November 10th, 2006 —
Podcast: Air America “The Upside of Down” Interview on EcoTalk
Thomas Homer-Dixon tells Betsy about his new book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Listen to the podcast:
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Displaying 3 of 182 results for: Societal Collapse
November 9th, 2006 —
Podcast: World Affairs Council of Northern California “The Upside of Down: Leveraging Catastrophe for Positive Change” Lecture
From the rise and fall of the Roman empire, to the devastation of the 9/11 attacks; from the slums of the megacities in Latin America and Asia, to ground zero of the SARS outbreak in Toronto and Hong Kong; we are, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, on course for breakdown. Simply managing our problems is no longer [...]
May 14th, 2006 —
Prepare Today for Tomorrow’s Breakdown
What causes societies to collapse, and are our modern societies at risk of collapse themselves?
In the last few years, these questions have been on people’s minds. Many of us have the intuition that things are out of control and that our societies could crash. We see headlines about extreme weather, impending oil shortages, avian flu, and horrible terrorism in distant places. Some people, particularly those of a religious disposition, even think we’re entering end times. Parallels between ancient Rome and the modern world are common, and images of doom abound in preaching and fiction.
Much of this stuff is nonsense, which makes it easy for our societies’ policymakers, elites and “experts” of various stripes to dismiss it with a patronizing wave of the hand. But I think the common intuition is right: some kind of real trouble does lie ahead.
