From American Scientist:
Humanity's Prospects on a Finite Planet
GRAND TRANSITIONS: How the Modern World Was Made. Vaclav Smil. xi + 363 pp. Oxford University Press, 2021. $34.95.
Asked to name the disruptive technologies that have shaped the modern world, most people might mention the internet, airplanes, the internal combustion engine, or the printing press. But Vaclav Smil chooses to focus on the technologies that have improved our ability to extract food and energy from the planet’s biosphere—an ability that underpins humanity’s existence. Technologies that can produce abundant food produce a small component of the gross domestic product in industrialized economies, but they are a defining feature of the modern world, as are the technologies that enable energy to be extracted from the long-buried biomass of fossil fuels. In his latest book, Grand Transitions, Smil explains that the modern world—the one that began to emerge around 1500 CE—arises from the interactions of transitions in agriculture and energy with transitions in populations, economies, and environments.
Smil has published dozens of books dealing with this subject matter; four of them examine “long-term transformations of global food production and nutrition,” four others deal with energy resources and uses, another five are about “key technical and material inputs of modern economies,” and three more focus on the global environment. These books are unapologetically chock-full of detailed facts and statistics, to the point of data overload. This latest book is no different; the reader must wade through data showing trends in birth and death rates in country after country, the application rates of nitrogen, and the proportion of daily calories a person gets from cereals. Grand Transitions is classic Smil; that is to say, it is the product of deep research....
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