Podcast: Wicked Problems & Solutions

Radio Ecoshock Podcast: “Wicked Problems & Solutions.” Normal approaches to science and policy cannot solve wicked problems, like climate change, energy scarcity, or economic crisis.

Podcast: SBS Radio “Environmental breakdown, or opportunity?” interview

“Environmental breakdown, or opportunity?” interview with Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon on the World View program on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Radio, Australia. Listen to the podcast:

Podcast: ABC Melbourne interview on the Conversation Hour

Conversation Hour program on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Melbourne, Australia. Listen to the podcast:

Podcast: Electric Politics “Urbi et Orbi” Interview

Thomas Homer-Dixon is a respectable, intelligent fellow, and though he speaks about impending catastrophe in a low-key way the message gets through loud and clear: there’s going to be serious cleaning up to do. Which is more or less the point of his latest book, The Upside of Down. Episode information: http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/2007/03/urbi_et_orbi.html Listen to the [...]

Fareed Zakaria Interviewed Thomas Homer-Dixon about His Book ‘The Upside of Down’

PBS show- Foreign Exchange Fareed: Our first guest of the new year explains to us the fragility of our current global systems. Thomas Homer-Dixon argues in his new book ‘The Upside of Down, Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization‘, that the convergent stresses of population, energy, environment, and economy could cause a catastrophic breakdown [...]

Podcast: Free Forum with Terry McNally Interview

Author of Canada’s #1 bestseller, The Upside of Down. Whether from terrorism, climate change, pandemic, energy scarcity, or the widening gap between rich and poor, he believes breakdown is inevitable. And if we won’t change our ways till we crash, it’s up to us to make sure breakdown doesn’t spiral into total collapse. Listen to [...]

Beyond Management: How and Why Kymlicka Is Wrong

Toronto Globe and Mail Response to book review “Panarchy and Dystopia.” Toronto Globe and Mail, November 11. 2006,  by Will Kymlicka In his review of my new book The Upside of Down (“Panarchy and Dystopia.” Toronto Globe and Mail, November 11. 2006), Will Kymlicka makes a number of mistakes about the book’s argument, and he [...]

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:

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 [...]

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.