A Society of Seers

The Upside of Down opens with two scenes that form a leitmotif for the book. The first recounts the San Francisco earthquake on April 18, 1906, in which ruptured gas lines, burst fuel tanks, and toppled electrical lines combined to create a fire that engulfed the city. The second details the melancholy sight of the ruins of the ancient Colosseum in Rome. Although it nearly razed the city, the San Francisco fire also inspired the city’s renewal and led to the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the first far-reaching measure introduced by the US government to forestall financial panic. The final demise of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, on the other hand, is an example of an advanced and powerful civilization that imploded because of its inability to adapt to evolving reality. The San Francisco earthquake sparked the ingenuity needed to revive the city; the Roman Empire of the fifth century had no such catalyst. “So rather than resisting change,” Homer-Dixon writes, “our societies must learn to adapt to the twists and turns of circumstance.” The main contention of The Upside of Down is that some form of societal collapse is inevitable, but we may still have time to build enough resilience into our systems that collapse will spur a process of renewal rather than plunging humankind into an era of violence and anarchy.

The territory covered in The Upside of Down overlaps with that of The Ingenuity Gap, but this time the perspective is oriented toward the future. Homer-Dixon identifies five “tectonic stresses” whose effects are accumulating globally: differences in population growth between wealthy and poor nations, increasing scarcity of non-renewable energy resources, environmental degradation, climate change, and the instability of the global financial system and the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor. Amplifying the effects of these tectonic stresses are “multipliers” such as the speed and interconnectedness of today’s global society. Rising temperatures in the far north, for instance, may change global weather patterns, undermine European agriculture, cause mass migrations to cities further south, and increase the gap between rich and poor. The greatest danger will arise if several of these tectonic stresses suffer rapid, synchronous failure. “This would be destructive — not creative — catastrophe,” Homer-Dixon writes. “It would affect large regions and even sweep around the globe, in the process deeply damaging the human prospect. Recovery and renewal would be slow, perhaps even impossible.”

One of the distinctive features of The Upside of Down is its emphasis on energy, whether animal or mineral, solar or nuclear, as the driving force of civilization. For Homer-Dixon, “energy is society’s master resource: when it’s scarce and costly, everything we try to do, including growing our food, obtaining other resources like fresh water, transmitting and processing information, and defending ourselves, becomes far harder.” In order to generate energy for a society, there must be an energy return on investment (EROI)greater than one: the energy created must be greater than the energy expended in creating it. The Roman Empire may have collapsed in part because its eroi fell below this threshold.

The amount of energy needed to sustain a city like Bombay, Tokyo, or Los Angeles is staggering. These cities are ultimately dependent on oil, and with good reason: high-quality crude offers a vast amount of energy given its volume and weight. But crude oil is a non-renewable resource, and there is reason to believe that easily accessible reserves such as the Saudi oil fields are near or past their peak and that most of the world’s major oil reserves have already been discovered. “I don’t mean we’re going to run out of oil — at least not anytime soon,” Homer-Dixon writes. “But we are going to run out of the cheapest oil — that is, the most accessible oil — as it becomes harder to find, costlier to produce, and more concentrated in politically volatile parts of the world.” A permanent scarcity of oil, combined with advancing climate change and damage to our ecosystems, could easily set in motion the kind of synchronous failure Homer-Dixon believes would lead to a destructive catastrophe.

So what can be done to steer ourselves toward a creative catastrophe rather than a destructive one? In the first place, we need to change our assumptions about economic growth. Classical economists such as Benjamin M. Friedman, author of The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, may be right that steady economic growth has fostered tolerant, democratic institutions, but economic growth on a global scale would require levels of energy consumption that are simply unsustainable over the long run. Homer-Dixon, by contrast, suggests that we need to think beyond the “growth imperative” to a conception of economics that incorporates our impact on nature. An “economic-ecological system” would recognize that “there are no good substitutes for some of the most precious things that nature gives us, like biodiversity and a benign climate.” Since core natural resources such as fresh water, fertile soil, and fish stocks have no real substitute, we need to assign them explicit value in our economic calculations.

Most importantly, however, we must adopt what Homer-Dixon calls a “prospective mind.” The prospective mind anticipates radical change and collapse across a variety of possible futures and builds flexibility and resilience into our systems so that we can achieve what he calls catagenesis — “the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions, and societies in the aftermath of breakdown.” To address our current situation, Homer-Dixon writes, we also need to reduce underlying tectonic stresses in areas like climate change and technology. That way, when breakdowns occur they will not cause a catastrophic synchronous failure and we can seize on these “moments of contingency” to reimagine our future. “We can’t hope to preserve at least some of what we hold dear,” Homer-Dixon writes, “unless we’re comfortable with change, surprise, and the essential transience of things, and unless we’re open to radically new ways of thinking about our world and the way we should lead our lives.”

Past civilizations have assumed the permanence of their values and way of life, but we can’t afford to do that. Nonetheless, Homer-Dixon remains optimistic that we can adjust. “It’s conceivable that we could end up with a more just and humane human life,” he tells me.

Not surprisingly, The Upside of Down is far more effective in its relentless documentation of the impending collapse than in detailing the possibilities for renewal. It is one thing to argue that classical economics does not provide a sustainable model for policy in an era of climate change and radical divisions between the rich and poor, but quite another to offer an alternative view precise enough to be useful. There is little doubt that if a breakdown of global civilization is inevitable, creating resilient systems that avert destructive collapse is advisable, yet Homer-Dixon’s concept of resilience remains abstract, not the kind of weapon that can be deployed in what he argues should be an almost wartime vigilance toward our future problems. It may be that “our institutions are ill-adapted to what we’re facing,” as he tells me, but that falls far short of envisioning what well-adapted institutions would look like, how they would emerge, and how they would work. But in a way this is the point. We are currently ill-prepared for the possible futures we face and we need to devise new, collective ways of solving common problems, perhaps by using an open-source approach to the Internet. “New forms of democracy are essential,” he writes, “because we need as many heads as possible working together to solve our common problems, and because the larger the number of people involved in making crucial decisions that affect everyone, the less likely that narrow elite interests will dominate.” One thing is clear: our values will have to be in line with the natural world upon which we depend.

“Each chapter in this book was a challenge,” Homer-Dixon comments as we get up and walk back toward the house. “I would come out of it deeply traumatized; I would come out and see my little boy.” Perhaps his son is why his mind is so much on the future these days, and also why he clings to hopes of a more just and humane world. “In the last section of my career, when I have the greatest resources, I want to explain things practically,” he says. “I want to set up an open-source system of problem-solving and also try to develop a better understanding of plausible futures as well as to ground ingenuity theory in measurable concepts. And the final component of my agenda is public policy.”

Thomas Homer-Dixon is a public intellectual who is ready to get his hands dirty — and not just in his orchard.