University of Toronto Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon writes provocative and influential books on issues of global importance, roaming effortlessly across scholarly disciplines and distilling insights from complex theoretical literatures. His arguments illuminate complicated global processes, describe the problems they generate and their likely trajectories, and identify responses that individuals, businesses, and policymakers should consider. His latest book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, deserves a wide readership and should be the focus of animated discussions in classrooms, journals, and policy arenas around the world.