Vaclav Smil
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 501726 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Vaclav Smil |
| NOMBRES | Vaclav |
| APELLIDO | Smil |
| FIRMA | SMIL V |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Manitoba |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8142-298X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 103 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 242 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 103 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1976 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Wie die Welt wirklich funktioniert
Invention and Innovation
Energy in China's Modernization
A selection of 50 Slovak folk tales assembled from the collections of folklorist Pavol Dobsinsky. The translator seeks to preserve the poetic qualities of the originals, and the book includes an introduction to the genres of the folktale and the specifics of Slovak tales
Energies
Accurate, balanced AND imaginative.Energy is the only universal currency. One of its many forms must be transformed into another in order for stars to shine, planets to rotate, living things to grow, and civilizations to evolve. Recognition of this universality was one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century science, yet even today there is little literature that tries to view the world broadly through the prism of energy.In this highly o…
Energy in Prehistory
This chapter discusses the use of energy during prehistoric times. Our direct ancestors spent their lives as simple foragers, and it was only about 10,000 years ago that the first small populations of our species began a sedentary existence based on the domestication of plants and animals. This means that for millions of years, the foraging strategies of hominins resembled those of their primate ancestors, but we now have isotopic evidence from E…
Energy and Civilization
Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done. The conversion of energy on Earth ranges from terra-forming forces of plate tectonics to cumulative erosive effects of raindrops. Life on Earth depends on the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into plant biomass. Humans have come to rely on many more energy flows—ranging from fossil fuels to photovoltaic generation of electricity—for their civilized existenc…
Examining energy transitions
The Transformation of the World
The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, by Jurgen Osterhammel. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014. xxii, 1,167 PP- $39-95 US (cloth). Reviewing major book at time when it has been already reviewed by many historians, economists, and commentators on social and political affairs (its first German edition was published in 2009) is always challenge and forlorn task: one should avoid repeating what has bee…
Akira Iriye, editor. Global Interdependence
Journal Article Akira Iriye, editor. Global Interdependence: The World after 1945. Akira Iriye, editor. Global Interdependence: The World after 1945. (A History of the World.) Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2014. Pp. vi, 997. $39.95. Vaclav Smil Vaclav Smil Emeritus University of Manitoba [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Hi…
Fragenan … 12 Questions to
Peer reviewed: Yes
Fifty Years of the Shinkansen
Japan of 2014 is clearly a troubled nation - and I will remind the reader about only a few key components of its peculiar situation. The country is still rich by any global standard but its national debt is far higher than that in any other affluent country, and rising, and in 2014 its economy has been chronically close to, or actually in, a deflationary recession. Japan is still the world's third largest economy, but after decades of huge trade …
Made in the USA
An argument that America's economy needs a strong and innovative manufacturing sector and the jobs it creates."There's no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil." —Bill GatesIn Made in the USA, Vaclav Smil powerfully rebuts the notion that manufacturing is a relic of predigital history and that the loss of American manufacturing is a desirable evolutionary step toward a pure service economy. Smil argues that no advanced econom…
Reducing the Carbon and Sulfur Load of the Atmosphere. Assessing Global Decarbonization and Desulfurization and the Future of a Low-Carbon World
For more than a century human activities have been affecting two key biogeochemical cycles, carbon and sulfur. Substantial declines in average carbon intensity (carbon per gigajoule), especially in Western countries, have not been translated into an absolute decline of global emissions, largely due to large emissions increases in Latin America, Africa and, above all, in Asia. In contrast, global desulfurization has taken place not only in relativ…
The Last Eighty Years
Japan's Dietary Transition and Its Impacts
An examination of the transformation of the Japanese diet from subsistence to abundance and an assessment of the consequences for health, longevity, and the environment. In a little more than a century, the Japanese diet has undergone a dramatic transformation. In 1900, a plant-based, near-subsistence diet was prevalent, with virtually no consumption of animal protein. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan's consumption of meat, fis…
Japan's Economy in 2012
Adding insult to injury" sounds like a lawyerly phrase compared to its painfully evocative Japanese equivalent 泣面に蜂nakitsura ni hachi - literally "a bee to a crying face". But even that stinging proverb fails to convey what Japan has been through during the recent past. In March 2011 its economy, slowly recovering from the worst global post-World War II downturn, was hit by a powerful earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. That twin disaster d…
America's Oil Imports
Burdensome dependence on crude oil imports is a key challenge for America's energy policy; its principal cause is excessive consumption of refined oil products, which is mainly the result of an inefficient automotive fleet, the virtual absence of diesel-powered cars, and the complete absence of modern high-velocity trains. Addressing these challenges will require major infrastructural investment, a reality that precludes any early attainment of e…
Harvesting the Biosphere
The human species has evolved to dominate the biosphere: global anthropomass is now an order of magnitude greater than the mass of all wild terrestrial mammals. As a result, our dependence on harvesting the products of photosynthesis for food, animal feed, raw materials, and energy has grown to make substantial global impacts. During the past two millennia these harvests, and changes of land use due to deforestation and conversions of grasslands …
Why America Is Not a New Rome
Energy Transitions
This bold and controversial argument shows why energy transitions are inherently complex and prolonged affairs, and how ignoring this fact raises unrealistic expectations that the United States and other global economies can be weaned quickly from a primary dependency on fossil fuels. Energy transitions are fundamental processes behind the evolution of human societies: they both drive and are driven by technical, economic, and social changes. In …
On Meat, Fish and Statistics
The easiest way to compare dietary commonalities or peculiarities of individual nations is to check the food balance sheets that the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (headquartered in Rome) prepares for virtually all of the world's countries (FAO 2008). These accounts are based on the best available national statistics of food production and trade and on the estimates of plant and animal harvests diverted to animal feeding, seed and other n…
International Trade in Meat
This paper provides an original account of global land, water, and nitrogen use in support of industrialized livestock production and trade, with emphasis on two of the fastest-growing sectors, pork and poultry. Our analysis focuses on trade in feed and animal products, using a new model that calculates the amount of "virtual" nitrogen, water, and land used in production but not embedded in the product. We show how key meat-importing countries, s…
The Unprecedented Shift in Japan's Population
Three recent statistical releases have led me to revisit the future of Japan's population. On December 20, 2006 the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (NIPSSR) published its latest long-range forecast of the country's population that showed, once again, a faster decline than previously anticipated: the medium variant projects the total population of only about 90 million (89.93) people by 2055, the figure that both Asah…
Light Behind the Fall
The phenomenon is unmistakable (albeit largely unnoticed), and the contrast lends itself to all kinds of symbolic interpretations: Japan's unending retreat from being a highly respected polity and economic powerhouse, widely expected to become the 21st century's global ichiban, has entered troubled waters. As a result of that downward economic trend, whose beginning was signaled by the collapse of the Nikkei index in 1990, Japan's GDP managed the…
Japan and China
Major trends that are gradually changing the fortunes of nations and reshaping world history are not easy to identify. There are three key reasons for this. First, many important trends unfold so insidiously that they are recognized only ex post once the developments reach a breaking point and a long-term trend ends in a stunning discontinuity. Second, we cannot foresee which trends will become so embedded as to be seemingly immune to external fo…
Examining energy transitions
Energy at the Crossroads
In Energy at the Crossroads, Vaclav Smil considers the twenty-first century's crucial question: how to reconcile the modern world's unceasing demand for with the absolute necessity to preserve the integrity of the biosphere. With this book he offers a comprehensive, accessible guide to today's complex issues -- how to think clearly and logically about what is possible and what is desirable in our future. After a century of unprecedented productio…
Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley
Eating Meat
Carnivorousness is a part of human evolutionary heritage, but typical meat intakes were limited in virtually all preindustrial societies. Rising meat consumption has been a key marker of the universal dietary transition that has accompanied economic modernization. Meat is now the largest source of high-quality animal proteins, and in some countries its annual supply is as high as 100 kg or more per capita. At the same time, high average intakes o…
Collapse
COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Jared Diamond New York: Viking, 2005. xvi, 576pp, $44.00 cloth (ISBN 0-670-03337-5)During a recent wait at a large North American airport, I saw Diamond's Collapse displayed between yet another slim paperback of Dalai Lama's inspirational wisdoms and the latest inanities produced by Dr. Phil (he of the incomparable Oprah fame). Nothing else is needed to confirm the author's megacelebrity status-bu…
Nitrogen and Food Production
Nitrogen was the most commonly yield-limiting nutrient in all pre-industrial agricultures. Only the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia broke this barrier. The rising dependence on nitrogenous fertilizers, which represents the largest human interference in the biospheric N cycle, has two different roles. In affluent nations it helps to produce excess of food in general, and of animal foods in particular, and it boosts agricultural exports. But for a…
Harvesting the Biosphere
The human species has evolved to dominate the biosphere: global anthropomass is now an order of magnitude greater than the mass of all wild terrestrial mammals. As a result, our dependence on harvesting the products of photosynthesis for food, animal feed, raw materials, and energy has grown to make substantial global impacts. During the past two millennia these harvests, and changes of land use due to deforestation and conversions of grasslands …
International Trade in Meat
This paper provides an original account of global land, water, and nitrogen use in support of industrialized livestock production and trade, with emphasis on two of the fastest-growing sectors, pork and poultry. Our analysis focuses on trade in feed and animal products, using a new model that calculates the amount of "virtual" nitrogen, water, and land used in production but not embedded in the product. We show how key meat-importing countries, s…
The Next 50 Years
Modern civilization is subject to gradual environmental, social, economic, and political transformations as well as to sudden changes that can fundamentally alter its prospects. This article examines a key set of such fatal discontinuities by quantifying the likelihood of three classes of sudden, and potentially catastrophic, events—natural disasters (the Earth's collision with nearby asteroids, massive volcanic eruptions and mega-tsunami generat…
How Many People Can the Earth Feed
General Energetics
The universal link planetary energetics photosynthesis heterotrophic conversations human energetics man as a simple heterotroph man as a solar farmer preindustrial complexification fossil fuels fossil-fuelled civilization energetics of food environmental implications energetic correlates grand patterns
Coronary Heart Disease, Diet, and Western Mortality
RAPID DECLINE OF INFECTIOUS AILMENTS and the rise coronary heart disease (CHD) as the leading cause adult mortality can be traced in every Western country since the beginning this century.' Although during the past generation the total rates cardiovascular mortality have been declining in most European countries, as well as in North America and Australia, CHD still claims every year more lives than all cancers combined.2 For middle-aged and older…
Energy flows in rural China
The Next 50 Years
Change in modern societies comes both because of sudden, and often catastrophic, events and because of the gradual unfolding of fundamental demographic, social, economic, strategic, and environmental trends. A previous essay by the author assessed the probabilities over the coming five decades of the most important natural and anthropogenic catastrophes with possible global impacts. This essay surveys key socioeconomic trends of the next 50 years…
Feeding the World
Feeding the World
A perspective on global environmental crises
Food Production and Quality of Diet in China
As always, the question of food sufficiency in the People's Republic of China is important, fascinating and difficult to answer. After China's reopening to the Western world in the early 1970s, it was answered affirmatively by both the Chinese and the first foreign observers. To give just one example in each of these categories, China's Vice Minister of Agriculture assured the delegates at the United Nations World Food Conference in Rome in Novem…
China's food
Controlling the Yellow River
China's Energy Prospects
For the last several years, eager analysts of energy demand have rallied to the cry disaggregate! The problems with data have been formidable: noncongruent categories ... surveys with inadequate sample size .... minimal engineering detail . .. privileged information. Nonetheless, around the world, such messiness is being faced and cleaned up . . . The result of all this effort is a new perspective on energy
China's Energy
Energies
China's greenhouse gas emissions
Population Growth and Nitrogen
Intermediate energy technology in China
China’s Energy Performance
Essay| September 01 1977 China’s Energy Performance Vaclav Smil Vaclav Smil Associate Professor of Geography, University of Manitoba Vaclav Smil, a specialist in the field of energetics, is the author of China’s Energy—Achievements, Problems, Prospects (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976), Energy and the Environment—A long-Range Forecasting Study (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1974) and numerous articles on Chinese as well as global energetic…
A Delphi forecast
Learning from Ta-ch'ing
Food in China
Essay| September 01 1978 Food in China Vaclav Smil Vaclav Smil Associate Professor of Geography, University of Manitoba Vaclav Smil, a specialist in the field of energetics, is the author of China’s Energy—Achievements, Problems, Prospects (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976), Energy and the Environment—A Long-Range Forecasting Study (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1974) and numerous articies on Chinese as well as global energetics. Search for…
China's Energy Prospects
For the last several years, eager analysts of energy demand have rallied to the cry disaggregate! The problems with data have been formidable: noncongruent categories ... surveys with inadequate sample size .... minimal engineering detail . .. privileged information. Nonetheless, around the world, such messiness is being faced and cleaned up . . . The result of all this effort is a new perspective on energy
China's Energy
China’s Water Resources
Essay| September 01 1979 China’s Water Resources Vaclav Smil Vaclav Smil Associate Professor of Geography, University of Manitoba Vaclav Smil, a specialist in the field of energetics, is the author of China’s Energy—Achievements, Problems, Prospects (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976), Energy and the Environment—A Long-Range Forecasting Study (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1974) and numerous articles on Chinese as well as global energetics. …
Energy flows in rural China
Controlling the Yellow River
China
Mineral Economics and Basic Industries in Asia
China’s Environment
Essay| September 01 1980 China’s Environment Vaclav Smil Vaclav Smil Associate Professor of Geography, University of Manitoba Vaclav Smil, a specialist in the field of energetics, is the author of China’s Energy—Achievements, Problems, Prospects (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976), Energy and the Environment—A Long-Range Forecasting Study (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1974) and an edited volume, with W.E. Knowland, Energy in the Developing …
Environmental Degradation in China
Research Article| August 01 1980 Environmental Degradation in China Vaclav Smil Vaclav Smil Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1951) 20 (8): 777–788. https://doi.org/10.2307/2643633 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Vaclav Smil;…
Water Management in the Yellow River Basin of China
China's food
World Problems of Energy Supplies
Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley
Sichuan
Research Article| September 01 1984 Sichuan: China’s Quintessential Province Vaclav Smil Vaclav Smil Professor of Geography, University of Manitoba Vaclav Smil has research interests in interdisciplinary energy studies and in the energy, economy, food and environment of China. His latest book is The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1984). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Schola…
The Bad Earth. Environmental Degradation in China
The Basil Society's China mission, one of the ore successful Protestant missions in the nineteenth century, was distinguished by the fact that most of the initial proselytizing was conducted by Chinese converts in the interior rather than by Western missionaries in the treaty ports. Thus the first viable protestant communities were not only established by Chinese evangelists, they were established among an ethnic minority in south China, the Hakk…
China's Food
Eating Better
Essay| September 01 1985 Eating Better: Farming Reforms and Food in China Vaclav Smil Vaclav Smil Professor of Geography, University of Manitoba Vaclav Smil’s latest books are The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1984) and Energy, Food, Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Current History (1985) 84 (503): 248–251.…
Land Use and Land Cover in Eastern China
Landsat imagery is a valuable source of information about the land use and land cover of inaccessible areas. In this study, the objective was to compile a map of eastern China, with particular emphasis on agricultural activity, from enhanced Landsat imagery using the diazo and density slicing techniques. Area measurement of major land uses was based on the land‐use interpretation map, but because of the lack of ground verification it was necessar…
The Bad Earth
World Resources 1986
Political science (48 obras) · China (42 obras) · Economics (42 obras) · Geography (38 obras) · History (28 obras) · Biology (24 obras) · Computer Science (23 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Business (22 obras) · Archaeology (21 obras)