Is the Deadly Crash of Our Civilization Inevitable?

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted February 13, 2007.

Humankind is doing more things, faster, across a greater space than ever before, producing changes of a size and speed never seen before.

Thomas Homer-Dixon compares our current situation to driving too fast along a country road in a dense fog. Some ignore the fog and keep their foot pressed on the accelerator, but most of us feel like fairly helpless passengers on this wild ride.

In 1870, the average income in the world's richest country was about nine times greater than that in the world's poorest country. By 1990 it was forty-five times greater.

In 2006, the world's 793 billionaires held combined wealth of $2.6 trillion. (If liquidated in 2006), this wealth could have hired the poorest half of the world's workers -- the 1.4 billion workers who earn a few dollars a day -- for almost two years.

Between 1977 and 1996, the weight of the average American cheeseburger grew over 25 percent, and the volume of the average soft drink grew more than 50 percent. About 40 percent of the world's population now lacks sufficient water for basic sanitation and hygiene, and nearly one out of every five people does not have enough to drink.

Between 2000 and the beginning of 2005, China's daily oil imports soared 140 percent. Saudi Arabia, has pumped a total of 46 billion barrels of oil in the past 17 years, without admitting to any decrease in its stated reserve figure of about 260 billion barrels.

Since 1950, industrialized fishing has reduced the total mass of large fish in the world's oceans by 90 percent. The atmosphere's level of carbon dioxide is the highest in 650,000 years.

Is a deadly crash inevitable?

Thomas Homer-Dixon is director of the Trudeau Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict at the University of Toronto. He is the author of "The Ingenuity Gap" and his newest book "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization."

Terrence McNally: What are the biggest questions driving you right now?

Thomas Homer-Dixon: I have a 20-month-old son, and I'm concerned about the future for him. I'm trying to figure out what might happen and how we can make it better.

It's unlikely that the future is going to be a linear extrapolation of the present, but I've pretty well arrived at the conclusion that the diversity and power of the stresses that we're encountering are going to cause some major volatility. I expect social, political, economic and technological crises and breakdowns. It's hard to say what they're going to look like, but the probability of some major problems developing is rising.

So how are we going to respond in times of crisis?

In the book I introduce the metaphor of earthquakes. I talk about tectonic stresses building up under the surface of our societies and of global society. Now this is something that Californians are very familiar with. Everybody in the state knows that there are mighty tectonic plates pressing together along the San Andreas Fault, among others. Potential energy builds up, and at some point it's released in earthquakes that can have devastating consequences.

And I think the same is at least metaphorically true for our world. Stresses are building, and at some point I expect there will be a release of pressure because our institutions and our adaptive capability will be overloaded. We just won't be able to cope.

TMN: You point out that it's not linear, and it isn't any one thing that's going to do it. It's the combination and interaction. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond puts forth five factors that have led to collapse -- human environmental impacts, climate change, the behavior of your enemies, the behavior of your friends and how you respond. What are the converging stresses you see?

THD: Demographic, energy, environmental change, especially scarcity of water, shortages of cropland and forest in poor countries, climate, and then finally widening gaps between rich and poor people around the world.

You touched on something a moment ago that's very important. The real problem is that they're all happening together. We've learned in recent decades that revolution or societal collapse tends to happen when societies are stressed from multiple directions simultaneously.

Any one of the problems we face could be a major challenge for human society, but we have things going in the wrong direction in five different ways at the same time. Millions around the world are in a situation of severe water scarcity. That's already having major economic impacts, causing poverty and dislocation, and undermining institutions. Add climate change and the problem becomes that much worse. The two things will multiply each other. You could have a really catastrophic problem where, say, the precipitation fails and there's already water scarcity.

TMN: And the energy issue impacts everything -- moving water, moving people.

THD: Or drilling deeper into the ground to pull more water out of the ground. Energy is kind of a master resource. If we have enough cheap, high quality energy, we can cope with a lot of our other problems. But once energy becomes a lot more expensive, then the combination of climate change and water scarcity will be that much harder to deal with.

TMN: I recall Buckminster Fuller made the basic point that truly accurate economic value is related to energy.

THD: In fact there's a whole way of approaching economics that uses thermodynamics. Herman Daly in particular has pioneered this. Energy is a currency that is fundamental and physical, and it gets you away from prices, which are often distractions. The price of something -- a barrel of oil, a bushel of grain -- includes so many other factors that may not have anything to do with underlying abundance or scarcity of these things.

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Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org).

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