Growth

Smil treats growth as both an unspoken and an explicit aim of individual and collective striving, and argues that it is a single phenomenon running from microorganisms to galaxies. It governs the capabilities of our unusually large brains and the fortunes of economies alike, and shows up in annual increments of continental crust, in a rising gross domestic product, on a child's growth chart and in the spread of cancerous cells. The book offers a systematic investigation across that whole range. Smil begins with organisms whose mature sizes run from the microscopic to the enormous, taking in disease-causing microbes, the cultivation of staple crops and human growth from infancy to adulthood. He then turns to the growth of energy conversions and of man-made objects, developments he treats as essential to civilisation itself. Finally he examines growth in complex systems, first human populations and then cities. Tracing the growth of empires and civilisations, he argues, is a harder problem, because the growth of organisms can be charted across individual and evolutionary time while societies and economies do not move linearly and encompass decline and renewal as well as expansion. The trajectory of modern civilisation, caught between material growth and biospheric limits, remains uncertain.

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

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