"Thomas Homer-Dixon is one of the few people on the planet who could have tackled what he defines as the world’s overriding issue: the yawning ‘ingenuity’ gap between the need for practical solutions to complex problems, from global warming to Third World poverty, and the actual supply of workable ideas.

His most recent book, The Upside of Down:  Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, was an immediate #1 best-seller in Canada, a Globe and Mail Top 100 pick, and the winner of the 2006 National Business Book Award.  His previous book, The Ingenuity Gap, won the 2001 Governor-General’s Award for Nonfiction.  His first book, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, won the Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize of the American Political Science Association.

As one of Canada’s foremost public intellectuals, Dr. Homer-Dixon writes regularly for the Toronto Globe and Mail and the New York Times.  He has also written for the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the International Herald Tribune.  His widely cited scholarly articles have appeared in leading journals, including International Security, International Studies Quarterly, and Population and Development Review.

"Human beings have been smart enough to turn nature to their ends, generate vast wealth for themselves, and double their average life span. But are they smart enough to solve the problems of the 21st century?"

—Thomas Homer-Dixon

He has been invited to speak about his ideas and research at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Cornell Universities; UC Berkeley; the University of Chicago; West Point; Oxford and Cambridge Universities; the World Bank; the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Dr. Homer-Dixon has provided briefings to the Privy Council Office, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Department of Defense in Canada; and to the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the National Intelligence Council, the State Department,  the Agency for International Development, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States.

Selected Lecture Topics

• Energy, society, and economic change
• Climate change and society
• Leadership in a world of complexity, speed, and surprise
• Building resilient organizations, cities, and societies
• Threats to international security in the 21^st century, including terrorism
• Education for a new world
• The Ingenuity Gap

• Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future (Random House Canada, 2009)
• The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Island Press, 2006)
• The Ingenuity Gap (Vintage Books, 2002)
• Environment, Scarcity and Violence (Princeton University Press, 2001)
• Ecoviolence: Links Among Environment, Population, and Security, edited by Thomas Homer-Dixon and Jessica Blitt (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,1998)
  

• “Climate Summit Was a Pathetic Exercise in Deceit,” Toronto Globe and Mail, December 12, 2011.
• “And Now the Weather: Nasty and Brutish,” Toronto Globe and Mail, December 31, 2010.
• “Disaster at the Top of the World,” New York Times, Editorial / Opinion, Sunday, August 23, 2010.
• Homer-Dixon, Thomas, and Weaver, Andrew, “Responding to the Skeptics,” Toronto Globe and Mail, Monday, December 7, 2009.
• Homer-Dixon, Thomas, and Keith, David, “Blocking the Sky to Save the Earth,” New York Times, Editorial / Opinion, Saturday, September 20, 2008.

• “Unconventional Wisdom: Economies Can’t Just Keep on Growing,” Foreign Policy, January 2011.
• “Fear is Good,” Toronto Globe and Mail, April 4, 2009.
• “The Stag Hunt: Deflation as a Collective Action Problem,” Toronto Globe and Mail, November 26, 2008.
• “Unbounded uncertainty #2,” Toronto Globe and Mail, September 26, 2008.
• Homer-Dixon, Thomas, and Wolfe, Sarah, “Everything is not Peachy,” Toronto Globe and Mail, August 18, 2008.

• “Our Fukushima Moment,”Toronto Globe and Mail, March 18, 2011.
• “The Enticements of Green Carrots,”Toronto Globe and Mail, Saturday, August 9, 2009.
• Homer-Dixon, Thomas, and Friedmann, Julio S.,“Clean Coal? Go Underground, Alberta,”Toronto Globe and Mail, Monday, May 4, 2009.
• “A Win-Win-Win Situation,”Toronto Globe and Mail, Saturday, March 8, 2008.
• “The Age of Cheap Oil is Ending,”Toronto Globe and Mail, Monday, August 6, 2007.
• “The End of Ingenuity,” New York Times, Editorial / Opinion, Wednesday, November 29, 2006.

• “Climate Change, the Arctic, and Canada: Avoiding Yesterday’s Analysis of Tomorrow’s Crisis,” 20th Anniversary Conference of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, Ottawa, Ontario, Thursday, October 30, 2008.
• “Terror in the Weather Forecast,” New York Times, Editorial / Opinion, Tuesday, April 24, 2007.

• “When Wise Words Are Not Enough,” Nature, March 19, 2009.
• “Prepare Today for Tomorrow’s Breakdown,” Toronto Globe and Mail, Monday, May 14, 2007.

• “We’re Losing Our Past to Technology,” Toronto Globe and Mail, Saturday, December 24, 2011.
• “Caught Up in Our Own Connections,” New York Times, Editorial / Opinion, August 13, 2005.

• “Pull up Terrorism by the Roots,” Toronto Globe and Mail, Monday, September 11, 2006.
• “Brittle Cities are Easily Broken,” Toronto Globe and Mail, Saturday, July 23, 2005.
• “The Rise of Complex Terrorism,”Foreign Policy, January/February 2002.
• “Why Root Causes are Important (Published title: We Ignore Misery at Our Peril),” Toronto Globe and Mail, September 26, 2001.
• “Now Comes the Real Danger,” Toronto Globe and Mail, September 12, 2001.

• “War: Which Way to Turn?” Toronto Globe and Mail, February 8, 2003.
• “The Virulence of Violence: Small Arms, Many Wars, Large Threat,” Washington Post, February 4, 2001.

Awards

• 2007 National Business Book Award for The Upside of Down
• 2001 Governor General's Nonfiction Award for The Ingenuity Gap
• 2000 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize; the Science, Technology and Environmental Politics Section on the American Political Science Association for Environment, Scarcity, and Violence.
  
• 1999 American Political Science Association Caldwell Prize for Environment, Scarcity, and Violence
  

Dr. Thomas Homer Dixon lectures on the meaning of national security discourse:

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon discusses his book, The Upside of Down, on Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria:

Audio interviews and podcasts by Dr. Homer-Dixon can be found here.

For more information about Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and his work please visit  www.homerdixon.com .