly outlines the various options before us and what actions we can take to prevent serious disruptions.

The book is a call for preparation. Resilience is what our outlook and our policies should undertake to prevent disasters that we cannot handle. Having observed and reflected on these issues for several years, Homer-Dixon concludes that major difficulties lie ahead. We cannot avoid them - they're already here or loom in the near future. He lists some of the obvious ones: terrorism is now a part of life, climate change beyond our experience is already with us, and economic and social disruption causes have already been pinpointed. His model used as the basis of assessment is the Roman Empire. He cites three examples of what the Empire accomplished, the Colosseum, the road and aqueduct networks and the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, Lebanon. All these enterprises required immense amounts of energy, yet a society without engineering schools achieved them all successfully. It worked only so long as the energy was available and applied efficiently. Our schools taught us that the Romans built their imperium on slavery, but Homer-Dixon shows that concept to be false. Oxen pulled the 256 carts of material required by the Colosseum and free peasant farmers supplied the basic energy needs. The Empire collapsed only when the energy required failed. We need to understand what can be learned from that Empire offer, and Homer-Dixon demonstrates how pertinent the lessons are today.

The author's formula for assessment is EROI - Energy Return On Investment. We've been profligate in energy use, and it's future availability is a major concern of the his. "Peak oil" has been the topic of so many books and articles, it should be old news. The author notes how the petroleum industry and those dependent on it keep up a continuous barrage of denial propaganda to discourage us from believing that evident fact. The "globalised" economy was supposed to reduce the distinction between rich and poor. Not only is it having the opposite effect, but it's increasing the consumption of energy in the process. While a number of recent books stress the threats posed by environmental change, Homer-Dixon sees that as but one element in a far larger picture. He deals with a full range of pressures building up to threaten society. He likens them to tectonic stresses likely to snap unexpectedly at any time.

Unlike some books making forecasts or offering timetables of potential catastrophe, Homer-Dixon's more circumspect. He's more concerned with demonstrating that the kinds of "growth" we've experienced cannot endure. What and when surprise setbacks occur is of less importance to him than how we adjust to them. He's not addressing a small coterie of "movers and shakers" with this work His prose style is just short of that of a story-telling narrative. He means for all of us, taxpayers, policy-makers and even academics and scientists, to participate in the development and preparation of new sets of options for survival. We will all be effected by the unfolding events. While this may seem that the author's "Down" is inevitable and final, he prefixed it with "Upside" for a reason. His opening depicts the destruction of a city - San Francisco in the 1906 earthquake and fire. The city didn't collapse and die, but recovery meant a new approach to disaster planning. We must follow that example, or our collapse will be more severe. It will be global and possibly all-consuming. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]