Thomas Homer-Dixon is holding a cordless phone in his lap, in anticipation of his wife’s call. She’s in the midst of defending her PhD thesis, and he has asked her to call the moment she is finished. The phone’s proximity is the only sign that he’s feeling stressed. Serving up tea and cookies in his living room, he’s the picture of a celebrity professor—poised, serious, hyper-articulate—except when he smiles, at which point he transforms from Michael Ignatieff’s more handsome doppelgänger into an overeager 12-year-old.

Then again, Homer-Dixon (friends call him Tad) knows a few things about handling stress—in a way, it’s his professional expertise. The head of U of T’s Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, he is the go-to guy on the connections between environmental degradation and war (he sometimes jocularly refers to himself as Dr. Doom). In 2000, Homer-Dixon published his best-selling The Ingenuity Gap, a stark warning about how development and innovation may create as many problems as they solve.

The Upside of Down is a sequel of sorts. In it, he argues that as societies grow more complex and use up readily available energy sources, they become less able to cope with such stresses as global warming, energy scarcity and population imbalances.

But those apocalyptic scenarios seem far away as Homer-Dixon offers a quick tour of his home of the last four years, an 1860s stone cottage in Fergus, near Guelph—all high ceilings and intricate crown mouldings. It means a 90-minute commute, but to him it’s worth it. “You get a lot more for your money out here,” he says. “It’s partly why we came.”

Another reason is that Homer-Dixon feels most at home in the country. Born in 1956, he grew up near Prospect Lake, on Vancouver Island. His father, a forester, gave him early lessons in ecology. His mother, an artist, was ill with multiple sclerosis for much of his childhood, and died when he was 13. As a child, his main window onto the outside world came from Time Life books.

Homer-Dixon paid his way as an undergraduate through a series of jobs, including summers in the Alberta oil patch. He completed a degree in poli-sci at Carleton and spent his spare time setting up the Canadian student wing of the pacifist group Pugwash. Next came a doctorate at MIT. “I was very driven in my 20s,” he says. “I was still unpacking the death of my mother, and it took me a long time to understand how traumatic that had been.”