Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil is a Czech-born Canadian scholar known for writing about energy, environment, technology, food systems, risk, and large-scale societal trends. His work frequently emphasizes physical realities—materials, energy flows, infrastructure, and limits—over fashionable narratives or overly optimistic forecasts. Trained in scientific analysis but writing for broad audiences, Smil is known for challenging simplistic interpretations of data and for insisting that big transformations must be judged by time scales, engineering constraints, and the arithmetic of resources.