By now it’s clear that our world faces a series of unprecedented ecological, economic, and geopolitical challenges. Too often, we look at these challenges in isolation from one another, perhaps because we don’t have a theoretical foundation to help us understand how they interact. Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Knopft Canada, 2006) provides just this sort of foundation. His work allows us to see past the sizzling trees to assess the direction and scale of the fire that’s consuming the forest.

Homer-Dixon is the director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict studies. In his book he reviews cutting-edge research on the breakdown of complex systems and applies its findings to our global community.

Complex systems evolve in cycles. At the beginning of the cycle, such a system has a high level of resiliency and a low level of inter-connectedness. As time goes on, the components of the system establish intricate relationships, increasing their inter-connectedness and complexity. This increases their potential for diversification, but it also increases their vulnerability, as problems in one part of the system can rapidly spread throughout the system. Eventually, the system becomes so complex and so vulnerable that it suffers a breakdown.

The next stage in the cycle depends on the vitality of both the sub-systems supporting it and the macro-systems surrounding it. If these sub-systems and macro-systems are healthy, then the breakdown can actually play a positive role in the system’s life-cycle. The latent potentials developed during the system’s preceding growth phase, potentials that were suppressed by the previous networks of interdependence, are now liberated, and the system regenerates in a new form. If, however, the sub-systems and macro-systems are impoverished, the system may not recover for a very long time, if ever.

Forests provide a good example. At the beginning of a forest’s growth cycle, plants and animals haven’t had the time to develop tightly connected relationships. There’s room for growth and experimentation, and problems in one part of the system, such as diseases and fires, don’t affect the entire forest. As the forest grows, the plants and animals develop closer relationships: they monopolize previously empty ecological niches, and become more dependant upon the stability of those niches. As plants and animals become more tightly coupled in their various relationships, damage to any part of the forest can quickly affect the functioning of the entire forest. Dry, dead wood becomes more common, and eventually a forest fire dramatically reduces the forest’s complexity. If the soil remains fertile and the weather patterns stable, the forest regenerates. New types of plants can flourish, and animals can begin experimenting with new sources of nourishment. On the other hand, if the soil is barren, or if weather patterns produce less moisture than before, the forest may perish.

It’s dangerous to prevent breakdowns. The longer we delay a breakdown, the more likely it is that it will occur at the same time as breakdowns in sub-systems and macro-systems. For decades, governments in the Pacific Northwest suppressed forest fires. This allowed dead wood to pile up like tinder on the forest floor. As the climate warmed, the woods dried out and the pine beetle infestation spread through the tightly-coupled forest ecosystem. When the fires came they were fiercer than anything firefighters had seen before. They were hot enough to kill the seeds that would have otherwise regenerated the forest and to wipe out animals that would normally have survived to participate in the next phase of the cycle.

Taken individually, draught, the pine beetle infestation and the accumulation of dead wood couldn’t produce the infernos that have torched our forests in recent years. When taken together, however, these stresses interacted in ways that produced a catastrophe far in excess of their individual contributions.

Societies also move through these phases, and usually break down when they become too interconnected and complex for their own good. When confronted with a series of devastating stresses, a society that has reached a high level of complexity can quickly fall apart. If its resource base remains relatively intact, the society can regenerate in new ways, exploiting opportunities for economic, political, and cultural organization that were previously ignored. If, however, its resource base has been badly depleted by such things as deforestation, soil erosion, and over-fishing, regeneration may be impossible. The longer a society avoids breakdown, the more likely it is that when breakdown happens it will be accompanied by a breakdown in its resource base, with catastrophic consequences.

Howard-Dixon believes that our global society has avoided breakdown for a very long time. Because of this delay, five serious stresses have been building up, stresses that are interacting dynamically at every level of our civilization.

They include rising economic stress caused by growing inequality, with its accompanying threat of social chaos and extremism; demographic stress resulting from much higher birthrates in impoverished countries than in affluent nations, as well as from the growth of unstable mega-cities; environmental stress caused by deteriorating natural resources, particularly in countries that can’t defend themselves from corporate predation; climate stress brought about by global warming; and energy stress from the imbalance between our rising energy demands and our plateauing energy supplies. These stresses are aggravated by increasing interconnectedness throughout the global system and by the growing access small groups of people have to weapons of mass destruction.

Energy stress is particularly important. To manage the other stresses within the current system, we need to develop higher levels of social complexity. To manage climate change, for example, we would have to create and maintain a comprehensive global regulatory regime and very well-funded and sophisticated international problem-solving institutions. Unfortunately, a society’s complexity is dependent upon its energy supply.

Our global economy requires constant growth to keep unemployment levels low and class conflict suppressed, as well as to maintain viable democratic institutions and effective government bureaucracies. This growth requires ever-more energy, and that energy comes predominantly from oil. The demand for oil is rising exponentially, while the global production of oil has either already peaked or will peak in the very near future. Even allowing for technological advancement and the development of alternative energy sources, the prognosis for our energy supply is very poor. As energy becomes more costly, it will become far more difficult for our society to maintain its complexity, much less dramatically increase it. Our capacity to manage our global stresses within the current system is going to contract as the stresses grow.

By preventing societal breakdown for so long, we’re pushing our ecological, economic, and social systems to the point of simultaneous collapse. Howard-Dixon argues that the breakdown of our global system is almost certainly inevitable and possibly imminent. When it happens, we need to be ready, which means that we need to do everything we can to improve the resiliency of every level of our society. Resiliency must take priority over economic efficiency: a very efficient, streamlined, and highly interconnected system is far more vulnerable than a largely decentralized system whose important functions are protected by multiple layers of redundancy.

Homer-Dixon writes, “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 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.”

If we aren’t ready, Howard-Dixon says that extremists will be. He isn’t the only one warning of this danger. In American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Simon and Schuster, 2007), Chris Hedges argues that the radical Christian right has the institutional infrastructure in place to implement a totalitarian agenda if America suffers a series of ecological disasters, a devastating terrorist attack, or a depression. I suspect that fundamentalist groups in various religions around the world are similarly positioned. Of course, such takeovers won’t help matters at all. Totalitarian societies have far poorer problem-solving capacities than democracies, and they tend to address their difficulties with measures that aggravate breakdown-producing stresses.

Our woods will soon be ablaze. Our actions will determine which seeds, if any, will survive the fire.