The Upside of Down

Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization

Thomas Homer-Dixon

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781597260657, 9781597260640
• eBook ISBN: 9781597266307
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Environmental disasters. Terrorist wars. Energy scarcity. Is this the world's fate, a downward spiral that ultimately spells the collapse of society? Perhaps, says acclaimed author Thomas Homer-Dixon—or perhaps these crises can actually lead to renewal for ourselves and planet earth.

The Upside of Down takes the reader on a mind-stretching tour of societies' management, or mismanagement, of disasters over time. From the demise of ancient Rome to contemporary climate change, this spellbinding book analyzes what happens when multiple crises compound to cause what the author calls "synchronous failure." But crisis doesn't have to mean total calamity. Through catagenesis, or creative, bold reform in the wake of breakdown, it is possible to
reinvent our future.

Drawing on the worlds of archeology, poetry, politics, science, and economics, The Upside of Down is certain to provoke controversy and stir imaginations across the globe. The author's wide-ranging expertise makes his insights and proposals particularly acute, as people of all nations try to grapple with how we can survive tomorrow's inevitable shocks to our global system. There is no guarantee of success, but there are ways to begin thinking about a better world, and The Upside of Down is the ideal place to start thinking.

NOTES

PROLOGUE

1. The use of field artillery to destroy buildings along Van Ness Avenue is not widely noted in histories of the great San Francisco fire, even in the U.S. Army's documentation of its role in the disaster. In the fire's aftermath, great controversy surrounded the decision to destroy buildings to create firebreaks. For this reason, the use of artillery was likely downplayed. The army's report on the dynamiting of buildings was prepared by Captain Le Vert Coleman, and is available from the San Francisco Museum at http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906/coleman.html. The account of the great San Francisco fire in these paragraphs is drawn largely from reports in The New York Times on April 19, 20, and 21, 1906, especially “Bombardment a Mile Long Fails to Save San Francisco: Mansions Wrecked by Cannon in Last Stand on Nob Hill,” New York Times, April 20, 1906, 1. For a fascinating recent treatment of the quake and fire, see Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 190 6 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), especially page 290, which explains how the quake caused the fire.

2. Rome's ruins have inspired literature, art, and scholarly investigation for millennia. Perhaps most famously, Edward Gibbon said he was prompted to write his monumental history on October 15, 1764, as he “sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter.” Unfortunately, modern scholars aren't sure exactly where Gibbon was sitting at the time; there were no visible ruins of the Temple of Jupiter's superstructure in the eighteenth century. Gibbon's remark from his autobiography is quoted in David Womersley's introduction to Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited and abridged by David Womersley (London: Penguin, 2000 [1776]), xvi.

3. See Joseph Tainter, “Post-Collapse Societies,” Companion Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Graeme Barker, ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 988-1039. As we will see later in this book, there's scholarly controversy about the extent to which one can say the Roman empire “fell,” “declined,” or “collapsed,” and also about whether people's average standards of living fell.

CHAPTER ONE

1. James Burke writes marvelously about urban dwellers' dependence on technologies that they don't comprehend, their vulnerability to failure of these technologies, and the implications of a mass exodus from cities in the event of such failure. See Burke, Connections (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 4–7.

2. A survey article that provides a somewhat similar breakdown of stresses is Robert Kates and Thomas Parris, “Long-term Trends and a Sustainability Transition,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100, no. 14 (July 8, 2003): 8062–67.

3. Harvard University's John Holdren, a physicist and environmental scientist, notes, “Civilization remains dependent on nature, for most of the cycling of nutrients on which food production depends, for most of the regulation of crop pests and agents and vectors of human disease, for most of the detoxification and disposal of wastes, and for the maintenance of climate conditions within limits conducive to all these other environmental services and to the human enterprise more generally.” Holdren, “Environmental Change and the Human Condition,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 57, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 25.

4. Two good examples of such arguments are Jack Hollander, The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment's Number One Enemy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from Environmentalists, a Conservative Manifesto (New York: Basic, 1999).

5. For a discussion of these constraints, see Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environment, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unforgettable World (New York: Vintage, 2002).

6. Jared Diamond, “The Last Americans,” Harper's Magazine (June 2003): 45.

7. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–199 1 (London: Abacus, 1994), 15.

8. Christopher Chase-Dunn, Yukio Kawano, and Benjamin Brewer, “Trade Globalization Since 1795: Waves of Integration in the World-System,” American Sociological Review 65 (February 2000): 77–95.

9. In his autobiography, the Manhattan Project physicist Luis Alvarez writes, “With modern weapons-grade uranium, the background neutron rate is so low that terrorists, if they had such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half. . . . Even a high school kid could make a bomb in short order.” Alvarez, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 125.

10. In the 1970s, the Italian electrical engineer and futurist Roberto Vacca presented an argument about breakdown in complex systems that's similar in some respects to the one offered in these pages, especially in its focus on interactions between stresses and the possibility of “coincident breakdown.” According to Vacca, systems break down when their complexity and congestion exceed managers' control. Although his argument doesn't reflect recent research on self-organizing complex systems, it still bears close attention. Vacca has developed considerable renown for his ability to predict system failures, including the collapse of the Soviet Union. See Vacca, The Coming Dark Age: What Will Happen When Modern Technology Breaks Down, trans. J. S. Whale (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974).

11. James Howard Kunstler makes an argument along these lines in The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005).

12. Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

13. This is especially true because such events might not be independent of each other: in some circumstances, the occurrence of one kind of shock could boost the likelihood of others.

14. For instance, the American writer Gregg Easterbrook contends that concerns about the rising likelihood of social breakdown are simply a product of “collapse anxiety”—a generalized fear in rich countries that high standards of living can't be sustained. He thus manages to disparage such concerns by labeling them a psychopathology, without really explaining their source. See Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York: Random House, 2003).

15. Some thoughtful people have reached similar conclusions about our future. See, for example, Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century—On Earth and Beyond (New York: Basic, 2003); Robert Harvey, Global Disorder: How to Avoid a Fourth World War (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003); Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005); and Didier Sornette,“2050: The End of the Growth Era,” chapter 10 in Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

16. In statistical terms, catastrophic events lie in the tail of a “power-law frequency distribution.” This means they're very rare but not impossible. As we'll see in chapter 5, the same is true of highly connected hubs in scale-free networks. Richard Posner uses cost-benefit analysis (technically, expected value calculations) to argue that it makes economic sense to invest in preventing rare, large-scale catastrophes. See Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (New York: Oxford, 2005).

17. Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security (Andover, MA: Brick House, 1982), 1.

18. Amory Lovins, correspondence with the author, July 23, 2002. Permission granted for quotation.

19. The word catagenesis is also used in petroleum geology: categenesis happens when organic compounds are “cracked” or broken down into oil under conditions of high pressure and temperature deep underground.

20. For a thorough survey of the history of systems thinking, see Charles François, “Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Syst. Res. 16 (1999): 203–19.

21. We'll learn in chapter 2 that complex adaptive systems are orderly, thermodynamically open, and far from thermodynamic equilibrium, that their parts are diverse and specialized, and that they exhibit self-organization. In chapter 5, we'll learn that the parts of complex systems are often connected together in dense, scale-free networks that produce feedbacks and synergies. A serviceable indicator of a system's complexity is its “algorithmic complexity,” which is the length of a computer program, or algorithm, that can reproduce the system's behavior (the longer the algorithm, the more complex the system). On measures of complexity, see Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, 115–16.

22. A good overview of this research is C. S. Holling, “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems,” Ecosystems 4 (2001): 390–405. See also Lance Gunderson and C. S. Holling, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002).

23. The notion of constrained breakdown may seem odd because most of us assume that breakdown has to be—almost by definition—sudden, thoroughgoing, and catastrophic. But in reality there are lots of gradations along a continuum between catastrophic collapse at one extreme and straight-line stability at the other.

24. When small changes produce very large effects, specialists say the system is “sensitive to initial conditions.” Such sensitivity is a key feature of systems that exhibit chaotic behavior.

25. Figures from the Internet Systems Consortium, available at http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/ops/ds/.

26. Henry Mintzberg surveys the dismal record of our best forecasters in “The Performance of Forecasting,” in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, and Planners (New York: Free Press, 1994), 228–30.

27. An informative attempt at long-range forecasting is the State of the Future project of the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University. This project produces annual reports that are among the best efforts at synthesizing large amounts of data and expert opinion on humankind's future. Once again, though, forecasts tend to be straight-line extrapolations of current trends. Further information is available at http://www.acunu.org.

28. James William Sullivan, “The Future Is a Fancyland Palace,” in Dave Walter, ed., Today Then: America's Best Minds Look 100 Years into the Future on the Occasion of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Helena, MT: American & World Geographic Publishing, 1992), 27.

CHAPTER TWO

1. The architectural historian Frank Sear writes, “[The voussoir arch] was not a Roman invention. Probably of eastern origin, it was making a tentative appearance in Hellenistic and Etruscan architecture by the fourth century.” Acc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Firestorm
• One: Tectonic Stresses
• Two: A Keystone in Time
• Three: We Are Like Running Water
• Four: So Long, Cheap Slaves
• Five: Earthquake
• Six: Flesh of the Land
• Seven: Closing the Windows
• Eight: No Equilibrium
• Nine: Cycles Within Cycles
• Ten: Disintegration
• Eleven: Catagenesis
• Twelve: Baalbek: The Last Rock
• Notes
• Illustration Credits
• Acknowledgments
• Index