From Quartz:
Meet Vaclav Smil, the Canadian polymath whose books Bill Gates is racing to read
HT: the Financial Times' FT Alphaville blogA few weeks ago, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates published his personal summer reading list on his blog Gates Notes. Of the eight titles, two are by the same author, a Canadian professor emeritus you’ve probably never heard of: Vaclav Smil.+“I’m trying to read everything he writes, but he publishes so quickly that I can’t keep up,” Gates writes of Smil on his blog.Smil, who taught in the department of Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba until 2011, can only be described as an interdisciplinary scholar. He has written about a large number of globally significant issues and trends, though he tends to focus on energy, food production, and the environment. The two Smil books on Gates’s summer agenda are about the fall of manufacturing in the US and the rise of sushi and meat-eating in Japan. He has also published books on the creation of synthetic fertilizers, the diesel engines and jet turbines that make global trade possible, and the limits to growth in China. His book count will hit 34 in December, and he’s published hundreds of academic papers. He is 69 years old.+
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Smil’s intellectual omnivorousness is precisely what appeals to Gates, an insatiable reader with broad interests. “On any page [Smil] might talk about meat-eating among bonobos or the average human life span during the Roman Empire,” Gates writes in a review of Harvesting the Biosphere, one of Smil’s latest books. “The word “polymath” was invented to describe people like him.”+Quartz spoke with Smil about his background and his most recent books. He’s a bracingly smart and hard-nosed academic who is obsessed with global systems and doesn’t own a cellphone. His ideas don’t fit comfortably into any ideology: He simultaneously argues that the West should eat less meat for environmental reasons and that Western governments should not make a concerted effort to stop using fossil fuels.+Below is an excerpt of the interview:+Your interests are incredibly broad-sweeping. What is your educational background, exactly?
I’m the product of the classical, old-fashioned European education that is broad-based. You want to get your degree in the world, you have to study all sorts of things. I studied what the Germans call the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences. Everything from biology to geology. How the clouds are formed, how the animals live, and what makes the rocks. So I know about nature. Period.I’ve read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don’t have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don’t have a Facebook page) then you don’t have any time for reading....MUCH MORE
*"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject".
From our June 2013 post "Energy--'Vaclav Smil is Correct: Never Forecast'":
...Smil is one of the sharpest guys in the "Talking about energy" biz:
Energy: "The man who’s tutoring Bill Gates … "
Vaclav Smil Takes on Jeremy Grantham Over Peak Fertilizer
Vaclav Smil: "In energy matters, what goes around, comes around—but perhaps should go away"
Vaclav Smil: "The Manufacturing of Decline"
Serious Thinking on Energy: An Interview With Dr. Vaclav Smil
A Major Piece: "Why the tech revolution isn’t a template for an energy revolution"
Bill Gates Reviews Vaclav Smil's "Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines"
