What is 'Upside of Down' in COVID?

Review by Bill Doughty––

What if you could go back in time to hear warnings and advice about a global catastrophe?

We can. 

"The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization" by Thomas Homer-Dixon (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2006) teaches us about "catagenesis" –– catastrophe followed by creativity and, eventually, renewal.

His book opens with a bizarre scene from history (just twelve years before the 1918 Great Influenza pandemic, by the way): San Francisco, April 19, 1906, after the U.S. Army had to blow up, using dynamite and artillery fire, damaged buildings including millionaires' mansions. Out of the ashes and expenses of the San Francisco earthquake and fire came "a wave of events that would sweep around the world and, years hence, help create the Federal Reserve System of the United States."

Written during oil shortages, growing terrorism and increasing threats from climate change –– including devastating fires in southern California in 2003 –– Professor Homer-Dixon shows the way toward resilience through innovation.

Now, much more than a decade later, Homer-Dixon's analyses, warnings and recommendations can apply to the catastrophe we're living through in 2020.

Here are some of his warnings:

• Pandemics: "The codes of devastating diseases, including smallpox and the 1918 Spanish Flu are now publicly available, and the machines that allow biologists to mutate the genes of common viruses to make them more lethal, or even to construct viruses from scratch, can be found in laboratories around the world."
• Climate: "At least for a while, we can generate great wealth for ourselves by drawing down nature's capital –– by overusing our soils and forests, overfishing the oceans, and pouring immense quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Eventually, though, when nature's capital nears exhaustion, this reckless behavior will catch up with us, because overstressed ecosystems can lose their resilience and suddenly collapse. In some cases they already have..."
• Stressors: "The population, energy, environmental, climate, and economic stresses affecting our world are just like tectonic stresses: they're deep, invisible, yet immensely powerful; they're building slowly; and they can release their force suddenly without warning."
• Growth: "That's the real problem, because there's no sign we're about to give up our commitment to growth. Meanwhile, our energy consumption is pushing the limits of supply, and our output of waste, especially of carbon dioxide, is pushing Earth's natural systems beyond their thresholds of resilience."
• Leadership: "People will want reassurance. 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." (Us and them; the Other.)

Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon (homerdixon.com)

A failure to recognize the threats –– and embrace opportunities for creative renewal ––can bring about total collapse, as Homer-Dixon shows in his brilliant examples from Ancient Rome.

Roman society depended on slave labor and a Ponzi scheme of creating wealth by conquering and exploiting other territories. Significant wealth inequality contributed to the decadence and destruction of Rome, especially when hundreds of wealthy landowners evaded paying taxes, and the empire exceeded its energy requirements.

While we may see a temporary over-abundance of oil at the moment, particularly in these early weeks and months of the novel coronavirus pandemic, we must realize the finiteness of fossil fuels and the existential threat and danger of growth for growth's sake.

He advises to "keep it simple," rely on science, and go with granularity when it comes to intelligence and national defense. 

A U.S. Marine assigned to Marine Corps Intelligence Schools, Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center, attends class at Naval Base Dam Neck, Virginia Beach, Va., Jan 17, 2017. The school provides intelligence language training and remote sensor system operators in order to provide technically proficient Marines to the operating forces and supporting establishments. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Laura Mercado)

"The intelligence and defense agencies of countries used to focus their resources mainly on tracking, assessing, and responding to threats from large agglomerations of military force, like armies massed along borders, naval fleets at sea, and missiles in their silos," Homer-Dixon writes. "Today such agencies have to pay much more attention than before to small groups and even single persons."

Another stuttering, uncommon, but perfect word in "The Upside of Down" is "concatenating" –– chained together and reinforcing each other in entirely unexpected ways.

On a crowded interdependent planet, hurricanes, financial crises, droughts, and disease outbreaks can have devastating impacts. This warning in "The Upside of Down" comes from fourteen years ago!:

"Our world's tight connectivity also promotes the rapid spread of disease. In fact, we are now seeing a negative synergy between the massive size of the human population and its internal connectivity that helps new diseases –– like HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and perhaps soon avian influenza –– develop and propagate around the planet faster than ever before. Collectively, humankind now makes up one of the largest bodies of genetically identical biomasses on Earth: all of us, taken together, weigh nearly a third of a billion tons. Combined with our proximity in enormous cities, and our constant travel back and forth across the globe, we're now a rich environment –– just like a huge Petri dish brimming with nutrients –– for the spread of disease."

And in our globally connected but complex ecosystem of a world we are led to another "new" word (or at least new use of a word): "Panarchy" –– a theory that "helps us see our world's tectonic stresses as part of long-term global process of change and adaption. It also illustrates the way catastrophe caused by such stresses could produce a surge of creativity leading to the renewal of our global civilization." Resilience!

Navy Chief William Imfeld of USS Shoup (DDG 86) inspects a foreign fishing boat's freezer
for an Oceania Maritime Security Initiative with the Coast Guard in 2018. (MC2 W. Collins III)

The devastating effects of overfishing in the world's oceans has led to international agreements and the hope for more cooperation on the global commons. Although not included in this book, but as an example of ingenuity in the face of necessity, the U.S. Coast Guard operates in coordination with the U.S. and Canadian navies and other entities, including Canada's Department of Oceans and Fisheries, to help enforce international laws and treaties.

Homer-Dixon writes, "Economists in particular say that human beings if given the right incentives, are smart enough to solve just about any problem that comes their way." He notes the irony of the morbid incentives that exist in dwindling numbers of fish that become worth more due to their very scarcity.

Crewmembers of U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Sequoia (WLB 215) stand with members of Oceans and Fisheries Canada before boarding vessels in the Western Pacific Ocean July 30, 2018. The crews boarded vessels to ensure compliance with Western and Central Fisheries Convention regulations.
(U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Amanda Levasseur/Released)

How can we incentivize good behavior as we harness the ingenuity of humans who want to see balance, ethics, critical thinking, science, and cooperation in our progress forward?

(By the way, while this book –– with its extensive notes and fascinating references to history and science –– gives us a snapshot from the past, Homer-Dixon offers more recent commentaries and perspectives, including some essays about the novel coronavirus, on his website, including his Pandemic Log, where he examines the science, economics and prospects of COVID-19.)

C.S. "Buzz" Hollings (Wikipedia)

In "The Upside of Down" we meet some fascinating people, including Crawford S. "Buzz" Holling, "one of the world's great ecologists." Homer-Dixon takes us to Florida's Gulf Coast to meet Holling, one of the creators of panarchy theory, and discuss adaptive cycles of growth, collapse, regeneration, and then growth again.

Holling, who passed away last August at the age of 88, was a proponent of resilience in the face of deep collapse. He predicted a "rare and major 'pulse' of social transformation" –– much like punctuated equilibrium in evolution –– on scale with the shift from hunter-gatherers to agricultural settlements, the industrial revolution, and global communication connectivity, including through the internet and World Wide Web.

Holling advised, "The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living." Perhaps we can consider Holling's words in contemplating a new normal after COVID-19.

Homer-Dixon said, "We'll see shortly that exuberant experimentation is essential to social resilience." Renewal can come, but "we need to prepare to turn breakdown to our advantage when it happens –– because it will."

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and financial panic of 1907 led to the formulation of the Federal Reserve System, which has acted as a "backstop" for rich countries' economies. The Great Depression led to creation of the Social Security System. It could be argued that the First World War led to women's right to vote and both world wars helped integrate societies and ignite the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

What will we, as world citizens, bring about in COVID-19's aftermath?

The U.S. Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels, and the U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron, the Thunderbirds, conduct a flyover April 28 to honor frontline COVID-19 responders and essential workers with a formation over New York City. (Photo by MC3 Omar Rubi)