Book Review: The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization

Having read a couple of favourable reviews of this book, I decided to buy it.  I "woke up" to the potential for catastrophic societal change in summer of 2005, when I first began reading about avian flu.  Two books I had read prior to The Upside of Down this were similar volumes: A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright, and The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler.  Both of these  books cover pretty much the same territory, warning that modern society is inevitably going to come face-to-face with some pretty critical problems, e.g. a global oil shortage, and that our healthy and unhealthy responses to them are going to have a deep impact on our future.

One of things I like about Thomas Homer-Dixon's writing is that he makes his arguments so easy to comprehend; he's not here to show off how clever he is or to talk down to his readers.  It's almost like having a conversation with a learned friend, who knows you are starting from scratch on the topic.  The many clear examples offered in the book speed the learning process.  For example, in discussing the steady energy needed  to keep a civilization going and avoid its collapse:

But maintaining this order is a bit like holding a marble on the side of a bowl with your finger: the marble wants to sit at the bottom of the bowl--that's its equilibrium point; so holding the marble on this side takes a constant inputof energy.  Similarly, cities, ecosystems, and human bodies must have a constant input of high-quality energy to maintain their complexity and order...in the face of nature's relentless tendency toward degradation and disorder.  And, as the system gets larger and more complex, more and more energy is needed to keep it operating.

....

In other words, our societies are like the marble that wants to roll back to the bottom of the bowl, and compared with ancient Rome we're holding that marble much farther up the bowl's side.  Colossal flows of high-quality energy make this possible.  If we can't sustain these flows, our societies will fall back toward equilibrium--which menas, essentially, that their complexity will unravel.  And that unraveling, should it occur, would make Rom's decline pale by comparison.

I'm already on the third chapter and I can't put the book down.  The Upside of Down is definitely a book to recommend for those who, as Homer-Dixon puts it, are driving too fast for safety in an enveloping white fog.  It will definitely be a wake-up call for some people (politicians, business leaders, policy wonks, etc.) who expect that the future is going to be like the present, only more so.