- A focus on the deep causes of social instability and conflict, especially failures of social adaptation;
- An interest in topics at the interface between the natural and social worlds, especially those relating to environmental change, energy, and complex adaptive systems;
- An interdisciplinary approach to research scholarship;
- And a commitment to bring the findings of advanced research to policymakers and the general public.
The material from two of these projects is available on the Web. From 1994 to 1996, the Project on Environment, Population, and Security, a joint effort with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, produced accessible studies for policymakers in Washington, D.C., and Ottawa. From 1994 to 1998, the Project on Environmental Scarcity, State Capacity, and Civil Violence, undertaken with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, focused on the links between environmental stress and weakened states in poor countries.
These were the first research projects to systematically investigate the relationship between environmental stress and violence, using a clear theoretical and conceptual structure and grounding the analysis in the detailed empirical study of multiple cases. They involved over one hundred experts and researchers in fifteen countries on four continents. The findings and materials generated by this work were disseminated widely to policy making communities around the world.
After nearly ten years work, I summarized these findings in Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, 1999). This research showed that environmental stress by itself does not cause violence. It must combine with other factors, such as the failure of economic institutions and government. Some societies, it turns out, adapt quite smoothly to environmental stress, while others suffer from migrations, worsened poverty, and institutional failure. Why do some societies successfully adapt while others do not?
I concluded that a central characteristic of societies that successfully adapt is their ability to produce and deliver useful ideas (or what I call "ingenuity") to meet the demands placed on them by worsening environmental problems. Societies that adapt well are able to deliver the right kind of ingenuity at the right time and places to prevent environmental problems from causing severe hardship and, ultimately, violence. My thinking was influenced by recent advances in economics, especially in the subfield of economics called endogenous growth theory, which analyses the role of ideas in economic growth.
Beginning in 1997, I extended my ingenuity argument beyond poor societies and their environmental problems to examine how societies, in general, adapt to a wide range of complex stresses. As part of this long-term project, I studied the role of ideas in social adaptation: what kinds of practical ideas do societies need, how do their requirements for ideas change over time, and what factors promote or limit the delivery of useful ideas? In 2000, I addressed these questions in The Ingenuity Gap (Knopf Canada; Knopf USA; and Jonathan Cape). Although written for a general audience, this book nonetheless comprehensively surveyed research in many fields bearing on social adaptation to complex stress.
I am now working to specify how ingenuity might be measured and to identify more precisely the factors that affect both our need for and our supply of ingenuity. I am particularly interested in a kind of development trap that seems to afflict some poor societies. In this trap, stresses like severe environmental damage contribute to social polarization and conflict. This conflict, in turn, undermines the society's capacity to deliver enough ingenuity to deal with the underlying stresses. Such a vicious circle is visible in much of the developing world, including Haiti, the Horn of Africa, southern Mexico, and Pakistan. I have twice traveled to the state of Bihar, India, to study this phenomenon.
In the last three years, I have extended this line of inquiry further. My latest book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, examines the threat to global stability of simultaneous and interacting demographic, environmental, economic, and political stresses. At the moment, these deep stresses are operating largely in the background, quietly eroding the resilience of humankind's adaptive mechanisms. The danger is that several will reach a crisis point simultaneously. Such a convergence of events could overwhelm the resilience of even the richest and most powerful societies.
This work has led me, in particular, to consider the role of energy in society, especially the thermodynamics of complex social systems. Human civilization is about to go through an epochal energy transition from an age of cheap, abundant, high-quality energy to an age of energy scarcity. Scholars have not even begun to explore the implications of this transition for civil peace and political order.
I have always felt a strong obligation to communicate the results of the best research on such issues to a broad public audience. So in the mid-1990s I decided to devote a decade to writing for the general public. I assumed that ten years would be sufficient time to write two major books, and The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down are the products of this commitment of time. In turn, I have used this exercise to elaborate an intellectual agenda that should fully occupy me for the remainder of my scholarly career. I expect over the next years to produce a series of academic papers that explore the most important components of this agenda. I will remain committed, though, to translating the results of this work into forms that I hope will intrigue, inspire, and inform the public and policymakers at large.