The Forces That Built the World We Live In

Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

Something must change, but it’s impossible to untangle the overlapping social, political, and technological forces driving our world. Activists and reform advocates have wanted to change the ways we built cities, generate power, grow food, and distribute money. But every time somebody makes even fiddling procedural changes, it creates a domino effect of unintended consequences. We need a guide with encyclopedic knowledge to organize reforms without creating a cascade.

Despite searching, I can’t determine Vaclav Smil’s original scientific specialization. Every press biography and university write-up calls Smil a “scientist,” and his writing shows definite interdisciplinary background knowledge. He definitely comprehends technical aspects of modernity that well-meaning activists frequently miss. Yet reading him, I noticed that Smil misses something, too: technological whiz-bangs require humans to operate them, and humans make choices.

Professor Smil identifies four synthetic products which he calls “The Four Pillars of Modern Civilization”: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia (he apparently excludes naturally occurring petroleum). These products create physical stability, economic prosperity, and at least a measure of control over the natural environment. Unfortunately, each also carries environmental and economic prices, some vast. And we cannot remove any without upsetting the architecture of technological modernity.

So far, so good. But Smil’s analysis of these products and their public applications, overlooks that using these products always entails human choices. Sometimes, those choices are private: you individually decide whether to spray weed-n-feed, an ammonia product, on your lawn. But when those choices are scaled to society-wide levels, we call that public policy, and it always involves conscious decisions, by lawmakers or their appointed bureaucrats, about how we’ll direct our public resources.

Because I live in Corn Country, I noticed Smil’s disregard for policy mostly in his passages on agriculture. Start with this: Smil insists that, to adopt an organic agriculture model free of synthetic chemicals and heavy equipment, we’d first have to revert to medieval peasant lifestyles. This is patently ridiculous, because Jethro Tull’s seed drill and its successor, John Deere’s steel plow, displaced agricultural workers long before diesel fuel and ammonia fertilizers existed.

Yes, Jethro Tull and John Deere were real people, before they became brand names.

Smil contends that only modern agricultural output makes modern civilization possible. But in Nebraska, where I live, corn (maize) farmers flail desperately to find or invent markets for their produce. This represents chemical-intensive farming technology, but also government decisions about which crops to subsidize. America regularly unloads surplus corn on chronically impoverished nations as “food aid,” undercutting native agriculture and increasing urban poverty and global dependence.

Vaclav Smil

Similar objections permeate Smil’s technological analyses. Portland cement produces approximately seven percent of Earth’s greenhouse gas emissions, but we can’t manufacture modern roads without it. And we need roads, right? Only somewhat. Roads are an example of what economists call “induced demand,” observed when newly constructed superhighways become congested within five years. Building roads creates the need to use them, especially as Americans refuse to fund public transit networks.

Modernity has produced unprecedented comfort and wealth, as Professor Smil writes, in the aggregate. Yet modernity hasn’t distributed its benefits evenly. Traffic jams represent a manifestation of modern wealth, after all. So did Houston’s inability to drain following Hurricane Irma. Single-use urban design, which necessitates commuting, and slovenly urban design, which causes rainwater to pool and wash away topsoil, are the product of policy choices, not inevitable outcomes.

I cannot find fault with Professor Smil’s technological analyses, especially since he’s more widely informed than me. He makes a persuasive case that living like we to today absolutely requires his Four Pillars, and even minor amendments will inevitably create painful dislocations with broad knock-on effects. We didn’t get into this position of economic inequality and looming environmental collapse overnight, and we won’t escape this position without changes that will overhaul our society.

Yet for all his technological clarity, Smil’s analyses completely omit the public policy and economic considerations which created such material dependency. Notwithstanding a later chapter on “risk analysis,” Smil defines risk in substantially technical terms, excluding nonlinear human variables. The world Smil describes didn’t just happen; bureaucrats, capitalists, and other unelected decision-makers built it, brick by brick.

This book provides valuable insights into the technical qualities of modernity, in plain-English terms for non-specialist readers. But Smil writes checks his analysis can’t cash, because he sees technocracy as an inevitable progression from cause to effect. He completely excludes the human decision-making processes that got is into the situation, thus overlooking the only forces which might get us out.