Flat Earth Theory provides some useful emotional comfort. It validates the view that our human perspective is the sole source of significance and meaning. It says life can be simple and local. Ambiguously, it says things are as they seem. I recall visiting a remote village in Papua New Guinea where ...

Smil's review of "the future" is dedicated to the idea that one can easily be too optimistic or too pessimistic, with some interesting cases to look at but also with plenty of rhetoric. His anchoring concept is that systems have a lot of inertia in the physical processes, so regardless of...

Chapter Four – Love How do they do it? Beech and oak forests in Germany are at war with wild boars and deer and squirrels. If the forests were to just release the same number of nuts every year, the animals would win, by gradually increasing their population and eating all the nuts that fall. So it ...

for social creatures (and who knew trees are in this category?), cooperation assists survival more than chopping down the competition. (Although arguments about group Vs. individual selection may be reignited.) Chapter Three is a parable about how forests provide lessons for society. The surprising...

Chapter Three Forests are counter-intuitive! You would think that even spacing of trees like in a plantation would mean each tree has the best opportunity to grow as fast as possible. Not so! Natural forests that are not thinned to space the trees apart will grow more biomass than artificially manag...

Chapter Two Do trees have language? They clearly communicate using scent, electricity and fungal chemistry. Like pheromones that cause human sexual attraction, all animals communicate by creating smells from hormones, in a wordless language. For trees, an example is that when African trees get eaten...

Chapter One explains how an ancient tree stump that has had no leaves for centuries can stay alive, “the conclusion is that forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.” Researchers have found that tree roots actually connect different trees so they can exchange nutrients...

Consciousness is obviously not something we can attribute to trees since they don't have brains. But they do feel pain, as this book explains. And they do seem to be able to make decisions about which branch to grow and which to let die. The underlying theme is that our usual assumption is that a fo...

Chapter One begins with strange mossy stones in an ancient forest. It turns out they are not stones at all. They form a circle five feet across, the remains of an ancient tree, long fallen. This tree has no leaves but its stump is somehow still alive, green under the bark. No tree can live without l...

In case you were wondering what the hollowing out of the human brain looks like, here is the answer I got about this chapter from our near future overlords. Chapter Seven of Vaclav Smil's book "How the World Really Works" is titled "Understanding the Future". In this chapter, Smi...