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Book Review
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S NOTE
As we move into 2008 and global climate change continues to dominate the news, it is appropriate to begin the reviews with the latest Alfred Crosby book and others on climate change and resource use. The books reviewed reflect the increasing importance of the field of environmental history to the general public. It would be impossible to produce reviews without the help of many people. I greatly appreciate those who make the reviews possible: the reviewers who donate countless hours, the managing editor who provides counsel as well as editing, and the staff at the Forest History Society who cheerfully take on a number of tasks. The readers of the journal are in your debt.
MELISSA WIEDENFELD
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| Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy. By Alfred W. Crosby. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. xv + 192 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. Cloth $23.95.
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| Through the years of a path-breaking career as a historian of science, culture, and environment, Alfred Crosby has oriented colleagues, students, and a wider audience to fundamental trends in our past. His two broad syntheses of intercontinental, anthropogenic ecological change, The Columbian Exchange (Greenwood Press, 1972) and Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge, 1986), were breakthroughs. For historians of the global reach of the Western world, these works added an essential new dimension. For historians of science, Crosby bridged the crevasse between physical and biological sciences. For disease historians, his work provided a long temporal and transoceanic context. For environmental historians, he forged a highly influential overview of the devastating encounter of the Eurasian biotic world with the Americas and the Pacific. |
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Children of the Sun, Alfred Crosby's latest book, addresses an even more fundamental issue: the entire history of energy consumption. The work whose theme it resembles most closely is Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (Westview, 1994). The two make good companions. Smil's densely argued survey is academic in tone, and ends chronologically with a long section on "Fossil-Fueled Civilization." Crosby writes for a broader audience, he continues beyond fossil fuels, and he writes in far more accessible prose. A determined reader might begin with Crosby and move on to Smil. |
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Children of the Sun sweeps through history, summarizing the key stages of human energy technology and consumption in nine succinct chapters totaling a mere 166 pages. He begins with a brief orientation to the physics of solar energy. This is followed by a structural symmetry of three sections, each with three chapters. In the first, "The Largess of the Sun," he borrows from archeology and anthropology to review "Fire and Cooking," "Agriculture," and his trademark "Columbian Exchange." Then in part 2 Crosby takes on one of the historical profession's most thoroughly worked subjects, industrialization, in three chapters, "Coal and Steam," "Oil and the Internal Combustion Engine," and "Electricity." He imbeds each subject in the cultural attitudes of its time. |
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The final section of Children of the Sun surveys energy options in today's world, moving beyond fossil fuels. In chapters on nuclear fission and fusion he assesses skeptically whether those technologies can fuel the world economy when the era of fossil fuels fades. His summary of recent research on fission is particularly useful, bringing arcane physics into focus for amateurs—and warning that harnessing fusion energy may well prove impossible for human ingenuity. |
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At this point, Crosby turns from historian to moral philosopher, a stance that has been inherent but largely implicit in his earlier work. Even here he is not a normative ethicist, for he consistently avoids abstractions, grounding his argument in physical specifics. "We of the first years of the twenty-first century have access to more energy than we have the experience to wield intelligently. We of the richer societies make decisions we are not qualified to make almost every time we enter a voting booth or an automobile showroom or a grocery store, decisions that will in the long run have drastic effects on the lives of our descendants and on our planet" (p. 161). In the process, as he recounts our relentless appetite for more energy, Crosby suggests the question of overconsumption, a crucial issue that environmental historians have addressed all too infrequently or obliquely. The challenge of his final chapter, "The Anthropocene," concludes explicitly, "We have reason to believe that we are capable of environmental sanity; but first we have to accept that the way we live now is new, abnormal, and unsustainable" (p. 164). |
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To balance the accumulating gravitas of his subject, Crosby writes in a distinctively engaging prose style. He is unfailingly witty, deliberately using incongruous, even idiosyncratic illustrative details. His opening paragraph states, "Children of the Sun is a history of how we access the energy to get work done, to move our muscles, to think, to hunt mammoths, to sow and harvest, to build pyramids, to power automobiles and space rockets, to boil water for tea." |
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To a professional historian of science and technology (or in early chapters, to an anthropologist) these accounts may seem superficial. But as an introductory orientation, this is the most useful yet. As an undergraduate textbook, Children of the Sun will be a highly effective survey, complete with an intriguing selective bibliography. It will be equally appropriate as a gift to anyone concerned with the prospects for global warming. |
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Richard Tucker is adjunct professor of natural resources at the University of Michigan. His book, Insatiable Appetite (California, 2000: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) surveys the global ecological impact of the American consumer economy. His ongoing work includes studies of the environmental effects of warfare. |
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