Resilience and Civilization

Below is a conversation between Thomas Homer-Dixon and Ron Dembo. Dr. Dembo is a risk expert and founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, a not-for-profit dedicated to reducing our ecological footprint. Dr. Homer-Dixon is Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
He is also the author of The Ingenuity Gap, winner of the Governor-General’s Award. His most recent book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization assesses the concatenated risks facing the planet’s civilizations, and urges not a solution to this or that problem, but a whole new way of understanding the systems we’ve built. The challenges are not political or economic (or not fundamentally so); they are structural. And the only way to address them before it’s too late, he urges, is to understand that the repertoire of solutions we usually turn to is not going to work.

Ron Dembo: There are a couple of things that really stick out for me. My trouble with reading books like this is that I immediately try to think of solutions. In particular the whole notion of resilience interested me because I think you can actually simulate systems to check how resilient they are. You emphasize the concept of resilience and the need to create resilient societies. We don’t put a priority on it. Imagine you are now the prime minister, and you can do what you like. What would you do to Canadian society to make it more resilient?

Thomas Homer-Dixon: One of the problems would be that I don’t think the conditions are ripe for the kind of paradigm change that I’m suggesting in terms of thinking of resilience. We had this enormous blackout in 2003 and it didn’t get us thinking about resilience, it got us thinking about more of the same, just improving micro managing and tinkering with the grid in various ways to make sure it never happens again. But the idea of decentralized energy production, more off-grid production, or the ability of individual communities and households to reduce their dependence upon the grid, that wasn’t raised at all. People unfortunately tend to think in sort of dichotomies about these things. For example, they think we need nothing but connectivity and the more connectivity the better (an example that comes up in Chapter 5). On the other hand, participants at a solar conference I attended tended to assume we want complete autonomy. In the end, we don’t want either. This is sort of a goldilocks situation; we need the “just right” goal where you have a certain amount of connectivity but not too much. The problem is that to bring about change, this goal is going to have to be shared across the culture, and I’m not sure that it’s there yet. So it’s not going to be easy for a prime minister to change things all at once.

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