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Václav Smil is a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass a broad area of energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies, and he had also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China. His name pronounced as "vah:tslahf" and "smeel".
Background
He was born during WWII in Plzeň, at that time in the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (present-day Czech Republic). He completed his graduate studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University in Prague and at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University. Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he emigrated first to the USA in 1969 and eventually to Canada in 1972.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy) and the recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology in 2000. He has been an invited speaker in more than 300 conferences and workshops in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, has lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and East Asia and has worked as a consultant for many US, European Union and international institutions. His wife Eva is a physician and his son David is an organic synthetic chemist.
When asked about Thomas Friedman's influential globalization book The World Is Flat, which argues that the economic playing field is being leveled in the 21st century, Smil replied:
The surface may seem to be getting flatter (the same brands, cars, e-gadgets, the world of Sony, Toyota and LG, are encountered from Seoul to Soweto). But underneath, the differences (economic but also cultural and, most distressingly, the religious ones) are actually getting greater. This is not only in People's Republic of China and India (where the proverbial tide lifts all boats, but those of the new urban class float now relatively lot higher than decades ago) but for the past generation even in the U.S. and Canada, where inequality is increasing. Think of nearly 50 million Americans living on food stamps: hard to believe how Friedman could get it so wrong.
In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of FP Top 100 Global Thinkers. In 2013 he was appointed by the Governor General to the Order of Canada. He reads 80 books a year but does not have a cell phone. Included among Smil's admirers is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who has read all of Smil's 36 books.
In the fall of 2013, he was the EADS Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.