From Foreign Policy, January 11, 2020:
The Foreign Policy staff reviews Vaclav Smil’s encyclopedia on growth and recent releases on economics in hard times and diplomats on the front lines.
Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil
The best way to appreciate Vaclav Smil’s latest doorstopper is to take a deep breath, walk across the room, and pick up the book from wherever it landed after being tossed away for the umpteenth time as impenetrable, incomprehensible mush.
Because it does get a lot better—and much more interesting. Smil’s Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities never approaches anything like a beach read, or even a pleasure read, in much the same way that hacking through untracked jungle never quite approaches an indulgence. Yet Smil’s encyclopedic recounting of the story of growth is fascinating, compelling—and ultimately convincing.
Smil’s basic thrust is that growth is finite. The growth of individual microbes—and animals and plants and humans—has limits. So does the growth of their populations. So, too, does the growth of nearly every other thing in the history of humanity, from cranes to steam turbines to jetliner cruising speeds to the length of German autobahns to empires, all of which are documented—with graphs—in Smil’s relentless quest to build his case. Things—whether broiler chickens or wind turbines or wheat yields—are small for a while, then undergo a period of vertiginous growth, and then stabilize at a bigger size. And then they can’t really get bigger.
Except there’s one thing that everybody expects to keep growing: the economy. That’s what government policies everywhere seek to do, with more or less success. The problem, Smil notes, is that we live in a real world with finite resources. Economic growth requires more energy, more food, and more raw materials; efficiency gains only nibble around the edges.
Smil contends that there is ultimately an even bigger constraint to infinite growth: the sustainability of the environment, a problem that is especially pressing due to climate change. “Continuous material growth, based on ever greater extraction of the Earth’s inorganic and organic resources and on increased degradation of the biosphere’s finite stocks and services, is impossible,” as Smil puts it in one of his pithier moments.
The upshot? Smil, who has no truck with techno-optimists who expect miraculous exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics, ends his journey by concluding that a “fundamental departure from the long-established pattern of maximizing growth and promoting material consumption cannot be delayed by another century,” if humanity wants to have a place to live.—Keith Johnson
....MUCH MORE (next two reviews)
