Refrigeration has become so well established over the last 125 years that today a crude ice maker
becomes a boon for primitive people in the jungle or desert. Only a total dislocation in energy
sources will quickly loosen the connections between people and cooling. A few centuries ago,
Hippocrates (460–377? B.C.) observed: ‘most men would rather run the hazards of their lives or
health than be deprived of the pleasure of drinking out of ice’ … In the U.S.A. [today], 750 million
frozen Eskimo Pies are sold annually and seven ice cream plants are said to be operating in
Moscow … Like the men of Hippocrates, a lot of people will resist any curtailment in food and
freezing operations. They have come to expect these for survival in our present social and
industrial orders.
These remarks, asserting the extent to which the people of the United States of America
regarded refrigeration not as an optional luxury but as a necessity for survival even at the
height of the energy crisis of the late 1970s, formed part of a contribution to a massive
11-volume international compendium, Alternative Energy Sources, produced in 1978 in
response to Western concerns about rising oil prices and falling reserves. An enthusiastic
advocate for geothermal energy, the contributor's perception provides a vivid contextual
starting point for our study of Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito Coast (1981). In this
novel the central narrative focuses upon a New England family's rejection of post-war
American consumer society with its imperative to ‘build automobiles that would fail
within five years and refrigerators that would fail in ten’. The novel indeed explores some
of those very kinds of alternative energy sources which had been exciting scientists and
inventors (often on or beyond the fringes of scientific orthodoxy) since the early 1970s
when journals such as The Ecologist had begun to prophesy an end to energy-driven
economic growth in the western world.
