Grand Transitions

Smil's answer to the deceptively simple question of what makes the modern world work rests on four grand transitions of civilisation, in populations, in agriculture, in energy and in economics. Societies that have passed through all four emerge into an era of radically different population dynamics, food surpluses and the waste that accompanies them, abundant energy use, and expanding economic opportunity. The book insists that this is not a universal story. In other parts of the world, hundreds of millions of people remain largely untouched by these developments, and that unevenness is part of the argument rather than a footnote to it. Through detailed storytelling Smil investigates how the four transitions interact, which is where much of the complexity lies. He then presses a moral point, that the case for sharing the benefits of modernity has become more acute as economic inequality has widened, yet correcting that imbalance would make the changes needed for long-term preservation of the environment considerably harder to implement. A fifth transition therefore looms, covering environmental change from natural resource depletion, biodiversity loss and global warming, and how it is managed will decide whether the earlier grand transitions succeed or eventually fail.

Written from the catalogue listing at Blackwell's reproducing the Oxford University Press publisher's synopsis.

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