Thomas Homer-Dixon’s latest book is the story of what happens to societies that grow too big for their britches. Through constant and clearly relevant use of metaphor backed up by vast amounts of empirical data, Homer-Dixon—who holds the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies here at U of T—masterfully sketches a picture of our civilization as a complex system— a sketch that is as much a call to action as it is a layman’s primer on society itself.
What could otherwise be cynically viewed as an attempt to cash in on the recently burgeoning cottage industry of climate cataclysm books, Homer-Dixon transcends this genre by linking human life with “the economy”—a term that other writers all too frequently use as if the economy exists outside of space-time, with its own rules inapplicable to normal reality—in a way that makes the subject matter as real as it is pressing.
The key focus to The Upside of Down is energy. Energy is harnessed by our civilization not just as electricity, but also as food powering human labour. In order for a civilization to grow, it requires greater and greater amounts of highyield energy, that is, energy that produces far more work than is spent in acquiring it— a concept of profit that should be familiar. The trouble with what we’re doing, Homer-Dixon argues, is that over time our depletion of the non-renewable resources such as oil will decrease their returns as the most accessible oil fields give way to less accessible ones, which in turn give way to scrambles for untapped fields and new (energy-intensive) technologies to extract more and more of the stuff, as is evident in the Alberta tar sands.
Targeting what he sees as the fallacy of unlimited and ongoing economic growth, Homer-Dixon weaves an elaborate indictment of our present unsustainable situation that seriously brings into question many of the central tenets of liberal capitalism. In this area, the book is rather scant on positive proposals for change, and Homer-Dixon gives the impression of holding back rather than not having an opinion. Indeed, in the spirit of building the more resilient, broad-based social networks he so firmly espouses, Homer- Dixon ends the book with a call to action of sorts: a reevaluation of the very existential values that shape how we perceive ourselves and our societies. He certainly provides plenty of ideas with which to start.
Rating: VVVVv
