Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of forty books, including Energy and Civilization, published by the MIT Press. In 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. In 2013 Bill Gates wrote on his website that "there is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil."
An epic, multidisciplinary analysis of growth.—Guardian
Smil, whose research spans energy, population and environmental
change, drives home the cost of growth on a finite planet. It is
high: polluted land, air and water, lost wilderness and rising
levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.... Growth urges us to think
differently. That is desperately needed to manage the trade-offs in
making renewables more efficient, improving economic incentives for
fast adoption, minimizing environmental degradation and bettering
lives in a swelling population.—Nature
Growth, whether biological, social or economic, may be normal,
[Smil] says, but the exponential growth in economies and lifestyles
we have seen in recent decades isn't, and can't continue without
disastrous consequences.—New Scientist
Growth is filled with numbers, graphs and mathematical notation.
Yet it's written to be easily understood by non-mathematicians,
making brilliant but accessible use of statistics to illustrate
salient features of growth in all its terrestrial forms (the book's
scope is limited to Earth). In short, Growth is a compelling
read.—Resilience: International Policies, Practices and
Discourses
A somewhat eccentric but really rather compelling read. The
subtitle indicates its ambition. We do literally go from the growth
dynamics of archaea and bacteria all the way to empires.... The joy
of this book is less in the big picture than in the detail. And
what a lot of it! The mind boggles at Smil's extensive reading and
absorption of information. We get the speed at which marathons are
run – over the entire course of human history; the growth rates of
piglets and weight of chickens over time; sales of small
non-industrial motors over time; the envelope for the maximum speed
of travel; Kuznets cycles; Zipf's law for city size.... The middle
section of chapters offer a fantastic overview of technical
progress over long periods in a wide range of technologies. I love
all this detail.—Diane Coyle, The Enlightened Economist
A rich and unique work from one of the leading interdisciplinary
minds in the world today.... An outstanding reference guide for
growth in its many forms, I don't hesitate to say that Growth
should find its way onto the bookshelves of everybody interested in
understanding the complexity of growth and how it affects the urban
landscape.—Spacing Vancouver
In his new book, Growth — a dense, 500-page treatise that covers
everything from 'microorganisms to megacities,'... Smil makes
perhaps an even-more-off-putting proposition: that in order to
'ensure the habitability of the biosphere,' we must at the very
least move away from prioritizing growth and perhaps abandon it
entirely.—New York Magazine
Smil's weighty tome turns out to be both entertaining and erudite,
exploring the benefits and limits of material growth to reach a
fundamental point about the uncertainty of civilization's survival
and the importance of maintaining a habitable biosphere to ensure
it.—
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