Homer-Dixon on Risk, Uncertainty and Crises

Think Globally Radio recently posted a number of great interviews. Here is one interesting one with political scientist, and renown author Thomas Homer-Dixon from University of Waterloo (Canada) – one of the world’s leading scholars on the intersection of environment, security and crisis. Direct link to the interview can be found here.

Homer-Dixon on Our Panarchic Future

In Worldwatch Magazine Thomas Homer-Dixon writes Our Panarchic Future about Buzz Holling‘s thinking, Panarchy and global transformation.  Homer-Dixon writes: Holling embodies something truly rare: the kind of wisdom that comes when an enormously creative, perceptive, and courageous mind spends a half-century studying a phenomenon and distilling its essential patterns. In a conversation with him not […]

Planning for climate catastrophe

Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of the Ingenuity Gap and other books on the social response to environmental change and now a professor of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University, argues in a recent New York Times op-ed Near the North Pole, Looking at a […]

Anatol Rapoport 1911-2007

Anatol Rappaport died Jan 20th in Toronto. Born in czarist Russia, he lived and worked in the USA and Canada. He was a transdisciplinary innovator who made substantial contributors to the study of commons dilemnas, systems, and peace. He was a co-founder of Society for General Systems Reseach. Perhaps most famously he was the inventor […]

Creative Shrinkage

The Dec 10th New York Times Magazine is a special annual issue on ideas. It has number of fun and interesting new ideas. One that fits with the idea of adaptive reorganization is Creative Shrinkage. The idea that cities with declining populations can re-organize for decline, to take advantage of its opportunities rather fighting against […]