Vaclav Smil Is Fed Up

The acclaimed environmental scientist is criticizing climate activists, shunning media, and stepping back just when we need him most

- By Arno Kopecky. Photography by David Lipnowski

IN 2019, the environmental scientist and energy historian Vaclav Smil published Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. In the book, Smil charts the expansion of everything from algae blooms and embryos, domesticated chicken breasts and corn harvests, mountain ranges and skyscrapers and air travel to the destructive power of human weaponry, the storage capacity of microchips, the rise and fall of trees, forests, empires, and the economic outputs of country after country. The commonality among them, Smil finds, is disturbing: after a period of rapid, often exponential growth, any number of unpleasant things can happen, including precipitous collapse. Growth was Smil's fortieth book; he's published seven more since.

The renowned physicist and inventor David Keith has called Smil "a slayer of bullshit," and Growth reads like a 513-page assassination of one of civilization's most cherished delusions: that a finite planet can accommodate infinite growth. Smil is quick to acknowledge the benefits of economic growth - dramatic gains in food production, life expectancy, energy access, and countless other indices of human progress. But unlike the Steven Pinkers of the world who downplay or ignore the costs of that progress, Smil emphasizes their central harm: "a multitude of assaults on the biosphere." These range from the obliteration of global forests and terrifying declines in biodiversity to hundreds of gigatons of fossil carbon being released into the atmosphere.