Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

As I read this book I was reminded of Paul Kennedy's 1993 book "Preparing for the 21st Century." Like Kennedy and other authors in recent decades, Homer-Dixon assesses major global problems and trends with an eye toward how such stresses have converged throughout human history to cause breakdown or collapse of whole societies. The "tectonic stresses" he identifies are:
Population stress (megacities; differing rich/poor growth rates)
Energy stress (especially from scarcity of oil)
Environmental stress (land, water, forests, fisheries)
Climate stress (atmosphere)
Economic stress (instability; widening income gaps)
None of this is surprising, having been identified elsewhere in the literature at least as far back as the 1972 study "Limits to Growth" by the Club of Rome. But the author eloquently lays out the scenarios, makes historical analogies, and explains the interplay between the stresses in language that concerned citizens, and even policy-makers, can understand. This in itself is a great service to the reader.
Like Kennedy, Homer-Dixon will be criticized for not sufficiently addressing solutions to these problems. Indeed, the "upside" in his title doesn't really manifest itself until about the last 50 pages of the book, and some readers may find what's offered to be inadequate. His solutions should be common sense (which can be uncommon in complex societies): design for resilience, be prepared to make the best of change. His belief that endless economic growth is overrated and even detrimental will not please everyone. And part of his argument is that collapse is probably inevitable, so we should strive to emerge from the disaster as good or better than we were before. Not the most encouraging pep talk - try not to think about your children and grandchildren when you read this.
The author seems to be anticipating that some kind of breakdown having ripple effects across the world will occur somewhere between a few years from now and mid-century. Energy, which he calls "our master resource," seems to be his favorite choice as the primary culprit, which makes sense from today's perspective.
I selected this book because for the past few years, I've been trying to absorb as much wisdom as possible about the globalization phenomenon. The book definitely comes down on the skeptical side of what the author calls "globalized capitalism." Of the books I've read on this side of the argument, this one is probably the most balanced, well-written, and non-accusatory. If you can handle depressing news, and you care about what direction the globalization era will take in the next few decades, this is a very worthwhile read.

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.

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]

I learned a great deal more about this author when two chapters in a book I just published, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace featured his thinking: an interview of him by Hassan Masum; and his interview of the Rt Hon Paul Martin on the important topic of the Internet and democracy.

Consequently, I may place more value on this book than some of the other reviewers, but I choose to give it a solid five stars. In combination with his earlier book The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future, and the work of many, many people on emergent collective, peace, commercial, gift, cultural, and earth intelligence, all subsets of the emerging discipline of public intellligence (self-governance founded on full access to all information to produce reality-based balanced budgets), I regard the author as one of a handful of individuals exploring the possibilities of cognitive collective integral consciousness.

I have a note: superb single best overview. I cannot list all the books I would like, being limited to ten links, the ones I do are a token. See my 1100+ other reviews and my many lists for a more comprehensive stroll through the relevant literatures.

Highlights from my notes:

+ Five stresses (population, energy, environmental, climate, economic)

+ I have a note, what about mental, cultural, physical stress (e.g. dramatic increases in mental illness, blind fundamentalism, and obesity).

+ See the image on predicting revolution, the author observes that revolutions come from synchronous failures with negative synergy.

+ Connectivity and speed are multipliers, and I am reminded that virtually all US SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems in the US are connected to the Internet and hackable (meanwhile, the Chinese have figured how to hack into systems not connected to the Internet, but drawing electric power from the open grid).

+ Synchronous failures get worse when they jump system boundaries and created frayed less resilient networks.

+ He write of the thermodynamics of empire and the declining return on investment from energy discovery and exploitation.

+ He writes of migration getting much much worse in the future, which confirms my own view that border control is not the answer, stabilization & reconstruction of the source countries is the longer-term sustainable answer.

+ He credits George Soros with having the first intuitive understanding of the asymmetries of wealth in relation to destabilization of the world.

+ He observes that we have transformed and degrades half the Earth's land surface, and is particularly concerned with the washing away of entire nations of topsoil (compounded by agriculture that does not do deep-root farming).

+ As the book winds to a conclusion, the author discusses massive denial and the loss of resilience that gets worse each day.

+ "Non-extremists have a formidable 'collective action problem.'"

+ Need alternative values (I am reminded that the literature points out just two sustainable approaches to agriculture and community: the Amish and the Cuban). He notes that fundamentalists are especially ill-equipped by their myopia to be adaptive or resilient.

+ He covers the polarization between rich and poor. While other books listed below are more trenchant, the author has done a superb job of integrating historical, economic, social, and cultural works. This is a very fine book.

+ He adds a useful snippet on Cultural Intelligence, distinguishing between utilitarian values (likes and dislikes), moral values (fairness and justice), and existential values (significance and meaning).

+ Violence is discusses as stemming from motivation, opportunity, and framing--all of which can be found in the eight stages of genocide as defined by Dr. Greg Stanton of Genocide Watch.

+ He ends the book with praise of the open source model (search from my Gnomedex 2007 keytone, "Open Everything") and concludes that the Internet is not living up to its potential as a platform for large-scale problem solving. I agree, and I condemn Google for choosing to become an illicit vacuum cleaner of other people's information, rather than an open source platform for allowing every person to be a collector, processor, analyst, producer, and consumer of public intelligence (search for my book review of "Google 2.o: The Calculating Predator." IBM ando the Google partners are literally BLIND and refusing to assimilate documented early warnings on how Google is preparing to scorch banking, communications, data storage, entertainment, and publishing, all without respect for privacy or copyright, and without regulatory oversight.

I list below eight books I recommend for reading as an expansion of this elegant synthesis. At Earth Intelligence Network you can find a table of 1000+ books I have reviewed, sortable by threat, policy, or challenger.

A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Five Minds for the Future
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)

This is Tad Homer-Dixon's second book in the last five years that takes a sweeping view of history to provide context to current problems. He sorts through today's headlines to identify trends we should worry about. He uses history, science and public policy to identify trends that are important and the options for addressing them. His first book left the reader with a clearer definition of the problems than of the solutions. The Upside of Down has a much more inventive conclusion i.e. in our problems and their consequences may lie the seeds of regeneration. But we must be smart enough to learn from our collective mistakes. We are smart enough; the human species is so adaptable. But the underlying question in this book is "will we?" We're good at adapting at small scales over time; can we do it over much larger scales in shorter amounts of time?

Homer-Dixon has an unsettling thesis written in a mellofiluous style. He is a pleasure to read, even when the subject is daunting. The reward for reading this book carefully is that it helps us worry more efficiently about the future with a dollop of hope that worrying well can make a difference.

Thomas Homer-Dixon has three great gifts. The first is the ability to integrate information from widely diverse sources and subject areas, the second is to understand the significance of what he has integrated, and the third is to explain what he understands clearly and forcefully. An alert eighth grader could easily understand The Upside of Down but it explicates vital concepts and relationships--supported by good data and sometimes innovative research--understood to date by few of our best analysts. Homer-Dixon's central thesis is that we have built a civilization of great complexity and a resulting inflexibility that is dependent on an infusion of energy unsustainable over coming decades. Many people think they already understand that, but their understanding is primitive in comparison to what this book conveys. Breakdowns, spreading through our complex systems, are inevitable. Homer-Dixon is extremely convincing and ultimately frightening. He offers no easy solutions. The "upside" promised in the title is that, if we are extremely astute and take the difficult steps self-preservation demands, breakdowns need not lead to catastrophe and may ultimately push us toward revitalization and renewal. Don't expect many answers from this book, but read it to understand the depth and profundity of the problems you only think you understand today. Among the analyses of our civilization I have seen, this work occupies first place.

This brilliant, courageous, inspiring, multidisciplinary book unflinchingly examines the ominous, ever increasing tectonic pressures--population imbalances, energy shortages, environmental damage, global warming, and the widening gaps between rich and poor--that threaten to disrupt, if not topple, civilization.

Historical, ecological, political, economic, scientific, sociological and psychological threads are woven together in a fascinating, extremely readable analysis of the mess we are in, how we got here, what we can expect in the future, and what we can do about it.

Homer-Dixon does not provide magic bullet solutions to our problems because, in fact, none exists. He does, however, suggest four important actions, including boosting the overall resilience of our civilization, especially critical systems like energy and food distribution. Most importantly, he stresses the cultivation of the prospective mind, which includes an openness to radically new ways of thinking about our world and about how we should live our lives.

The author states that "when a social earthquake erupts--when the established order starts to crack and crumble--much depends on what happens in the period immediately following the initial shock." A mega-crisis has the potential to jolt people awake from their social conditioning, and can bring out the very worst or the very best in people. Homer-Dixon tells us to prepare for that moment, so the forces of reason, tolerance and compassion will prevail.

This book is not for those wanting to pretend that band-aide solutions from corporate-owned politicians will save us. This book is a zen-like slap in the face designed to zap denial, and awaken prospective, creative intelligence, so that bold new solutions to our planetary problems can emerge.

If I could, I would make The Upside of Down required reading for everyone on the planet. When it comes to defining the global crisis, it is by far the best of the following related books which I've recently read:

James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil,
Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-
First Century (2006)

Stephen Leeb, The Coming Economic Collapse (2006)

Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006)

Sir Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning (2003)

David Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (2006)

Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable
Future(2007)

Raine Eisler, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics
(2007)

Jerry Mander & John Cavanagh, Alternatives to Economic Globalization
(2004)

Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came
into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (2007)

Lester Brown, Plan B2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a
Civilization in Trouble(2006)

Paul & Anne Ehrlich, One With Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the
Human Future(2004)

"The Upside of Down" is a fascinating look at the possible futures of our civilization, and a necessary read for anyone concerned about the continued success of modern societies.

The basic question is whether our society is sustainable and how we will know when it is not. In his answer, Homer-Dixon develops a profound synthesis of ideas from disparate fields, all of which point to potential and real problems in the current circumstances of humankind. As a graduate student with academic interests along similar lines, I have been exposed to most of these ideas in their original context, but I am still impressed at the clarity and cogency of Homer-Dixon's work. These are difficult problems and difficult ideas, and yet "The Upside of Down" remains an accessible and interesting work for the average reader.

Anyone who has read this far needs to read the book. I finished the book not only convinced of the need to address the unsustainable aspects of human society, but with a far better understanding of what those aspects are, and why they are unsustainable. It will not be the happiest or most uplifting book you read this year, but possibly the most important. You will likely react as I did - hoping he's wrong, thinking he's probably right, and with a terrible dread that it will seem prophetic in retrospect.

without repeating points well-made by the other reviewers here, this book was an eye opener for me, and laid out clearly many things that have been concerning me for some time, but which I have mostly seen only intuitively; Homer-Dixon quantifies and qualifies many of these concerns.

My main problem with this book, and the reason I don't give it five stars, is that Homer-Dixon's grasp of history is Eurocentric and fairly shallow, so using the Roman empire as his only major comparison point is not presenting the historical picture at all well; he should have drawn on Persian history, especially the Sassanid empire, India and China, as a wider context would have shown that the Romans were at least as much borrowers as innovators, and when they ran out of ideas to borrow it harmed their solution-finding ability immensely.

The "Elephant in the room" that Homer-Dixon and others ignore (and he never squarely addresses it in this book) is that our biosphere probably cannot support the current number of humans indefinitely, let alone the expected population growth to come, even if the effects of looming resource shortages and global warming are ignored. In the event of a major breakdown of global networks and fragmenting of societies as they look out for themselves first and last, starvation on an enormous scale looms. This is a problem that also needs to be addressed, but perhaps has no socially acceptable solution.

Despite these minor reservations, I would recommend this book as a starting point that pulls together ideas from many disciplines, leading into deeper research from specialists in the fields Homer-Dixon touches on.