ABSTRACT
On average, each one of us now consumes nearly 25 times as much energy per year compared with our hunter–gatherer ancestors (Smil 2010). This consumption is powered by a range of modern convenient energy sources and we use electricity and fossil fuels where once we relied primarily upon fodder for draft animals, biomass for heat, animal and vegetable oils for light, with a very small but significant contribution from waterwheels and windmills. The history of urbanization is therefore as much a history of the search for ways to provide sufficient food, shelter and energy services for a growing population, as it is one of monarchs and empires. Indeed in his book, Energy in World History, Vaclav Smil (1994) quotes the anthropologist Hoyt Alverson who said
the most salient aspect of the ecologic dimension of culture, looked at over millennia of cultural revolution, is the correspondence between the size and density of culture bearing populations on the one hand and the amount of potential energy per capita that must be captured from the environment and transformed into material and energy forms on the other.
