In praise of Vaclav Smil: “There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.” – Bill Gates
Many people … could halve their energy and material consumption … without losing anything important. People don’t realize how much excess they have in their lives.”
— Vaclav Smil
The American Energy Society has selected Vaclav Smil as the Energy Writer of the Year, 2019, for his book, Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities (MIT Press).
Vaclav Smil contends that growth is one of two constants at the center of 
everything: the lives of microorganisms and the development of human beings; the harnessing of wind and water and the invention of machines; the fortunes of economies and the development of cities….” Growth is an omnipresent reality of all life and every society.
The other universal constant: growth has natural limits.
In Growth, Vaclav Smil traces the arc of it all, from origins to end. Consequently, Growth is unavoidably dense. Readers who are intimidated by its weight should comfortably skim certain sections – like the logarithmic analysis of Malthusian population trends – but should also take time to pause and reflect on the many powerful ideas behind the data. Readers who invest the intellectual effort will be rewarded with a profound grasp of Smil’s larger thesis: perhaps humanity has exhausted its limits.
No doubt Growth will have its critics who hold desperately to certain sacred assumptions. For instance, bestselling author Thomas Friedman argued that because the world is flat, everything is interconnected: “what works in one place has value for everyone.” But in Growth, Smil rejects such formulae, as when he compares countries: “Denmark has little in common with the Philippines, and neither have much in common with Nigeria. Consequently, Nigeria needs a lot more growth (like food); the Philippines needs a little more growth (like medicine); and Denmark needs a lot less growth.”
Smil is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on development history and a master of statistical analysis, Vaclav Smil is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Over more than 40 years, his books on the environment, population, food and energy have steadily grown in influence. A self-proclaimed “slayer of bullshit,” his non-fiction was influenced by his first 26 years in Czechoslovakia “surrounded by Commie propaganda” during the era of the Soviet bloc. ◊
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