I’ve just finished reading The Upside of Down, which is very disturbing, but at the same confirms some of my own directions in life. A good part of this book reads like An Inconvenient Truth, but Homer-Dixon adds more detail about how we got into this mess. Much of the book is dedicated to an explanation of the five tectonic stresses that we face as a civilization — population; energy; environmental; climate and economic. About 80% of this book is depressing to any thoughtful or caring person.
However, there is a positive note — in times of crisis and destruction come opportunities for regeneration. This requires a ‘prospective mind’ that can anticipate crises and prepare for them. For instance, Homer-Dixon encourages building resilience into our communities and economies, so that we are not dependent on tightly coupled global supply chains. Resilience implies redundancy and is evident everywhere in nature.
Homer-Dixon suggests two related tools for helping us to build more resilient communities – the Internet and open source collaborative problem-solving. He sees much untapped potential in using one billion interconnected volunteers to bypass elite special interests and tackle our urgent global problems. Connecting with a worldwide community of interest while creating resilient local communities is the general recommendation from Homer-Dixon.
Advance planning means we need to develop a wide range of scenarios and experiment with technologies, organizations, and ideas. We’ll do better at these tasks, and we’ll also do better in the confusing aftermath of breakdown, if we use a decentralized approach to solving our problems, because traditional centralized and top-down approaches are not nimble enough, and they stifle creativity.
Homer-Dixon’s argument and suggestion to address “catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization” is a solid argument for many of the activities that I now find myself engaged in. These range from the creation of our community work Commons; our local organic food purchasing cooperative; and implementing open source organisational models. There is also the search for meaning, beyond that which was developed two millennia ago by the great faiths, during what is described in the book as the Axial Age, when “… people came to understand that they could use reason and reflection to see beyond their immediate reality …”. What we usually experience is more like this:
When we get in the door of our nearest church, mosque or synagogue, we find there’s no real opportunity for discussion. Instead, we’re handed a creed of some kind. We’re told what to think about values, not how to think about them.
The first step in our renewal as a civilization is admitting that we face a global crisis and talking about what we can do.
Thanks for this post Harold. Yesterday I found a web page that adds to my optimism amidst radical changes being forecasted.
http://www.energybulletin.net/22674.html. Australians have been exploring how to build resilience also. They call it permaculture — along the same lines as sustainable, green and self-regenerating lifestyles. My optimism is attached to the “Earth Steward” scenario where oil supplies deplete rapidly, but climate changes occur slowly. David Holmgren predicts that suburbia would be ruralized into small, self-sustaining communities, much like you describe as getting disconnected from the global supply chains.
I got this link from Chris Corrigan’s blog in British Columbia: Parking lot. http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/
He facilitates “open space” group processes for communities in transition. I just discovered his four year-old blog last week and am finding it full of compatibles with informal learning, communities of practice and conversational processes of transformation.
Tom