“There is
no author whose books I look forward to more
than Vaclav Smil,” Bill Gates wrote this summer. That’s quite an
endorsement—and it gave a jolt of fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of
environment and geography at the University of Manitoba. In a world of
specialized intellectuals, Smil is an ambitious and astonishing polymath who
swings for fences. His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world’s
biggest challenges—the future of energy, food production, and
manufacturing—with nuance and detail. They’re among the most data-heavy books
you’ll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (Sample nugget:
Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere produces this year.)
