BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY:
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity,
and the Renewal of Civilization
by Thomas Homer-Dixon
Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2006
429 pp., $37
The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the
Problems of the Future?
by Thomas Homer-Dixon
Vintage Canada, 2001
486 pp., $23
Environment, Scarcity, and Violence
by Thomas Homer-Dixon
Princeton University Press, 1999
253 pp., $30
Built in the mid-nineteenth century and once home to a country doctor, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s house in Fergus, Ontario, has an austere yet stately dignity, its exterior walls a blue-grey stone, its windows tall. And at first meeting, Homer-Dixon himself has something of the reserved, morally serious demeanour of a Presbyterian minister. The fifty-year-old director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto and author of the Governor General’s Award-winning The Ingenuity Gap is classically handsome, tall and rail thin, his hair greying, and his eyes a fierce blue.
