for: Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, The Upside of Down, Commanding Hope, Cascade Institute, Polycrisis

SUMMARY

• Thomas Homer-Dixon is a researcher in polycrisis and author of a number of books on aspects of the polycrisis.
• Here he talks about "Commanding Hope", following his other books "The Ingenuity Gap", "The Upside of Down".
• Homer-Dixon explores the idea of hope situated in his life, especially surrounding his children and their future in an uncertain world.
• In particular, he explores a robust form of hope that is honest, astute and powerful and he unpacks the meaning of each of these qualities.
• Even when the odds are stacked against us, robust hope gives us hope that we can make a big difference.
• Homer-Dixon offers a bounty of insights for anyone engaged in rapid whole system change. His Cascade Institute is developing tools to assist individuals and organizations alike who want to find the leverage points for rapid system change.

for: polycrisis, perfect storm, reinforcing feedbacks,

paraphrase

• the polycrisis is a network of self-reinforcing and diverse crisis:
  • political polarization
  • war
  • fossil fuel entrenchment and expansion
  • precarity
  • migration
  • climate crisis
  • extreme weather
  • AI
  • political polarization
  • misinformation and interference of sovereign voting
  • emergence of authoritarianism
  • incorrect focus of effort - tinkering at the margins
  • runaway inequality - wealth, racial, post colonial, gender
  • dominance of capitalist wealth aspiration
  • rapid change required for entire system
  • sense of despair, hopelessness, anger, fear
  • mass extinction
  • climate departure
  • increasing health burden
  • runaway pollution
  • lack of effective government regulation
  • approaching planetary tipping points
• the "perfect storm" assumes that these crisis are not related, but they are all syncrhonizing through positive feedbacks -their self-reinforcing positive feedbacks amplify all of them together and it can reach a threshold beyond human institutions to be able to cope
• Commanding Hope or "Hope to" is critical for meeting these challenges

for: book - Commanding Hope - description

book: Commanding Hope

• This is a book about agency, activism and personal engagement
• It takes a philosophical understanding of hope and applies it to the polycrisis we face

for: polycrisis, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Cascade Institute Royal Roads University - Changemakers Speakers Series, etymology - polylcrisis

Talk: Hope in the Polycrisis

Date: 2023

SUMMARY

• Thomas Homer-Dixon is a leading complex systems scientist and director of the Cascade Institute, which he co-founded at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., Canada, to study the polycrisis and identify strategic high leverage interventions that could rapidly shift humanity's trajectory in the next few critical years.
• The talk, entitled "Hope in the polycriisis" chronicles Homer-Dixon's multi-decade journey to understand the convergence of crisis happening in the world today.

• In a real sense, the evolution of his thinking on these complex problems are reflected in the series of books he has written over the years, culminating in the 2023 book "Commanding Hope", based on a theory of hope:

  • Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, 1999). - a book showing how other factors combine with environmental stress to produce violence.
  • “The Ingenuity Gap: Can Poor Countries Adapt to Resource Scarcity?,” which appeared in Population and Development Review in 1995
  • “Resource Scarcity and Innovation: Can Poor Countries Attain Endogenous Growth?" ?” coauthored with Edward Barbier, which appeared in Ambio (1999)
  • The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (2006), examined the threat to global stability of simultaneous and interacting demographic, environmental, economic, and political stresses. This led to examining energy as a major factor in our modern society.
  • "Commanding Hope: The Power we have to Renew a World in Peril"
    • https://commandinghope.com/

• Homer-Dixon also talks about practical solutions, His team at Casacade Institute is researching a promising technology called ultra-deep geothermal, which could provide unlimted energy at energy densities comprable to fossil fuels.

• He finishes his talk with his theory of Hope and how a "Robust" hope can be the key to a successful rapid transition.

etymology - polycrisis

• https://polycrisis.org/lessons/where-did-the-term-polycrisis-come-from/
• Complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern first used the term polycrisis in their 1999 book, Homeland Earth, to argue that the world faces
  • “no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem" (p. 74).
• South African sociologist and sustainable transitions theorist Mark Swilling then adopted the term to capture
  • “a nested set of globally interactive socio-economic, ecological and cultural-institutional crises that defy reduction to a single cause” (2013, p. 98).
• Climate change, rising inequality, and the threat of financial crises interact in complex ways that multiply their overall impact (Swilling 2013, 2019).