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Day after day, we are bombarded by news of environmental collapse, wars over energy, population crises in poor countries, and dysfunctional communities in rich ones. In short, doom and gloom – coming to a town near you. But that’s not good enough, says Thomas Homer-Dixon. Surely we can we lessen the severity of impending disasters. What happened to human ingenuity? And are there things we can learn from our collective knowledge? Homer-Dixon is a long-time observer of global trends, and among the first to identify social breakdown as a possible consequence of unchecked environmental degradation. Governments everywhere, from his native Canada to the UK, pay attention to him because the kites he flies are less prone to crashing than most. So his latest book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization, is likely to be read by policy wonks and worried individuals alike. It’s a wake-up call for millions feeling overwhelmed by an unrelieved diet of disaster. As he told Ehsan Masood, the point is both to understand our interconnected world – and to change it.

What kind of breakdown forces are we facing?

We are in a time of fundamental crisis. I see five “stress” factors as likely to have the biggest impact on future disasters. Energy stress, especially from oil scarcity. Economic stress from global instability and gaps in the incomes of rich and poor. Population stress from differentials in growth rates between rich and poor, and from megacities in poor societies. Stress from worsening damage to land, water, forests and fisheries. And climate stress from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.

Are there solutions?

We need radical thinking. One idea is what I would call open-source democracy, where you get a lot of people together using the online world to think collectively about how to solve our common problems.

What would be the role of the expert, scientific or otherwise, in this brave new collaborative world?

In the Wiki world, everyone has access to the same knowledge. Many people no longer feel that experts have additional authority. If knowledge is power, then today everyone has enormous power. What we need to do is get all of the people to take responsibility for the knowledge that we all possess. So, for example, in climate change, you don’t have an expert come in and say do this or do that. Instead, you encourage lay people to learn about the details of energy or the atmosphere, so the quality of the bigger conversation is improving all the time. I’m not saying experts don’t have a role: they will be part of the conversation, but they should not dominate.

Your book seems to cover similar ground to a number of recent books, such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Martin Rees’s Our Final Century.

There is an important difference. Their stories end with breakdown, suggesting that if we have breakdown, it’s “game over”. I think that if certain kinds of breakdown happen, that’s when things get really interesting. Between the alternatives of a prosperous business-as-usual future and catastrophic social collapse is a continuum of possible futures. Some of these might be very grim, but others might generate opportunities for positive change if we are smart enough to exploit them.

I especially like the Rees book because he brings gravitas to grave problems facing humanity. Collapse is admirable but is wanting in a lot of ways: for example, it uses a lot of historical references which have somewhat dubious relevance today. Our western civilisation is exceptional in as much as we have democracy, markets and science, and Diamond doesn’t effectively show why these things won’t stave off catastrophe.

Are there examples of when catastrophe leads to renewal?

I call this phenomenon catagenesis – rebirth through breakdown. In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake there was a financial crisis in both the US and the UK. This led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System. This one event reformed American capitalism and created one of the most important institutions of the modern world.

Could we experiment so we get in some practice under less drastic conditions?

Yes, I think we should use small-scale experiments to see which technologies, organisations and procedures work best under different breakdown scenarios. How, for instance, will we move around, feed ourselves and generate energy if our conventional ways of doing these things have been disrupted? And how are we going to keep extremists from manipulating people who are suddenly scared and angry? I don’t have complete answers but we should be out there looking now.

Isn’t there another problem, in that solutions may run counter to our economic model, which relies on perpetual growth?

Yes. In rich countries we need to figure out if there are feasible alternatives to our hidebound commitment to economic growth, because it’s increasingly clear that endless material growth is incompatible with the long-term viability of Earth’s environment. We need to know what a “steady state” economy – one with a roughly constant output of goods and services – might look like. What economic and ethical values might it have? Could it include some (albeit radically transformed) version of market capitalism? Would it be compatible with personal and social liberty? How would the political and social conflicts that would inevitably arise if there were no growth be resolved? Breakdown will discredit this economic rationalisation and create intellectual spaces for new ideas. But this space will be brutally competitive and might throw up rather cruel scenarios. We can boost the chances that humane alternatives will thrive by working them out now and disseminating them as widely as possible.

Could the process that spawned Wikipedia and open-source projects even help produce these humane alternatives?

Yes, I think so. What’s interesting about Wikipedia is that if someone had said 15 years ago that you could have a volunteeristic process, gathering knowledge to produce an encyclopedia which is almost as good as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, people would have laughed. I know there are teething troubles but the Wikipedia people are working on them. The details of the structure of open-source architecture will determine these projects’ success.

Are you actively involved in open-source projects?

I want to concentrate on how to use them to address the very toughest problems, such as energy and climate change. One example is already on my website. Before Paul Martin became prime minister of Canada, we talked about how to solve complex problems, such as public healthcare. His first reaction was to get 20 world experts around a table in a closed room. I said they might come out with good suggestions, but no one would buy into them because they’d be from 20 experts in a room. The world has changed: we have diffusion of power to the general public so we all need to take responsibility along with that power.

Did the PM get it in the end?

He was very receptive.

Your book shows recent civilisations disappearing much faster than older ones. Does this worry you?

Sure. When collapse starts it happens much faster now because everything is very tightly coupled. The evidence seems to be that as history progresses, societal collapses take place much more quickly.

If we don’t seize opportunities when they present themselves, what is the worst that could happen?

Because systems are all much more connected now, failures in one set of systems eventually affect all the others: in a sense, we are one system now. In Canada, for example, we had a huge cod fishery which was considered to be the most productive on Earth. Then it collapsed, most likely because of overfishing. The ecological system had been pushed to a new equilibrium. There is no reason in principle why this wouldn’t happen on a global scale. We just don’t know what kind of game we’re playing, and we may well push our global system beyond its limits and to a new equilibrium – one not suited to human prosperity.

But humans are often at their best, and achieve their greatest accomplishments, in moments of crisis and rapid change, and I hope against hope that the same will be true in coming decades.