Upside?

I just finished a really good book about the coming collapse. I recommend that you check it out. And for those of you who question my reading lists of late you'll be happy to hear that the author is the Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. The book is The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon.

Homer-Dixon touches on the numerous ways that our modern industrial civilization is under threat. There's climate change of course, the coming energy scarcity, asymmetric warfare, overpopulation, and the growing gap between the rich and poor in states and between states. All these "tectonic stresses" threaten the highly complex yet fragile global civilization that we have created. There is little resiliency in the structures we have created and maintained.

Collapse is natural. It happens all the time in systems. It leads to innovation and change. For instance a forest fire (which humans stupidly prevent thereby making conditions ripe for a monster fire which nothing can stop) allows for new seeds and species to take over newly cleared niches thereby restarting and slowly increasing the complexity of the forest ecosystem which will then experience another creative collapse; do we need more convincing that linearity is unnatural? We've been putting off collapse for so long and pretending that we can continue to take and take forever (insanity?) that we're due for a monumental rebalancing. The longer we wait the more painful it will be; the forest fire will burn so hot it will kill all the seeds.

He is also very critical of the hollowness of modern industrial civilization with its focus on consumption: "Our economic role in this culture of consumerism is to be little more than walking appetites that serve the function of maintaining our economy's throughput. Our psychological state is comparable to that of drug addicts needing a fix: buying things doesn't really make us happy, except perhaps for a moment after the purchase. But we do it over and over anyway"(197).

Homer-Dixon ultimately believes that collapse is unavoidable. Sooner or later it's coming down. What we need, he suggests, is to be ready to rebuild lest the forces of intolerance and violence take over. While he offers a lot of potential scenarios he explains that we must be guided by new values (that are already becoming visible): "Our values must be compatible with the exigencies of the natural world we live in and depend on. They must implicitly recognize the laws of thermodynamics, energy's role in our survival, the dangers of certain kinds of connectivity, and the nonlinear behaviour of natural systems like the climate. The endless material growth of our economies is fundamentally inconsistent with these physical facts of life. Period. End of story. And a value system that makes endless growth the primary source of our social stability and spiritual well-being will destroy us"(305).

What I liked most about this book was that it wasn't offering crazy solutions to our problems and pretending to be positive about the ingenuity of humans to subdue nature. It recognized that civilization is on a deadly and unsustainable path in its current form (can it ever be sustainable?) and has to collapse for the good of all life, including humans. It was also very accessible to those of us not familiar with panarchy for instance. It was also just plain interesting with examples from Homer-Dixon's Gore-like world traveling (are you part of the problem?).

There are so many books outlining that humanity is headed for disaster (Power Down, Collapse, Endgame, The Long Emergency, The World Without Us) but dear reader, if you want to start to learn the truth, start with The Upside of Down and then move on to Derrick Jensen.

And please if anyone tells you that humans will cope with the breakdown of the natural world at their hands tell them to go fuck themselves. We're fucked but that's a good thing.