New Releases by Thomas Homer-Dixon

Multiple global crises--including the pandemic, climate change, and Russia''s war on Ukraine--have recently linked together in ways that are significant in scope, devastating in effect, but poorly understood. A growing number of scholars and policymakers characterize the situation as a “polycrisis.” Yet this neologism remains poorly defined. We provide the concept with a substantive definition, highlight its value-added in comparison to related concepts, and provide a theoretical framework to explain the causal mechanisms currently entangling many of the world''s crises. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with slow-moving stresses to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and harmful state of disequilibrium. We then identify three causal pathways--common stresses, domino effects, and inter-systemic feedbacks--that can connect multiple global systems to produce synchronized crises. Drawing on current examples, we show that the polycrisis concept is a valuable tool for understanding unfolding crises, generating actionable insights, and opening avenues for future research.

From the #1 BESTSELLING thought leader: Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science and even Lord of the Rings, Thomas Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink. For three decades, the renowned author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, and The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?, has examined the threats to our future security--predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course. He was called The Doom Meister, but we now see how prescient he was. Today just about everything we''ve known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures and institutions) is changing dramatically--too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent, more authoritarian. In his fascinating long-awaited new book (dedicated to his young children), he calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a decisively new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations and collective values. Commanding Hope marshals a fascinating, accessible argument for reinvigorating our cognitive strengths and belief systems to affect urgent systemic change, strengthen our economies and cultures, and renew our hope in a positive future for everyone on Earth.

"We are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die." -James Lovelock, leading climate expert and author of The Revenge of Gaia "I don''t see why people are so worried about global warming destroying the planet - peak oil will take care of that." -Matthew Simmons, energy investment banker and author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy The twin crises of climate change and peaking oil production are converging on us. If they are not to cook the planet and topple our civilization, we will need informed and decisive policies, clear-sighted innovation, and a lucid understanding of what is at stake. We will need to know where we stand, and which direction we should start out in. These are the questions Carbon Shift addresses. Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down, argues that the two problems are really one: a carbon problem. We depend on carbon energy to fuel our complex economies and societies, and at the same time this very carbon is fatally contaminating our atmosphere. To solve one of these problems will require solving the other at the same time. In other words, we still have a chance to tackle two monumental challenges with one innovative solution: clean, low-carbon energy. Carbon Shift brings together six of Canada''s world-class experts to explore the question of where we stand now, and where we might be headed. It explores the economics, the geology, the politics, and the science of the predicament we find ourselves in. And it gives each expert the chance to address what they think are the most important facets of the complex problem before us. There are no experts in Canada better positioned to explain the world that awaits us just beyond the horizon, and no better guide to that future than this collection of their thoughts. Densely packed with information, but accessibly written and powerfully timely, Carbon Shift will be an indispensable handbook to the difficult choices that lie ahead. David Hughes is a former senior geoscientist with the Geological Survey of Canada David Keith is Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment, University of Calgary Jeff Rubin is Chief Economist, Chief Strategist and Managing Director, CIBC World Markets Mark Jaccard is professor of environmental economics in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) William Marsden is an investigative reporter and author of Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn''t Seem to Care) Jeffrey Simpson is a Globe and Mail national columnist and author, with Mark Jaccard, of Hot Air: Meeting Canada''s Climate Change Challenge With a foreword by Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress and What is America?

“Human beings have been smart enough to turn nature to their ends, generate vast wealth for themselves, and double their average life span. But are they smart enough to solve the problems of the 21st century?” -- Thomas Homer-Dixon In The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon, "global guru" (the Toronto Star), asks: is our world becoming too complex, too fast-paced to manage? The challenges facing us converge, intertwine, and remain largely beyond our ken. Most of suspect the "experts don''t really know what''s going on; that as a species we''ve released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. We are fast approaching a time when we may no longer be able to control a world that increasingly exceeds our grasp. This is "the ingenuity gap" -- the term coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon -- the critical gap between our need for practical, innovative ideas to solve complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas. Through gripping narrative stories and incidents that exemplify his arguments, he takes us on a world tour that begins with a heartstopping description of the tragic crash of United Airlines Flight 232 from Denver to Chicago and includes Las Vegas in its desert, a wilderness beach in British Columbia, and his solitary search for a little girl in Patna, India. He shows how, in our complex world, while poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity gaps, our own rich countries are not immune, and we are caught between a requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. When the gap widens, political disintegration and violent upheaval can result, reaching into our own economies and daily lives in subtle ways. In compelling, lucid, prose, he makes real the problems we face and suggests how we might overcome them.

Publisher description

Notre monde est-il devenu trop complexe et trop instable pour que nous puissions exercer sur lui quelque emprise que ce soit ? Les défis qui se posent à nous - que ce soient le réchauffement du climat, les épidémies de sida et de tuberculose, les crises financières - se recoupent et se conjuguent au point que nous ne sommes plus en mesure de comprendre ce qui nous arrive. En outre, nous entretenons l''affreux doute que " les experts " n''en savent pas beaucoup plus long que nous. Voilà ce que Thomas Homer-Dixon appelle le déficit de l''imagination, ce fossé qui sépare notre besoin d''imagination - imagination qui nous permettrait de trouver des solutions à ces problèmes aussi complexes que cruciaux - et notre capacité à stimuler cette imagination. L''auteur nous montre que si, dans notre univers complexe, les pays pauvres sont particulièrement vulnérables à ce phénomène, les pays riches sont également menacés par le déficit de l''intelligence. A mesure que le phénomène s''amplifie, on assiste à une augmentation de la désintégration politique et à une multiplication des conflits violents, situation qui peut influencer le cours de nos vies de façon subtile et inattendue. Par une argumentation audacieuse, Homer-Dixon formule de façon saisissante les problèmes qui sont les nôtres aujourd''hui et propose des pistes de solutions, applicables aussi bien à la sphère privée qu''au monde des affaires.