An interview with Thomas Homer-Dixon
Thomas Homer-Dixon seems the archetypal academic: greying hair, pale blue shirt tucked into pressed trousers, blazer folded by his side. He speaks in measured tones: earnestly, urgently, with a rising undercurrent of frustration that only occasionally spills over. It would be impossible, in his line of work, not to be frustrated.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is visiting Melbourne to talk about The Upside of Down, a book that looks at why the world is in real trouble and what we need to do in response. He identifies five major stresses that are building to a crisis point: climate change, energy crises (particularly the approach of peak oil), environmental pressures, population stress and economic instability and inequity, which could trigger global conflict. Added to those stresses are two forces that will amplify the effects of breakdown if and when it occurs: our much-lauded global connectivity, and the increasing ability of small groups to wreak large-scale destruction, best demonstrated by September 11.
“As I finished each chapter, I would feel like I’d been kicked in the stomach, as I learned more and more,” says Homer-Dixon. In the coming years, we will face not one or two, but several global crises at once. The question is not if breakdown will occur, but how severe it will be – and if we can learn from it, to change things for the better. “Often it’s in times of crisis that people are most creative and there’s the greatest opportunity for making real change. What matters is people seeing the evidence outside their windows.”
Australians, he observes, are at the forefront of global awareness when it comes to climate change – because of the drought. It’s hard to deny that climate change exists or that the world is changing when it becomes illegal to water your garden or fill your swimming pool from the tap. Melting Arctic ices are ringing alarm bells in Canada; climate change has topped opinion polls as an issue for voters for the past 18 months. This year’s unprecedentedly warm North American winter has created “a palpable shift in attitude” there, too – even if it’s not reflected by the government.
As we think about solutions for the immense problems we face, we also need to think about what we want them to look like. What is most important to us? What kind of world do we want for our children? If we don’t do that, says Homer-Dixon, our solutions will be based on maintaining the lifestyles we have rather than challenging the status quo – what he calls “have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solutions”.
“Well, that’s probably not going to work.” He waves around at the hotel we’re in, encased in glass several floors above the city below. “This is nice, this climate-controlled environment, but is this what we want? I’d rather my kids be able to get outside and walk on the seashore like I did when I was a kid.”
The biggest obstacle to change is not technological: it’s social. The kinds of radical, large-scale changes we need to make in order to avert or survive global crisis will need to be made by our politicians. Those kinds of changes will be inconvenient. They will cost money. They will not win votes.
“We need to think decades ahead, not just a few years. Politicians aren’t going to do that unless we expect them to.”
first published in The Big Issue, 2007
