Haley Mast is a freelance writer, fact-checker, and small organic farmer in the Columbia River Gorge. She enjoys gardening, reporting on environmental topics, and spending her time outside ...

Vaclav Smil was born in 1943, during World War II, in Czechoslovakia, in the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. As a teenager, Smil’s parents expected him to chop wood, every four hours, to ...

Vaclav Smil rarely agrees to interviews. Too many in the media have portrayed him as a tool of Big Oil, he says — because he insists on pointing out how deeply dependent humanity is on fossil fuels ...

Mark Zuckerberg’s 14th pick for his Year of Books is Vaclav Smil’s Energy—a beginner’s guide to what fuels us. This is everything you need to know about energy as a concept, where it comes from, what ...

If you want to understand the future of energy, says Vaclav Smil, you need to think locally—and skeptically. Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Manitoba, says that America ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. It must be exhausting to be Vaclav Smil. Everywhere the Canadian scientist turns, he encounters the unmoored ...

Katherine Martinko is an expert in sustainable living. She holds a degree in English Literature and History from the University of Toronto. Treehugger loves the idea of electric planes and has shown ...

Here is a recipe for a thought-provoking, if not wholly appetising, snack: slice up a large tomato and pour over five or six tablespoons of your favourite cooking oil. Depending on where you got your ...

Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of over forty books on topics including energy, environmental and population change, food production and ...