The following are my favorite excerpts from Thomas Homer-Dixon's The Upside of Down.
Conventional economics is the dominant intellectual rationalization of today’s world order. As we’ve overextended the growth phase of our global adaptive cycle, this rationalization has become relentlessly more complex and rigid and progressively less tenable. Breakdown will, all at once, discredit this rationalization and create intellectual space for new ideas to flourish. But this space will be brutally competitive. We can boost the chances that humane alternatives will thrive by working them out in detail and disseminating them as widely as possible beforehand.
We all ask these questions when we’re young, till the obvious discomfort of adults around us makes us stop…Because we’re reluctant or unable to talk about moral or existential values—and these values remain largely unexplored—unitarian values fill the void. This is one reason why consumerism has developed such a firm grip on so many of us in the West. Without a coherent notion of what will give our lives meaning, we try to satisfy our need for meaning by buying ever more stuff. In the process, the mental muscle that allows us to think and talk about values in complex and sophisticated ways atrophies. Reduced to walking appetites, we lose resilience. We become hollow people with no character, substance, or core—like eggshells that can be shattered with one sharp shock.
(I)t’s first necessary to recognize growths role in our modern economies. We take the value of constant growth for granted in our day-to-day discussions of economic matters-in our newspapers and business magazines and in political discussions. That growth is a good thing is an unchallenged, almost sacrosanct assumption. One might even say we’re collectively fixated on maintaining growth. But this is a rather curious fixation because beyond a certain point-a point many of us passed long ago-the higher incomes that growth produces apparently don’t make us any happier.
When psychologists have questioned people over the years about how happy they are, they’ve found that people in rich countries are on average no happier that people were in the 1970’s are even the 1950’s. During the intervening decades we’ve become far richer. In the United States, personal income (in constant 1995 dollars) more than doubled between 1957 and 1998. But over this period the number of people who said they were “very happy” actually declined slightly. Notes the American psychologist David Myers, “We are twice as rich and no happier”. And when we look at happiness around the world, we find that happiness is correlated with income up to about $10,000 to $13,000 per person annually, but beyond this threshold the correlation vanishes.
Money, in economists’ terminology, produces “diminishing return” of happiness. Once our basic material needs are satisfied, it turns out, we don’t need more money to be happy, but we do need loving families, supportive social relationships, absorption in satisfying activity, a sense of purpose in our lives, novelty, and security from catastrophic threats to our income and health.
So, if above a relatively modest threshold, greater material wealth doesn’t make us much happier, why do those of us who are already well off in rich countries work hard to get more of it? Psychologists and behavioral economists have offered a range of answers to this question. Some say we’re stuck on a “hedonic treadmill”: our aspirations tend to exceed our income, and as our income rises, our aspirations rise in lockstep. Others stress that our happiness is partly a result of our relative social status because human beings naturally compare themselves with other people. We’re all trying to keep up with Mr. Jones next door. If our yardstick of comparison is income, a higher income makes us happier only if it goes up relative to Jones’s income. But because Jones is working as hard as we are, nobody gets ahead, and no one feels any happier. We are essentially in an unwinnable income race with other people…
In essence, then, the logical underpinning our economies works like this: if we’re discontented with what we have, we buy stuff: if we buy enough stuff, the economy grows; if the economy grows enough, technologically displace workers can find new jobs, there will be enough economic demand to keep the economy humming and to prevent wrenching political conflict. Modern capitalism’s stability-and increasingly globalism’s stability-requires the cultivation of material discontent, endlessly rising personal consumption, and the steady economic growth this consumption generates…Our economic role in this culture of consumerism is to be little more than walking appetites that serve the function of maintaining our economies throughput. Our psychological state is comparable to that of drug addicts needing a fix: buying things doesn’t really make us happy, except perhaps for a moment after the purchase. But we do it over and over anyway.
Why? There are many reasons. But a central and often overlooked one, I think, is that consumerism helps anesthetize us against the dread produced by empty lives-lives that modern capitalism and consumerism have themselves helped empty of meaning….(T)he flip side of addiction is denial. Our addiction to growth…can only be sustained if we deny growth’s often-negative effects. But these effects are real and can be deeply personal. They likely include rich societies’ epidemic of eating disorders like obesity, anorexia, and bulimia, and their soaring rates of clinical depression….Depending on how it’s measured, the illness has become three to ten times more common in the past fifty years.
(I)n capitalist democracy, playing by the rules means not starting fights over big issues like our society’s highly skewed distribution of wealth and power. Instead, it means focusing on achieving short-term material gains-such as bettering our contracts with our employers. Put simply, our economic elites have learned (20th C)…to create a system of incentives, and a dynamic of economic growth, that diverts political conflict into manageable, largely nonpolitical channels. As long as the system delivers the goods…a rising material standard of living….no one is really motivated to challenge its foundations.
(A)bout 40 percent of the world’s population lacks sufficient water for basic sanitation and hygiene, and nearly one out of every five people has not enough to drink….Nearly half the world’s major fish stocks are now fished to their maximum limit, about 30 percent are overfished, and many have collapsed.
All of us, not just ancient astronomers or boneheaded academics, are highly conservative when it comes to our theories of reality. We don’t relinquish our core assumptions until the contrary evidence-what philosophers of science call “anomalous data”-is overwhelmingly abundant and relentlessly obvious. And often such conservatism is a good thing…..(b)ut sometimes we take this conservatism to extremes, and the result is the kind of cycles-within-cycles intellectual neuroticism that we see in Santucci’s great sphere. The contraption speaks of desperation….
One thing was clear to me now….our values must be compatible with the exigencies of the natural world in and depend on…The endless material growth of our economies is fundamentally inconsistent with the physical facts of life. Period. End of story. And a value system that makes endless growth the primary source of our social stability and spiritual well-being will destroy us.
We need a new approach to the great challenges we are confronting. Efforts at management are often important, even essential, but sometimes they aren’t going to give us a satisfactory solution. The alternative approach I advocate requires us to adapt what I’ve termed a prospective mind. We need to be comfortable with constant change, radical surprise, and even breakdown, because these are now the inevitable features of our world, and we must constantly anticipate a wide variety of futures. With a prospective mind we’ll be better able to turn surprise and breakdown, when they happen, to our advantage. In other words, we’ll be better able to achieve what I call catagenisis- the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions and societies in the aftermath of breakdown.
We have to do other things too, and advance planning for breakdown is undoubtedly the most important…In vigorous, wide-ranging, yet disciplined conversation among ourselves, we can develop scenarios of what kinds of breakdowns could occur. In this conversation, we shouldn’t be afraid to think “outside the box”—to try to imagine the unimaginable—because in a non-linear world under great pressure, we’re certain to make wrong predictions if we just extrapolate from current trends.
Moments of contingency are thus easily exploited for good or ill. Fear, hope, and greed are unleashed at the same time that social reality becomes fluid. This means that people’s motivation to change their circumstances soars just as their opportunities to accomplish change multiply. Whether the outcome of this powerful confluence is turmoil or renewal hinges-in large measure-on how the situation is framed.
People will want assurance. They will want an explanation of the disorder that has engulfed them.-an explanation that makes their world seem, once more, coherent and predictable, if not safe. Ruthless leaders can satisfy these desires and build their political power by prying open existing cleavages between ethnic and religious groups , classes, races, nations or cultures. First they define what it means to be a good person and in so doing identify the members of the we group. Then they define and identify the bad people who are members of the they group….Indeed, large numbers of people are already primed to see the world in terms of a Manichean division into good and evil…..In this stormy world, fundamentalist creeds can seem to provide a firm anchor. All such creeds claim privileged access to absolute truth, and all establish what’s right and wrong, provide strict rules of behavior, and identify friends and enemies. And because that truth comes from revelation not research, creeds justify the suspension of reason and deliberation—a kind of psychological denial that may be a balm for the bewildered but that’s truly an inept response to an ever more complex reality.
(Resilience) Events don’t have to turn out this way, because we really do have some ability to choose our future. But we have to recognize what kind of forces we’re up against, we have to have courage, and we have to be smart—not only at the time of the social earthquake and the moment of contingency that follows but also well in advance. Specifically, if we’re going to have the best chance of following a different and positive path, we must take four actions. First, we must reduce as much as we can the force of the underlying tectonic stresses in order to lower the risk of synchronous failure—that is, of catastrophic collapse that cascades across boundaries between technological, social and ecological systems. Second, we need to cultivate a prospective mind so we can better cope with surprise. Third, we must boost the overall resilience between critical systems like our energy and food supply networks And fourth, we need to prepare to turn breakdown to our advantage when it happens, because it will….Alas, humankind’s track record when it comes to proactive policy, especially in response to slow-creep problems, doesn’t inspire much confidence…Today, most of us are simply too deep in denial, and our political and economic systems are too hobbled by powerful vested interest for real change to happen in the absence of a sharp push or shock from outside. With colossal effort by the relatively small numbers of people today engaged in trying to do something about these problems, and perhaps with a good deal of luck..*&$(….so we’d better get ready for real social earthquakes.
This is where cultivating the prospective mind comes in…We can’t possibly flourish in a future filled with sharp nonlinearities and threshold effects—and somewhat paradoxically, we can’t hope to preserve at least some of what we hold dear—unless we’re comfortable with change, surprise and the essential transience of things, and unless we’re open to radically new ways of thinking about our world and about the way we should live our lives. We need to exercise our imaginations so that we can challenge the unchallengeable and conceive the inconceivable. , denying what’s happening around us, and refusing to countenance anything more than incremental adjustments to our course are just about the worst things we can do. These behaviors increase our rigidity and dangerously extend the growth phase of our adaptive cycle…
Of course, many of these recommendations fly in the face of the ideology of today’s globalized capitalism. In it’s most dogmatic formulation, this ideology says that larger scale, faster growth, less government, and more efficiency, connectivity and speed are always better. Slack is always waste. So resilience—even as an idea, let alone as a goal of public policy—isn’t found…..And because our leaders hardly ever think about resilience, , we keep doing things that make our lives progressively less resilient—we pile on more debt, build tract housing over our finest cropland, develop addictions to distant sources of energy, become so specialized that we can’t take care of ourselves when everyday technologies fail, and fill every nook and cranny of our days with so much junk information and pointless running around that we don’t have time to reflect on what we’re doing or where we’re going.
Rank of 2006 as hottest year on record in the 
Percent increase of America's carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels since 1990.
Percent increase of America's carbon dioxide emissions forecasted by 2020 if we do not cap pollution.
Percent decrease in America's global warming pollution required by 2050 to prevent the worst consequences of global warming.
Number of days by which the U.S. fire season has increased over the past 20 years - tied closely to increased temperatures and earlier snowmelt.
Number of people who could be displaced globally by extreme droughts, sea level rise and flooding by 2080.
Number of U.S. mayors (representing 55 million Americans) who have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement pledging to meet or beat Kyoto goals in their communities.
Number of federal bills passed by Congress to set a mandatory, economy-wide cap on America's global warming pollution.