Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon World 3 at 50 – What it got right and what it got wrong – CACOR Zoom Series

Topic: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon World 3 at 50
Time: Jan 12, 2022 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Summary:

World3—the computer program used in the Limits to Growth study, commissioned by the Club of Rome and published in 1972 by a team of MIT researchers under the direction of the famed Jay Forrester—was the first serious effort to model humanity and its natural environment as a single, integrated, global system.  In World3, worsening scarcity of nonrenewable resources was the main driver of global crisis. However, the distinction between nonrenewable and renewable resources is misleading, in part because the very label “renewable” suggests that such resources are more abundant and less vulnerable to degradation than nonrenewables.  Dr Homer-Dixon will show that the critical distinction is between what we can call “complex” and “noncomplex” resources.  Complex resources—including Earth’s climate and the planet’s cycles of fresh water, nitrogen, and carbon, as well as its living systems, like fisheries, forests, and pollinators—have key features that make them particularly vulnerable to over exploitation and degradation.

Biography:

Dr. Homer-Dixon is the Director of the Cascade Institute (Royal Roads University) and holds a research chair in Environment (University of Waterloo).  He was founding director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, and director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (University of Toronto).

He has a BA in political science (Carleton University) and PhD in international relations, defense and arms control policy, and conflict theory (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).  At U of T, he led research projects on the links between environmental stress and violence in poor countries.  At U of W, he has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century, including economic instability, climate change, and energy scarcity.  He also studies how people, organizations, and societies can resolve their conflicts and innovate in response to complex problems.

His books include Commanding Hope, The Upside of Down, The Ingenuity Gap, and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence.

His academic writing has appeared in Ambio, International Security, Journal of Peace Research, and Population and Development Review.  He has also written for non-academic audiences in Foreign Policy, Scientific American, The New York Times, and the Financial Times, and now writes regularly for the Globe and Mail newspaper.