The Tyee, an online Vancouver newsite, has a two part interview with Thomas Homer-Dixon, which focusses on some different issues than the Worldchanging interview. The first part Embrace the Collapse focusses on learning from collapse, while the second part, An Internet Idea Army, focusses on social learning. From the article:

Thomas Homer-Dixon says there’s hope. Not that global warming isn’t upon us, or that terrorists won’t explode a nuclear device in the near future, or that the growing gap between rich and poor won’t result in deeply destructive conflict, or that our social, political and economic systems aren’t deeply vulnerable to collapse.

No, not that kind of hope. That’s actually called denial. The question is, what might we do when one or all of those events — which Homer-Dixon calls “moments of contingency” — shake us out of our collective inertia? What might we do to ensure that, ahem, more is very much less.

In The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, that’s the central question. Can we turn failure into some kind of success? Homer-Dixon thinks we can, and his prescription isn’t very complicated. One thing we must do, he says, is develop a “prospective mind,” by which he means think ahead, and plan to take advantage when a crisis creates an opportunity.
…Homer-Dixon devotes a large section of the book to the work of former UBC professor and ecology guru Buzz Holling, who has looked at what allows complex natural systems to remain resilient. At the core of Holling’s “panarchy theory” is the simple idea that complex systems grow, become brittle, collapse and then renew themselves. If the growth cycle goes on too long, however, the potential increases for “deep collapse,” which can pretty much cut out that heartwarming renewal stage.

It’s the human tendency to try and keep everything as it is that has Holling and Homer-Dixon worried. If we don’t plan for the occasional collapse, if we don’t plan for real change, we’re going to pay and pay and pay.
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The Upside of Down is also a hopeful book. Homer-Dixon, the Victoria-raised director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, wants us to learn from ecology. He wants us to see human endeavour through nature’s lens. Systems grow, mature, become rigid, and break down. If we accept that this is true for human systems, we will be better able to create less rigid, less dangerously interdependent systems to minimize potential domino effects, and we will learn to plan for renewal when things do break down.

Of course, many people can talk a good line about impending peril. The question is, what are they actually doing about it? Homer-Dixon places a great deal of faith in individuals, in their ability to collaborate, create consensus, and place that consensus squarely in the public realm in a manner that cannot be ignored.

Some bits from the interview are below: Continue reading →

WorldChanging‘s Hassan Masum interviews Thomas Homer-Dixon about his new book, Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. The book is heavily influenced by the work of people in the Resilience Alliance – Buzz Holling, Sander van der Leeuw and and Joe Tainter in particular, along with the book Supply Side Sustainability by Tim Allen, Joe Tainter and Thomas Hoekstra.

HM: For me, one of the most resonant focal points of your book was the dual theme of resilience and catagenesis. I wonder if you agree that a particularly practical avenue is to adopt “low-regrets” technologies and systems?

More generally, what creative new kinds of institutions, customs, or ways of thought would you like to see arise, that could help spur catagenesis on an ongoing basis?

TH: We need to build buffering capacity in our societies and systems that’s fungible, that can be moved back and forth between different eventualities.

In the first part of the book, I talk about people’s desire to hold on, to keep things the same. But we can’t always keep things the same, since we don’t have as much control over reality as we think we do. This is very different from being fatalistic. The whole idea of the prospective mind is to develop a new set of customs – proactive, anticipatory, comfortable with change, and not surprised by surprise.

Institutionally, we could build in tax incentives and subsidies for people to make households more resilient. For example, if we have an energy grid that’s unreliable, maybe we shouldn’t build condo apartments that are totally dependent on electricity for elevators, water, and air conditioning. In some business towers, the windows don’t even open without power. This kind of housing is fundamentally reliant on large-scale centralized power production.

But what if our economy provided tax incentives for residents and commercial centers to have autonomous power production? If these kinds of incentives were incorporated into everyday policy – whether transportation, electricity, food or water – our systems would evolve to be more capable of withstanding shocks.

I’m sure if we got smart people around the table to think about this, we would generate thousands of specific ideas. Right now resilience isn’t treated as important, so people don’t pay a premium for it – and there will be a cost associated with the necessary capital investments, a cost that draws resources away from other things. But you’re buying resilience – a positive externality in the system, that benefits everybody to the extent it’s there.

It’s partly the role of government to provide encouragement to do these kinds of things. Distributed open source problem solving would also be an essential feature of a society which recognized that catagenesis is an important part of adaptation – that you’re going to have growth, increasing complexity, breakdown, recombination, regeneration, regrowth, and so forth in cycles again and again. A system able to incorporate those cycles in a natural, “standard operating procedure” kind of way is going to require non-hierarchical distributed problem solving.

Let me take an analogy. Within our market economy, the Schumpeterian notion of creative destruction is manifested every day – the growth of new industrial sectors, their decline and obsolescence, their replacement by new technology. Individual companies will start and grow, but may eventually go bankrupt. This creative destruction is part of the everyday world in market economies – it’s part of life, and a reason why market economies are so adaptive.

Somehow we need to take that normative comfort level that markets have to adaptation, and introduce the same kind of culture into our social and political worlds. Remarkably, in economies nobody assumes that things stay the same. But in political systems, everybody assumes change is an anomaly, and to the extent change is allowed, it’s incremental and managed.

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HM: How are you feeling about this book, now that it’s complete and about to be released?

TH: It’s scary because it’s an encapsulation of 30 years of thought, and I know I’m going to take some bruises on this one. One of the reasons I spend much of the book talking about the problems we face in detail is that I’m sick of people dismissing the fact that we’re in a serious situation. By the time you finish chapter 8, if you’ve been listening and thinking, it’s going to be hard to deny at least the possibility that there will be serious breakdowns in the future.

The last part of the book is about denial, about what breakdowns might look like, and what we might do about them. [With the potential of open-source democratic problem-solving and resilience], it’s the first time I’ve started to see a glimmer of something that offered a way out. At the end of the last book, I didn’t have a sense of what the way out might be.

It was by reading Buzz Holling’s work that I realized what normally seems bad can be an enormous opportunity. It’s a radical idea that some people are not going to like, and they may ridicule and pigeonhole it.