The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon

For a few days after reading The Upside of Down, I annoyed most of my friends and family by reciting chunks of Homer-Dixon’s work back to them — I couldn’t get it out of my head. I do this a lot to people, but not usually for days and days on end after reading a book.

The Upside of Down isn’t an environmental book, exactly, though it does deal with environmental and energy issues. While it shares some themes with more explicitly environmental books (like Jared Diamond’s Collapse), the core of the book is more political and sociological. Homer-Dixon is asking why societies collapse — what are the pressures our society faces today, and what, if any, are the positive results from the kind of collapse he’s talking about?


I’ve long been a skeptic of the “collapse-rebirth” school of green thought, so it’s saying something that THD has written a compelling and convincing (to me at least) book about exactly that — the opportunities that come for rebirth and reconstruction when societies face failures in the way their life support systems work. The book starts and ends with a gripping retelling of the earthquake and subsequent fire in San Francisco, 1906, and how the fire led to the creation of the Federal Reserve system in the United States. But Homer-Dixon doesn’t hamper his theory by sticking to one core analogy and building his theory around it — Rome is in there, the New Deal, any number of other examples to help bolster his arguments.

THD sees five structural pressures facing human society at the beginning of the 21st century:

Gristmill