From fossil fuels to fusion, a look at the evolution of energy
MODERN civilization is “the product of an energy binge,” Alfred Crosby pithily explains in “Children of the Sun.” “Binges often result in hangovers. Fossil fuel supplies are ultimately exhaustible and currently responsible for such worrisome effects as global warming.... Nuclear fission could produce all that we need, but ... [it] may be Mother Nature’s version of the Trojan Horse.”
Crosby has made a name for himself in the increasingly relevant field of global history, from his seminal account of “The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492” to his recent look at “America’s Forgotten Pandemic, the Influenza of 1918.” A professor emeritus of history, geography and American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Crosby has a salutary understanding of his mission: “As a historian of large-scale change, I sift through truckloads of books and journals and try to come up with generalities to save my readers from being overwhelmed by what may seem to be temporal and spatial chaos.”
Crosby takes his title from Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky’s phrase alluding to the fact that almost every form of energy that we use comes, directly or indirectly, from the sun: coal, the transmogrified residue of primeval forests; wood, from our remaining supply of trees; wind, the product of sun-determined weather; and muscle, dependent on the energy we get from eating the “solar energy” stored in plants and animals.
Indeed, in some ways the most fascinating and enjoyable part of Crosby’s book is his account of our Paleolithic ancestors’ amazingly ingenious discoveries of fire and cooking: “No explorer ever found a human society that did not cook. Cooking is more unequivocally characteristic of our species than language. Animals do at least bark, roar, chirp, sending signals by sound; only we bake, roast, and fry.”
For raw-food enthusiasts who may wonder why the big deal about cooking, Crosby provides a succinct and enlightening explanation. Prior to cooking, early hominids had to rely on hunting whatever game and gathering whatever fruits and vegetables they could find in the wild. Many of these, particularly roots, leaves, grains, but even raw meat, were hard to digest, delivering a relatively small amount of nutrition compared with the energy expended on procuring, chewing and digesting them: “Our ancestors chose to increase the available portion of available organic matter they could digest by inventing means to perform some of the essential processes of digestion outside the body -- by cooking.” Crosby also cites the theory put forth by some anthropologists that development of the human brain may have been helped by our ancestors’ diminishing need for big jaws and complicated digestive tracts.
We get a quick, rather cursory but eminently comprehensible tour of many developments: the rise of agriculture; the use of water and wind to power mills and sailing ships; the invention of the steam engine; the transformations, good and bad, wrought by the Industrial Revolution -- all spiced up by colorful anecdotes.
Entering the territory of our current age, Crosby must negotiate more vexing questions: He weighs the dangers of global warming from fossil fuels against the dangers of nuclear reactor plants and wonders just how realistic is it to expect our energy-gluttonous species to have the self-preservative common sense to use energy more wisely. At first, he seems to suggest that, compared with the tremendous threat of global warming, the threats posed by nuclear energy are slight. Nuclear here refers to the energy produced by highly toxic fissile materials like plutonium, which, he later admits, pose an appalling problem when it comes to disposing of them.
Crosby paints a far rosier picture of the promise of safe, clean nuclear fusion, the process that powers our sun. Although a technological feat still in its embryonic stages, Crosby tells us some experts predict it may be a reality in about 30 years. If so, one wonders why he even suggests we might wish to consider building more reactors relying on fission, which, as he also tells us, can create waste products that will be lethal for centuries.
Crosby notes that citizens of wealthier countries seem unwilling to make short-term sacrifices for long-term benefits. One can only hope the cynicism and shortsightedness Crosby detects are not permanent. For if so, it would seem that we, the descendants of those brilliant inventors of cooking, agriculture and steam engines, must have lost the brains we were born with.
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Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.
