The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization sets out a theory of the growth, crisis, and renewal of societies. Today’s converging energy, environmental, and political-economic stresses could cause a breakdown of national and global order. Learn more »
Is our world becoming too complex and too fast-paced to manage? The Ingenuity Gap argues that a dangerous gulf is opening between our need for practical, innovative ideas to solve our increasingly difficult problems and our actual supply of those ideas. Learn more »
Environment, Scarcity, and Violence shows how scarcities of critical renewable resources like cropland, fresh water, and forests will contribute to insurrections, ethnic clashes, urban unrest, and other forms of civil violence in poor countries. Learn more »
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Welcome.
At this web site you’ll find information about my background, teaching, research, and writing. The site includes some of my writings as well as a Forum where we can discuss issues of common interest. If you’d like to receive my newsletter, just enter your email address in the box at the bottom of the page. Enjoy your visit.
Featured
Speaking Truth to Power
See the speech by youth delegate Ms. Anjali Appadurai of Maine’s College of the Atlantic to the closing plenary of the Durban climate conference on December 10, 2011. “I speak for more than half the world’s population. You’ve given us a seat in this hall, but our interests are not at the table. What does it take to get a stake in this game? Lobbyists? Corporate influence? Money?” Watch the video »
It seems inevitable that the ongoing and rapid changes in the physical environment of the marine Arctic will push components of the region’s existing social-ecological systems—small and large—beyond tipping points and into new regimes. Here, we argue from a global perspective the need to understand the Arctic’s role in an increasingly nonlinear world; then describe emerging evidence from new observations on the connectivity of processes and system components from the Canada Basin and subarctic seas surrounding northern North America; and finally posit an approach founded in “resilience thinking” to allow northern residents living in small coastal communities to participate in the observation, adaption and—if necessary—transformation of the social-ecological system with which they live.
Today’s information technology is creating what we might call an Age of Ephemera. Our unprecedented ability to store and transfer gargantuan amounts of information obscures this information’s modern fragility.
