Light in the Darkness examines Alfred Crosby’s Children of the Sun, a new book about our present energy “crisis”:
Throughout our history, energy consumption has continued to rise as new technologies found new ways to exploit what are basically different forms of energy all ultimately derived from the sun. Whether it is in the form of simple muscle power, wind, current bio-mass (wood and peat), or biomass from the past (coal and oil), we are always ready to develop new sources when the old ones give out or prove inadequate. Yet each time such an energy crisis occurs, there is desperate handwringing and frantic cries that the world is coming to an end because our supply of wood, whale oil, or coal is running out.A perfect example of this occurred not long ago in the bucolic, rolling hills of Litchfield County, Conn., where today the rich are busily building their second (or is it their third?) homes.It was not always thus.At one time,not long ago, this area was the Pittsburgh of America, with iron-making blast furnaces belching black, carcinogenic smoke through the grim streets of immigrant workers’ shanties and slums.
When the local fuel supply for this industry was exhausted, wood was hauled in from as far away as Vermont. People were desperate; it seemed the American iron industry was dying.In fact,however,it had just moved to Pittsburgh, where the Bessemer converter made it possible to make steel with low-grade ore from the Great Lakes. Life continued, human ingenuity prevailed, and the Litchfield Hills sank back into a bucolic torpor to await a different kind of development.