Making the Modern World

Buchzusammenfassung

Vaclav Smil is an interdisciplinary researcher who has authored hundreds of books and papers on energy, the environment, and population development, food production, the history of technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy.

The intricate global production of modern devices, like the iPhone 5, highlights the challenges of tracing material origins, making national material flow analysis and life-cycle assessments (LCAs) practical tools for understanding environmental impacts. LCAs reveal surprising insights, such as granite sidewalks having a significantly higher environmental footprint than concrete due to energy-intensive processes, while also emphasizing the critical role of recycling in conserving resources and reducing waste. Human material use, rooted in prehistory, has evolved from stone, wood, and metal to modern reliance on metals, plastics, and silicon, with industrialization driving exponential extraction and consumption. Efforts to categorize material flows, as pioneered by the USGS, focus on raw materials but often overlook hidden flows like displaced earth during mining. Today, biomaterials, construction materials, metals, plastics, industrial gases, and electronics dominate material use, with innovations like dematerialization reducing material intensity but paradoxically increasing overall consumption due to affordability and accessibility. As population growth and higher living standards drive resource demand, sustainable practices like waste reduction, recycling, and the development of advanced materials like graphene and biodegradable plastics offer promising solutions for managing environmental impacts.

"Life’s great dichotomy is between autotrophs, organisms that can nourish themselves, and heterotrophs, or life forms that must feed on other organisms."

"Most people in affluent and middle-income countries worry about what is best to eat in order to maintain or improve their health and extend their longevity, not whether they will have enough to survive."

"Energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing (from galactic rotations to ephemeral insect lives) can take place without its transformations."

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