Review by External Professor Tim Kohler (Washington State University)
Some books make you larger, and some books make you small. Marten Scheffer’s new book is a triumph all in all!
I feel no shame in channeling both Grace Slick and Alice in Wonderland; Marten Scheffer’s book, Tipping out of Trouble, will open your mind to how scientific knowledge can be turned into social change to address our most dire problems.
These problems, as we well know, are fundamentally intertwined: a planetary crisis driven by ever-increasing anthropogenic CO2 coupled to an earth-system crisis driven by our “exponentially rising human footprint;” Per-capita consumption in high-income countries of some 24 tons/person/year (of extracted biomass, fossil fuels, metals, and minerals embodied in final demand) in 2020; Societies riven by individualism, lack of trust in institutions, extreme (and rapidly increasing) wealth inequality, and political polarization.
And yet, starting from its title, the fundamental tone of this book is hopeful. The big question is how our global industrialized society can escape the state just described in favor of one where “humans and other species can thrive in the centuries to come.” Scheffer begins by explaining how dynamical systems can rapidly change from one relatively steady state to another as one of its basins of attraction steadily shallows (“loses resilience”) through slow change, to the point where small events (environmentally induced, or intentional actions) can move the system past a “tipping point” into an alternate basin representing a new and relatively stable state. Since the beginning of his career as a young limnologist, Scheffer has applied this and similar models in his earliest publications on lake eutrophication, eventually finding resonances in changes of systems as diverse as human brains at the onset of migraines, coral reefs, oceans, forests and arid lands.
In this book, though, as in much of his more recent work, he’s most concerned with change in societies, especially the relationships between societies and their climates/ecosystems. Take smoking in public, for example: In keeping with the general model of tipping points, widespread changes in a society’s norms and behaviors have happened suddenly, tipping into a new regime only after incremental pressures (say, from activists) reveal how current practice (public smoking) is at odds with a growing awareness of its ill effects. This suggests that there is hope in our various small actions (recycling, purchasing an EV) even though they may seem to lead nowhere immediately.
Two things make the tipping-point model interesting. The first is its generality, and the second is its ability to provide some metrics (e.g., high temporal autocorrelation, and slower recovery from perturbation) for how complex systems should behave shortly before a state shift. Prediction of any social phenomenon is no small feat.
I urge you to read the book to find its more specific recommendations for speeding movement towards a less stressful and more just society that respects its planetary boundaries. Scheffer is usually quite cautious in attributing causality, but I agree with the weight he places on economic inequality as a key precipitator of many of our social ills, deeply connected as well with our vast consumptive habits. Though the book has some competitors, this is the one I’ll be gifting to my local congressman …
Marten Scheffer’s new book towers over them all.