IN HIS book How to Write a Thesis, academic, writer and philosopher Umberto Eco tells a story about a PhD student who proposes to write a thesis on “the symbol,” a joke example of an impossibly vague topic.

On the surface, academic Vaclav Smil appears to have plumped for a similarly vague topic, that of “growth,” immediately begging the question of what kind: economic, physical, biological?

The answer is all of them. Smil admits in his preface that covering all aspects of growth is impossible, so he restricts himself merely to “life on Earth and on the accomplishments of human societies.”

Eco surely would have something to say about this. Fortunately, Smil is more than up to the task, having spent a career working on vast interdisciplinary problems, and this book feels like his masterpiece.

Growth is a “big-picture” book but it’s built up of detailed sections on pretty much everything under the sun. A typical paragraph includes factoids on the increasing average area of US houses —x 2.5 since 1950 — and the growing volume of UK wineglasses, which has doubled since 1970.

The book could serve, if nothing else, as a source of such nuggets. But if that’s all you’re after, 500+ dense pages is on the bulky side.

It's an unusual book and I’m not sure who it’s aimed at. It would make a wonderful university textbook — albeit the sort where any course can only cover a tiny fraction of its content — and a drastically abridged version, half the length with an easier narrative, would be a real blockbuster.

Its real readership seems to be academics, policy makers and, maybe, Bill Gates. He waits for Smil’s books “the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie.”

Smil takes a dismissive view of “sloppy data gathering” and “misleading” forecasting by tech evangelists. He points out that almost all growth follows a curve like a stretched-out italic S. While the start of this process can look like an unstoppable rise, it will eventually flatten out and reach a limit. Thinking “this time it’s different” is a very bad idea.

Growth contains over 100 original graphs of growth processes and one small criticism is that these graphs don’t consistently distinguish between the actual data and fitted curves. It would have been nice to display these differently, visually bolstering Smil’s warnings to be sceptical of predictions.

While the author is cautious, he does offer some sobering conclusions. Fundamentally changing society to abandon endless growth and preserve “the only biosphere we have” is a revolutionary task, one that “cannot be delayed by another century.” But it’s one we’ve barely begun.

Published by The MIT Press, £32.