The Social Metabolism: A Socio-Ecological Theory of Historical Change (Environmental History, 14) [2nd ed. 2023] 303148410X, 9783031484100

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Environmental History 14

Manuel González de Molina Víctor M. Toledo

The Social Metabolism A Socio-Ecological Theory of Historical Change Second Edition

Environmental History Volume 14

Series Editor Mauro Agnoletti, Florence, Italy

The series intends to act as a link for ongoing researches concerning the historical interrelationships between man and the natural world, with special regard to the modern and contemporary ages. The main commitment should be to bring together different areas of expertise in both the natural and the social sciences to help them find a common language and a common perspective. Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are needed for more and better understanding of the environment and its history, with new epistemological frameworks and methodological practices. The links between human activities and flora, fauna, water, soil, are examples of the most debated topics in EH, while established discipline like forest history, agricultural history and urban history are also dealing with it. The human impacts on ecosystems and landscapes over time, the preservation of cultural heritage, studies of historical trajectories in pattern and processes, as well as applied research on historical use and management of landscapes and ecosystems, are also taken into account. Other important topics relate to the history of environmental ideas and movements, policies, laws, regulations, conservation, the history of immaterial heritage, such as traditional knowledge related to the environment.

Manuel González de Molina · Víctor M. Toledo

The Social Metabolism A Socio-Ecological Theory of Historical Change Second Edition

Manuel González de Molina Agroecosystems History Lab Universidad Pablo de Olavide Sevilla, Spain

Víctor M. Toledo UNAM Campus Morelia Centro de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico

ISSN 2211-9019 ISSN 2211-9027 (electronic) Environmental History ISBN 978-3-031-48410-0 ISBN 978-3-031-48411-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7 1st edition: © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 2nd edition: © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which require explanation or is the result of a historical process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and capital. Karl Marx, Grundrisse 1973, 489. Sustainability is of whom works on it. Leonardo Tyrtania

To Esther and Manolo… To Patricia, Emanuel and Emilio, once again…

Acknowledgments

All studies, but above all those completing the construction of a general idea, are always the result of a collective reflection and a family effort. The authors wish to deeply acknowledge those colleagues, students, assistants, friends, and family who have contributed for the publication of the second edition of this book, especially Christian Pulver. The initiative for this new edition came from him. What is here presented became outlined aided by discussions with numerous colleagues, supervision of several theses, imparted courses, and our participation in several academic events. The list of colleagues with which we discussed one or several of the main theses contained in the book includes: Narciso Barrera-Bassols, Benjamín Ortiz-Espejel, Enric Tello, Jesús Ramos, Mario Giampietro, Fridolin Krausmann, Geoff Gunfer, José Manuel Naredo, Oscar Carpintero, Esther Velázquez, Ramón Garrabou, Gloria Guzmán, Roberto García, David Soto, Antonio Herrera, Rosalva Loreto, Stefania Gallini, Wilson Picado, and Joan Martinez-Alier. Several years ago, Benjamín Ortíz-Espejel and Francisco Garrido Peña had already suggested the topic of dissipative systems. Juan Infante made expressly for this book the bibliometric analysis about the concept of social metabolism and helped us in a comprehensive review of the literature on this topic. More recently, our encounter with Leonardo Tyrtania and perusal of his writings was decisive. Pedro Antonio Ortiz-Báez largely made that encounter possible by building the bridges between Leonardo Tyrtania and us. A meeting about social energy that took place in the fall of 2013 with the participation of the physicists Marco Martínez and Omar Masera, together with Alejandra Martínez and other colleagues, was of great utility for differentiating the concepts of energy, emergy, and exergy. Likewise, we discussed many controversial issues of thermodynamic interpretation with Carlos Gómez Camacho from the department of thermodynamics at the University of Seville. We must also acknowledge the efforts of Eduardo García-Frapolli, María Rosa Cordón, Francisco López, Alejandra Gonzalez, Yaayé Arellanes, Patricia Claire, Antonio Cid, and Eduardo Aguilera that made possible the application of the basic model we present here in their doctoral and postdoctoral research works.

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Acknowledgments

Of similar importance were the International Seminars on Social Metabolism celebrated in Seville, Spain, in January of 2013, and in Puebla, México, in January of 2014. A large part of the results of the research contained in this book, and part of the economic support making possible the realization of seminars and congresses, was due to the financial support granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the research project Sustainable farm systems: longterm socio-ecological metabolism in Western agriculture led by Geoff Cunfer. Our encounters and discussions with Francisco Garrido Peña, who provided key readings, read, and reviewed important parts of this book, were fundamental for the theoretical reflection. This book would have not been completed without the appreciable collaboration of three colleagues who provided their determination, enthusiasm, and professionalism: Pablo Alarcón-Chaires (unfortunately deceased), who was in charge od the first edition, bibliographic references, and elaboration of tables and figures, many of which are true pieces of art; and Sergio Zárate and Christine Sagar, who translated the Spanish manuscript in a relatively short period of time. Beyond our expectations, Sergio Zárate also reviewed the sources, searched for references, made valuable comments, and even questioned and enriched several matters and aspects of the work. To both, we deeply and sincerely thank. Finally, we acknowledge the institutional support we received throughout the long task of completing this book from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville and from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in its Morelia Campus.

Contents

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Worrying About the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Exploring the Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Book Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 2 3 6

2

Environmental History as Sustainability Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 History and the Crisis of Modern Civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Environmental History, a Hybrid Discipline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Sustainability Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 A Frame for Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 A New Cognitive Frame and New Valuation Languages . . . . . . . 2.6 A New Axiology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 What is Environmental History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.8 The Goals of Environmental History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.9 Environmental History, an Alternative View of the Human Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.10 Is Environmental History Anachronic or Ephemeral? . . . . . . . . . 2.11 The Theoretical Foundations of Environmental History . . . . . . . 2.12 Environmental History and the Coevolution of Nature and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.13 Environmental History as a Transdiscipline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.14 Sustainability, the New “Sense” of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.15 Epistemological Foundations of Environmental History . . . . . . . 2.16 History as a Post-normal Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.17 Environmental History and the Ecological Paradigm . . . . . . . . . 2.18 A New Social Function for History: Species Memory . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9 9 10 12 15 16 18 19 21 22 25 26 27 29 31 32 35 36 39 41

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3

Contents

Social Metabolism: Origins, History, Approaches, and Main Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 A Stellar Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Darwin and Marx in London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 The Key Writings of Alfred Schmidt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Marx and Energy Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 The Rediscovery of Social Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 Industrial Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9 Urban Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.10 Agrarian or Rural Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.11 Regional Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.12 National Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.13 The Main Schools of Social Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.14 The Terms and Definition of the Socio-metabolic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.15 The Scope of the Metabolic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.16 Operational Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.17 Stock/Flow Versus Flow/Fund Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.18 Main Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.19 Other Topics, Other Domains of Metabolic Research . . . . . . . . . 3.20 Main Gaps and Questions to Solve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47 47 48 48 50 50 52 53 53 54 54 55 55 56 58 59 61 63 65 67 68 70

4

The Biophysical Bases of Social Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 4.2 Society is also Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 4.3 Society as an Adaptive Complex System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 4.4 Entropy and Negentropy in Social Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 4.5 The Evolutionary Originality of Human Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 4.6 Evolution, Complexity, and Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 4.7 Material and Energy Flows, Entropy, and Dissipative Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 4.8 Information Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 4.9 Physical Entropy: The Thermodynamic Foundation of Social Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 4.10 Internal Entropy and External Entropy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

5

The Social and Political Basis of Social Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Social Entropy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Social Order and Information Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 The Thermodynamic Roots of Inequality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 The Modalities of Social Inequity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

109 109 110 113 115 117

Contents

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7

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5.6 Market, Money, and Entropy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.7 Negentropy and Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8 Conflict, Protest, and Metabolic Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.9 Environmental Protest and Its Metabolic Function . . . . . . . . . . . 5.10 Environmental Conflicts as Social Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.11 Political Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.12 Political Entropy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

119 121 123 125 128 129 130 132

The Basic Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 The Metabolic Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 The Flows-Fund/Stocks Nexus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Funds or Stocks? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Biophysical Funds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.6 Social Funds: The Human Population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.7 Other Social Funds/Stocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.8 Metabolic Flows: Energy, Emergy, and Exergy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.9 The Tangible and the Intangible. Information Flows . . . . . . . . . . 6.10 Socio-metabolic Relationships and the Institutional Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.11 The Basic Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.12 The Structure of Nature: Ecosystems and Landscapes . . . . . . . . 6.13 The Colonization of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.14 Nature in Space: The Three Mega-Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.15 Who Appropriates Nature? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.16 Excretion: What is Excreted to Nature by Human Societies? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.17 The Analysis of Social Metabolism: Space and Time . . . . . . . . . 6.18 Social Metabolism and the Hierarchical Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135 135 137 141 142 144 146 149 149 151

Social Metabolism at the Local Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Punta Laguna Case Study of Rural Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 The Dual Nature of Labor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 The Appropriation of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 The Basic Appropriation Unit: P . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.6 A Flow Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.7 The Material Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.8 Ecological and Economic Exchanges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.9 Use Value and Exchange Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.10 Commodities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.11 Exchange of Equivalents and Unequal Exchanges . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.12 The Rural Metabolism of Punta Laguna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.13 Santa Fe: The Agroecosystem Metabolism Transformation . . . .

173 173 173 174 175 175 176 177 179 183 183 184 185 187

152 154 154 160 161 161 163 165 167 168

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7.14 7.15 7.16 7.17

An Agroecosystem in Territorial Equilibrium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Disequilibrium of an “Advanced Organic Economy” . . . . . 1934: The Beet Crisis and the Diversification of Crops . . . . . . . . Agricultural Production Partially Dissociated from Its Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.18 Biomass Production and External Inputs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.18.1 Net Primary Productivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.18.2 External Inputs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.19 The EROIs from an Economic Point of View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.20 The EROIs from an Agroecological Point of View . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

190 193 194

8

Social Metabolism at the Regional Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Beyond P . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 The Regional Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Regions: The Study of the Metabolic Interlock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Bosawás: Metabolic Analysis of an Indigenous Region . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

209 209 211 211 212 213 215

9

Social Metabolism at the National Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Metabolic Profiles at the National Scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 The Material Bases of Economic Development in Spain (1860–2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 Methodological Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5 Material Extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.6 The Physical Dimension of International Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.7 Material Consumption Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.8 Dematerialization or Rematerialization? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.9 Determinants of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.10 The Material Transition of the Spanish Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.11 Conclusions and Future Research Agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

217 217 218

10 Global Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 A Metabolic Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.3 Economic Growth and Material Consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4 Stocks (Funds)/Flows Nexus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.5 The Key Role of International Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.6 Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Material Flows . . . . . . . . . . 10.7 The Unviability of the Industrial Metabolism Regime . . . . . . . . . 10.8 A Biophysical Reading of the Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

237 237 237 239 243 244 246 247 248 250

196 197 197 199 200 203 205

222 223 224 226 227 229 229 231 233 234

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11 The Cinegetic or Extractive Socio-Metabolic Regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.2 The Simplest Social Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.3 The Productive Versatility of Cinegetic Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.4 The Metabolism of Cinegetic Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.5 The Intangible Dimensions of Cinegetic Metabolism . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

253 253 254 257 258 261 262

12 Organic Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.2 The Onset of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.3 The Domestication of Landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.4 The Multiple Implications of the Neolithic Revolution . . . . . . . . 12.5 The Distinctive Features of the Organic Metabolic Regime . . . . 12.6 The Metabolic Appropriation Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.7 Mimicking Nature: The Replenishment of Soil Fertility . . . . . . . 12.8 Environmental Constraints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.9 Transformation and Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.10 Markets, Consumption, and Excretion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.11 Organization and Functioning of Organic Metabolism . . . . . . . . 12.12 Common Features of Societarian Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.13 The Leading Role of the Peasantry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.14 Unsustainability and Crisis of Organic Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . 12.15 The Agrarian Empires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.16 The Collapse of Organic Metabolism Societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.17 The Environmental Conflicts of Organic Metabolism . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

265 265 266 268 270 271 272 275 276 279 281 284 289 290 295 297 300 302 304

13 Industrial Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.2 The Origins of Industrial Metabolism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.3 The Energy Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.4 A New Cognitive Framework for Processing Information: A Novel Cosmovision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.5 Changes in the Metabolic Function of Biomass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.6 The Four Pathways to Agricultural Industrialization . . . . . . . . . . 13.7 Industrialization First Comers and Late Joiners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.8 The Subterranean Forest Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.9 The First Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.10 Centers and Periphery: Trade and Colonization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.11 The Great Acceleration or the 50 s Syndrome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.12 The Trade-Off Between Entropies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.13 The Industrialization of Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.14 Industrial Metabolism: A High Entropy Regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

313 313 314 318 322 323 324 328 332 334 337 341 346 350 358 361

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14 Metabolic Transitions: A Theory of Socio-ecological Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.2 Societal Configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.3 Human Webs: The Kinetics of Historical Change . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.4 A Metabolic Reading of the Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.5 Main Metabolic Transformations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.6 The Modern World Crisis and Industrial Metabolism . . . . . . . . . 14.7 Going Beyond the Cybernetic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.8 Metabolic Change: Metamorphosis and Transitions . . . . . . . . . . 14.9 The Main Drivers of Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.10 Mobilizing the Drivers: Information Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.11 A Socio-metabolic Transition Case Study: The Industrialization of Spanish Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Epilogue: Metabolisms, Entropy, and Sustainable Society . . . . . . . . . 15.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.2 The Multiple Calls of Critical Thinkers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.3 The Limited Capabilities of Contemporary Science . . . . . . . . . . 15.4 A Synthesis of Syntheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.5 The Reappearance of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.6 Human Beings Are Tangible, Society is Ethereal . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.7 The Social Phenomenon is not a Human Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.8 And Neither is Politics… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.9 Cooperation: The Evolutionary Basis of Altruism . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.10 Social Inequity as Entropy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.11 Sustainable Societies and the Double Emancipation . . . . . . . . . . 15.12 The Final Challenge; the Final Opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

369 369 369 375 377 377 381 385 387 391 395 398 403 407 407 408 410 411 413 414 415 417 417 420 421 423 423

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Worrying About the Future As readers will have noticed, over the last two decades, an increasing number of publications have announced the collapse of human civilization and even of life itself: from Collapse (Diamond 2005) to The Sixth Extinction (Johnson 2023), followed by The Collapse of Western Civilization (Oreskes and Conway 2014) and Surviving the 21st Century (Cribb 2017). These books were accompanied by a special issue in Scientific American on the end of the world (2010), and by two crucial books: The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (2006) and An Inconvenient Truth by Gore (2007). In addition, there has been a proliferation of books, technical reports, and videos containing sophisticated analyses about future scenarios focusing on a new cabalistic date: 2050 (Smith 2012; WWF 2012). By 2050, a combination of four incontrovertible processes will take place: the human population will reach 9.7 billion; oil reserves will be exhausted; unabated climate change will cause a drastic water shortage; and consequently, food production will drop (Toledo 2022). In 2050, 1.4 billion rural producers will have to provide food for themselves, as well as for an urban population of over 8.3 billion consumers! It is time to worry about what is to come, about the insecurity of a modernity ever less capable of ensuring a safe future for mankind. In other historical periods, such anxiety about the future was nurtured by certain religious beliefs and apocalyptic ideologies, or cultivated by the desperate voices of fortunetellers, artists, and philosophers. Today, concerns are growing, but not because of cataclysmic views. Rather, they gain ground each time science exposes a new impact that humans are having on the planet’s equilibrium. The magnitude of this unease is also unprecedented: the disequilibria have become so great, and no region in the world or sector of society can escape from them. Everything is pointing towards a society that has already plunged through its own doing into “…a giant, uncontrolled experiment on earth (McNeill 2000)”, in which natural and social processes have become entangled as never before, generating novel, unpredictable, surprising dynamics and synergies that threaten human life, global equilibrium, and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_1

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uncountable life forms. The human species, now transformed into a new geologic force, has induced an unparalleled phase in Earth’s history (The Anthropocene see Crutzen and Stoner 2000). When observed in detail through the prism of the social sciences, the story reveals the predatory role of an elite, not of the whole of humanity (The Capitalocene see Moore 2016; Serratos 2021).

1.2 Exploring the Past Paradoxically, this concern for the future is prompting a renewed interest in the past. It is as if our eyes are anxiously turning towards history to understand what is to come and to find the keys to an uncertain future. Elements in the past to successfully navigate the seas of the future—a reaction that stands to reason at individual level— are today a challenge for the species and a universal task. But not only. It is also the most pressing of duties for present-day science. Will scientific thought generate the knowledge we need to solve today’s civilization crisis? The vision brought to us by History, for example, remains limited, cryptic, or biased. Only secondary— or even insignificant—matters are tackled and they result either from empirically unsupported speculations, or from unrestrained imagination. Even recent contributions aimed at determining long-term historical patterns are narrow in scope, such as the alternation of growth mega-periods with stages of stagnation and reorganization (Modelski 2007), or the expansion–contraction cycles (Chase-Dunn et al. 2007). The same applies to the frantic search for “collapses” across all epochs and regions of the world (Diamond 2005). If we expect science as a whole to understand and draw lessons from the past, two difficult and urgent missions await us: (a) building an integrating (interdisciplinary) socio-ecological conceptual framework capable of organizing research on the relations between society and nature and (b) applying such a framework, using it as an instrument to analyze these reciprocal relations throughout history (temporal dimension) and across all scales (spatial dimension). We already have at our disposal pertinent accounts on the increasingly complex succession of societal constellations built all over the planet throughout the history of the human species (McNeill and McNeill 2003). We now need to analyze all these descriptions and to interpret social and ecological processes through time, thus defining criteria that will allow us to position the present historical stage and those to come. This book belongs to the intellectual vortex that is tenaciously, sometimes obsessively, pursuing a single goal: to decipher the past for the sake of understanding the future. In fact, it is doing so even desperately. What follows is thus not a conventional history book, nor an ecological or environmental scientific work. We address here the uncommon field of interdisciplinary knowledge that we could call ecological and social, socio-ecological, or eco-social: the aim is to interpret natural and social processes within their complex and intertwined organization or synergies. Hence, what readers will essentially find here is a suite of theoretical and methodological tools based on a key concept: Social Metabolism. Broadly speaking, the concept of

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social metabolism analyzes the biophysical exchanges between society and nature. It thus leaves behind many reductionist approaches, and going beyond a conventional sociological perspective, it recognizes that material exchanges are mutually linked to exclusively social factors. As the reader will discover, the first dimension of the analysis focuses on material and energy flows, while the second centers on information flows. Such an exploration is ambitious and highly risky yet it is essential given the urgent need to understand the complexity of the present through interdisciplinary approaches.

1.3 Book Contents This is a new, second edition of the book that was published in 2014. As works on social metabolism have proliferated since then, it seemed opportune to update its contents. We undertook a twofold revision: one aimed at building socio-metabolic theory further, based on recent contributions; and the second at reviewing the literature published since the first edition in-depth and updating the narratives of this work accordingly. The changes in the book structure faithfully reflect the advances made in social metabolism. Despite this, the book is still an ambitious attempt to elaborate a biophysical theory of historical change. Indeed, in coherence with its epistemological foundations, social metabolism theory is under permanent construction. The present book maintains the same basic structure: it has been divided into four sections and fifteen chapters, including this introductory chapter. Chapters 1–6 center on the theory and epistemology: they provide a detailed definition of Social Metabolism, highlighting how the concept can contribute to Environmental History and act as a theoretical and methodological framework. These chapters therefore lay the theoretical foundations allowing to reconcile the discourse and practice of social sciences with physical and biological sciences. As a field that encompasses all human action since our appearance on Earth, History is particularly suited to this purpose when applying innovative axiomatic, epistemological theories of historical change and methodologies. This approach allows among other advantages to overcome the traditional fragmentation of scientific knowledge. Most hegemonic theories in social sciences still rely on the metaphysical illusion seized by modernity, which separated human beings from nature, generating an enduring anthropocentric fiction. Hence, our accounts of the past serve more to legitimize the permanence of obsolete industrial civilization structures than to adapt to new times, hindering our awareness of the necessary change towards a sustainable society. This conception of history as environmental history requires applying the knowledge “stored” in the past to engage in a journey towards the future and towards a more sustainable world. Among other functions, Environmental history should be like species memory, preserving all of humanity’s useful experiences across the ages of our relationship with the natural environment. The social metabolism concept has rapidly gained ground over the last decade, and its use has blossomed. Chapter 3 therefore documents the origins and development of social metabolism, outlining

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its principles and schools or trends. This chapter has undergone a major update and includes an in-depth study of today’s main social metabolism schools together with their similarities and differences. The first edition continued with a chapter devoted to the definition of a basic model of social metabolism. However, advances in the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics and their application to the social sciences, as well progress in information theory, Political Ecology, and transdisciplinary knowledge itself allowed elaborating a more rigorous biophysical foundation of past human societies. Social metabolism has thus become a robust theory with a thermodynamic and sociological basis that explains the historical course of human societies within their environment. In the first edition, this theoretical effort merely constituted a temporary proposal and was presented at the end of the book, in Chap. 12. Ten years later, a sufficient amount of knowledge has accumulated leading to a coherent theoretical proposal that requires two chapters: one focused on the biophysical bases of social metabolism (Chap. 4) and the other on establishing its social and political foundations (Chap. 5). Due to their importance in explaining the rest of the book, we decided to place them at the beginning. We thus sought to introduce the reader to the keys that, in our opinion, lead to a coherent, biophysical narrative about humanity’s past. We are convinced that this narrative is extremely useful today, as humanity must currently implement a radical shift in its relationship with nature. The first section ends with a chapter that describes the basic model in sufficient detail, acting as the conceptual framework and backbone of the work (Chap. 6). The proposed innovations include going beyond the application of metabolism to purely material dimensions—be they energetic, economic, or cybernetic. Indeed, the concept now embraces what can be understood as a complex network formed by material and immaterial components, both visible and invisible. Based on the latter, society in its entirety is understood as an assembly of phenomena pertaining to both dimensions: material and energy flows, and information flows. The information flows organize, shape and support material and energy flows through social conditioning factors such as institutions, legal rules and regimes, values, beliefs, and knowledge. The exchanges of energy, matter, and information between society and nature take place within a territorial or spatial matrix that contains several scales. The studied processes are therefore linked hierarchically, and the metabolic analysis can be conducted at different scales, each scale being determined by other scales and each determining others in turn. The scales at which the appropriation process can be analyzed range from the local to the global. There is a plethora of situations between these two extremes that are defined by the breadth of the scale and that have given rise to a trans-scalar analysis approach that is gaining ground in different fields of knowledge. In the second section, Chaps. 6–10 show how social metabolism functions at the main geographic scales, providing examples from the literature on social metabolism and some case studies developed by the authors themselves. Specifically, four examples are given, each representing a different scale: the current situation of a rural community, a rural community from a historical perspective, a micro-region, the nation state, and the world, i.e., at global scale. The cases are based on information

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collected in the field—i.e., on empirical research, from archives or from a compilation of statistical data and national accounts. The above-mentioned chapters test the spatial dimension of the basic model. They rest on the conceptual framework laid out in the first six chapters, deploying it at four spatial scales that are somewhat arbitrarily defined: local, regional, national, and global. Examples are provided for each scale, and methodological aspects are briefly discussed. The third section comprises Chaps. 11–13 and contains a similar analysis to that of Chaps. 6–10, but focusing on the temporal dimension, it offers an account of social metabolism through history. In these chapters, the material dimension of social change is examined through the study of different historical metabolic regimes. Each has encompassed a certain level of human appropriation of living or organic resources (capture of net productivity or biomass), as well as mineral resources (fossil fuels, non-metallic minerals, and metal ore), and a certain degree of human intervention in nature’s physical and biological processes. The aim is to classify societies according to their material basis (energy, matter, and information flows), and to the limits, this basis imposes on human practice. This latter practice in turn modifies and changes the metabolism itself until its total transformation. The temporal dimension of social metabolism calls for a review of the principal states or “moments” in the connections of different societies with their respective natural surroundings, each reflecting historical configurations. Three types of metabolic regimes are presented and described, constituting three key moments in humanity’s historical development from a socio-ecological perspective: cinegetic metabolism, organic or agrarian metabolism, and lastly, industrial metabolism. Three principal criteria are used to define these regimes according to the metabolic process of appropriation: the degree of transformation of the ecosystems or landscapes being appropriated; the main energy sources used during the appropriation; and the type of manipulation of the different components, and ecological or landscape processes. It is within these major, qualitative socio-ecological changes that variations or modifications take place, relating not only to other metabolic processes, but also notably to the intangible spheres of society, such as knowledge, cosmovisions, technologies, institutions, and ideologies. The three main social metabolisms are thus identified over time. A whole chapter (Chap. 13) is devoted to documenting the great transformation of human history in metabolic terms, i.e., the metamorphosis from organic metabolism forms to industrial metabolism configurations—a shift that can be described as sudden, as it spanned only a few hundred years. It is in this social and ecological transmutation that we can find most of the keys to understanding our contemporaneous situation. Chapter 14 opens the last section and presents a theory of socio-metabolic transformations built on the concept of socio-ecological transition: the metamorphosis from one metabolic regime to another, driven over time and space by socio-ecological forces. We single out a variety of factors that, usually acting in combination, tend to drive socio-ecological changes and in which social and territorial inequality, politics, and collective action play a relevant role. This latter vision is not featured in other social metabolism approaches which have so far been too cybernetic and that undervalue, or even ignore, the role of human agency in change. We then move on to

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review the socio-ecological transitions recorded throughout human history, centering on the process that led from the organic regime to the industrial metabolic regime. While we seek to summarize the drivers of societal transformations over time, and the relations of these societies with their natural surroundings, we are well aware that such a task is overwhelmingly complex. Indeed, societies can be described as intricate polyhedrons that mutate and transform themselves according to specific natural and social conditions. One dimension of the phenomenon has been largely ignored by historians in the field and other currents. This dimension is nevertheless pivotal to understand the transformations over time: social entropy, the frictions and conflicts it triggers, and the continued attempts to offset social entropy with more physical entropy. This latter mechanism has enabled one section of mankind to exploit and dominate another, larger section, at the cost of exploiting nature. A last chapter completes the book with a necessary epilogue or corollary describing the social and ecological situation of the contemporary world—i.e., industrial civilization. It suggests the need to envision and take a qualitative leap towards an alternative modernity. This leap, as understood in the present book, consists of searching for a new type of social metabolism that many scholars insist on calling sustainable society. Thus, the book concludes by affirming the need for a new socioecological transition, that has already started, towards a new metabolic regime based on sustainability values. The severity of today’s metabolic crisis—and whose manifestations are well known (ecological, energetic, food crisis, etc.)—highlights both the unsustainability of the modern life regime and the impossibility of completing the transition towards industrial metabolism. Several signs (some countries’ growing distance from energy and material consumption, the global progression of organic farming production, the expansion of renewable energies, etc.) indicate that the transition towards a sustainable society may have already begun. In summary, interpreting history in terms of social metabolism helps us to visualize the need for the human species to move towards a new type of social metabolism. It also offers elements to construct the profiles of a sustainable society. This implies a radical rethinking of the metabolic processes and the unavoidable suppression of all mechanisms of social inequality. The latter mechanisms are essentially visible in the trans-metabolic phenomenon of forced extraction of surplus—and its underevaluation throughout the metabolic chain, a hefty legacy of human society going back several millennia. We end this introduction with a key premise: suppressing unequal exchange—social crisis—within society is the only way to suppress unequal exchange between society and nature—the ecological crisis.

References Chase-Dunn Ch, Hall TD, Turchin P (2007) World systems in the biogeosphere. In: Hornborg A, Crumley C (eds) The world system and the earth system. Left Coast Press, pp 132–148 Cribb J (2017) Surviving the 21st century. Springer Crutzen PJ, Stoner EF (2000) The anthropocene. Glob Change Newsl 41:17–18

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Diamond J (2005) Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed. Viking Gore A (2007) An inconvenient truth. Documentary Film Johnson, Glen (2023) The sixth extinction: an apocalyptic tale of survival: part one: outbreak. Createspace independent publishing platform Lovelock J (2006) The revenge of Gaia. Allen Lane, Santa Barbara McNeill JR (2000) Something new under the Sun: an environmental history of the twentieth century world. Penguin Books McNeill JR, McNeill WH (2003) The human web: a birds eye view of world history. Norton Modelski G (2007) Ages of organization. In: Hornborg A, Crumley C (eds) The world system and the earth system. Left Coast Press, pp 180–194 Moore JW (ed) (2016) Anthropocene or capitalocene? Nature, history and the crisis of capitalism. PM Press, Oakland Oreskes N, Conway EM (2014) The collapse of western civilization. Columbia University Press Serratos F (2021) El Capitaloceno. Una historia radical de la crisis climática. UNAM y Festina Ediciones, México Smith L (2012) The new north: our world in 2050. Profile Books, London Toledo VM (2022) The global crisis is a crisis of civilization. Revista De Estudios Globales 2:119– 129 WWF (World Wildlife Fund) (2012) The 2050 criteria. World Wildlife Fund, Washington D.C.

Chapter 2

Environmental History as Sustainability Science

2.1 History and the Crisis of Modern Civilization Industrial civilization exerted global dominium during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is now undeniably suffering a deep crisis, its foremost myths gradually collapsing one by one. Industrial growth has visibly failed to close the gap between rich and poor countries, clearly revealing its inability to connect economic growth, industrialization, and wellbeing. Social inequalities have not been solved either. Although they receded during the peak of Fordism, inequalities are currently surging again, reaching even a growing share of rich country populations (Milanovic 2003, 2006; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). In stark contrast to misery and violence, the countless commodities offered on markets—now boosted by globalization—are fostering feelings of deprivation globally, thrusting migratory movements and endangering the positional privileges of affluent countries. The nineteenth- and twentiethcentury modes of political organization that accompanied industrial capitalism are clearly showing signs of exhaustion. Indeed, substantial shares of sovereignty are being continuously transferred to the realms of transnational decision-making. Meanwhile, small cultural communities, reacting to globalization, are regaining their political identities. The orthodox paradigms of science—together with their hegemonic core of scientific-technological rationality—have undergone an irreversible crisis that is also affecting dominant values. Other values have emerged in the meantime, labeled by some as post-materialistic, though they may be merely expressing the need for a new modernity—as claimed by Beck (1998). Yet it is the ecological crisis that perhaps illustrates the civilization crisis, its severity, and its planetary dimension the best. And it is the ecological crisis that will surely force the adoption of major societal changes. The greenhouse effect, the exhaustion of mineral resources and fossil fuels, deforestation, overexploitation, water depletion, atmospheric pollution, acid rain, erosion, and desertification, among others, are closely linked to the modes of production and consumption brought about by economic growth and industrialization. Nevertheless, most discourses regarding the past continue to maintain the same

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_2

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values and to proclaim the virtues of a single social model that a shrinking sector of the population still considers viable: industrial society. Indeed, it is discouraging to see how most historians regard the role of nature as marginal, and that nature is invoked solely by environmental historians. Once the scientistic pretension of a Total History, conceived as an instrument for social change, has been rendered obsolete, historical discourse has now diversified its objectives, its contents, as well as its theoretical and methodological orientations. No more is there a Universal History composed of the sum of national histories or of the aggregation of different social classes. We now work with a multiplicity of histories—some of which are too small or insubstantial—foregoing any sense of social usefulness. The pulverizing that was prompted by postmodern critical historiography has deconstructed the solid foundations of Total History, one of the late forms of understanding the past of industrial civilization. This deconstruction, however, was incomplete. Postmodern historiography continues to neglect nature. Its discourses remain inside a material vacuum with no physical or biological references, and no relation to the laws of nature that make social practices possible or impossible. Thus, most of today’s historiographical currents stem from the metaphysical illusion that enraptured modernity, and that segregated human beings from nature, engendering an anthropocentric fiction that refuses to die. That is why some accounts of the past are often turned into a mere instrument to legitimize the present. We thus find ourselves in an odd situation, i.e., lacking any social memory to face our current challenges. The prevailing historiographical discourse is still preserving the axioms of an obsolete modernity. The narratives have notoriously abandoned reality: incurably, they perform simple archaeological exercises or work on building knowledge museums that are almost devoid of any connections with their surroundings. In such a discourse, reality is only useful to legitimize a society in crisis, thus delaying awareness of change. It is thus urgent to reclaim the unity that is necessary to form a collective memory and social demands. And this recovery would be based on the need to reconcile society with nature. The following pages are devoted to supporting such an advance. Indeed, we attempt to relate accounts of the past with human knowledge, in order to achieve a clear and palpable social utility to face today’s eco-social crisis.

2.2 Environmental History, a Hybrid Discipline Environmental History emerged as a response to the limited capacity of conventional disciplines to understand the increasingly complex reality of the present. In his devastating criticism of contemporary science, Morin (2001) pinpointed the main limitation of the predominant style of scientific research describing it as the simplifying paradigm: a way of organizing knowledge that reduces at the same time the growing complexity of contemporaneous reality. The need to surpass such fragmented objectivity by means of a multidimensional or integrating explanation has already sparked new epistemological and methodological proposals.

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Two major contributions are, unquestionably, Edgar Morin’s principle of complexity (1980, 2001) and Rolando García’s study of complex systems (2000, 2006): “With the principle of complexity we intend to overcome the separation of knowledge into separate worlds characteristic of ‘classical science,’ [where] … not even the human sciences are conscious of the physical and biological nature of human phenomena, and nor are the natural sciences conscious of their inclusion within a culture, a society, a history, or the hidden principles orienting its constructs” (Morin 1984: 43). Thus, a science with consciousness as Morin calls it would be that which succeeds at transcending different specializations without abolishing them. In any event, many problems that need to be addressed by researchers are part of a reality that is not classified into scientific disciplines. García (2000) recognizes that certain multiple processes merge (e.g., of the physical-biological environment, production, technology, demography, and social organization) conform the structure of a system functioning as an organized whole. García calls them complex systems, and they can only be analyzed based on an interdisciplinary approach. The above requires a research strategy that goes beyond the simple summation of various specialists’ partial approaches. It is necessary to build a truly systemic interpretation leading towards an integrated diagnosis. Thus, this new field of scientific practice responds to the challenges of the ecological crisis. It embraces several hybrid disciplines that constitute specific reactions to the generalized and excessive compartmentalization and specialization process. They are expressions of a sort of salvage science seeking for information to stop and reverse the environmental crisis. This phenomenon presents two main characteristics. First, there has been a major infectious focus on Ecology. This latter discipline has achieved an original synthesis of knowledge coming from other Earth and biological sciences, including Physics and Chemistry, and then crystallized it in the proposal of the ecosystem concept, its object of study. Secondly, it has been a multipolar process in which the resistance of ecologists to change their approach, centered on the study of nature as a pure, pristine, or untouched entity, has been gradually overcome. The impermeable barriers of discipline purity have also been removed from at least nine areas of knowledge. As a result, nearly twenty hybrid disciplines have arisen (Fig. 2.1). They can be understood as interdisciplinary modes of approaching reality in which the synthetic analysis of nature (Ecology) is integrated into different studies of the social or human universe. Heterogeneity has been the main feature of this reciprocal fertilization. In fact, any attempt to consider these hybrid disciplines as components of an assumed metascience is premature, if not illusory. Nevertheless, interdisciplinarity requires the use of a common language at least. Examples of this can be found at present in many fields of study. One illustration is the case of the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE). Participants believe that “one of the major challenges this goal is develop ‘workable’ terminology that can be accepted by scholars of all disciplines” (Constanza et al. 2012, 106). Another example is Herbert Gintis’s more ambitious proposal (2009, 225) to extend History as a science and to study human behavior in the past. According to Gintis: “In fact all four (disciplines) (Economics, Anthropology, Sociology and Psychology) are flawed but can be modified to produce a unified

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Fig. 2.1 Diagram showing the birth of at least 12 hybrid disciplines resulting from the integration of biological Ecology into other knowledge domains. See text

framework for modeling choice and strategic interaction for all of the behavioral sciences”. From a sociological perspective, the triggering factors of all these new hybrid disciplines have undoubtedly been the globalization of the human phenomenon, the development of specialized knowledge itself, the deployment of new technologies, and, at the heart of it all, the appearance and aggravation of the so-called environmental or ecological crisis. The latter has reached today a global scale, and in recent decades, it has become more frequent, severe, and widespread. In sum, Environmental History has surged at the same time as other knowledge areas, among which the most conspicuous are Ecological Economics, Political Ecology, Environmental Education, Agroecology, etc.

2.3 Sustainability Science Beyond the thought of the above-cited scholars and others, such as Funtowicz and Ravetz (2000) or Holling (2001), who propose a science for sustainability, cognitive fragmentation has not been broken in a self-conscious and generalized way. The trend has been spontaneous, multipolar, and asynchronous; that is, it has appeared over different periods of time and across different knowledge domains where the problems to be solved have induced new integrating approaches. The best illustration of this methodological process is environmental problems— as they are called. Over time, it has become clear that these environmental issues can only be fully described, interpreted, and above all, solved, through a comprehensive approach. Environmental or ecological issues are perhaps today the greatest challenge for contemporary science. The reason is not only because they demand urgent new

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approaches capable of offering reliable and comprehensive information to solve numerous problems, but specifically because these issues already represent a colossal threat to the survival of life and human societies on the planet. In this regard, the birth of a science of sustainability can be understood as the result of an evolutionary convergence brought about by environmental pressures on the divergent branches of science. The terms “sustainability science” and “the science of sustainable development” were “officially” coined in 1999 by the National Research Council of USA (Giampietro 2021, 7). Despite its youth, sustainable science has experienced an unusual expansion. This novel field—which despite its diversity has given rise to a more unified scientific practice—has produced an impressive volume of literature. The bibliometric analyses performed show that this current has flourished, growing spectacularly since the nineties, and exceeding 12,000 papers in 2014 (González-Márquez and Toledo 2020). Sustainability science, as described by the PNAS website, is “… an emerging field of research dealing with the interactions between natural and social systems, and with how those interactions affect the challenge of sustainability: meeting the needs of present and future generations while substantially reducing poverty and conserving the planet’s life support systems (quoted in Kates 2011, 19449)”. At present, sustainability science “is usually understood as research providing the necessary insights to make the normative concept of sustainability operational, and the means to plan and implement adequate steps towards this end (Spangenberg 2011, 276)”. It is, therefore, a predominantly practical or applied science: “sustainability science is a different kind of science that is primarily use-inspired, as are agricultural and health sciences, with significant fundamental and applied knowledge components, and commitment to moving such knowledge into societal action (Kates 2011, 19450)”. It pursues “real-world solutions to sustainability problems (Spangenberg 2011, 275)”. Sustainability science is not a subtopic of other sciences, nor a transversal topic, nor merely a new discipline. Despite the fact that the term encompasses several theories, methods, and orientations (Kastenhofer et al. 2011), it has become a research field defined by the problems of unsustainability rather than by the disciplines it refers to (Clark 2007; Kajikawa et al. 2007). Beyond possible semantic differences, sustainability science must include both the science for sustainability and the science of sustainability. According to Spangenberg (2011, 276), sustainability science is characterized by three somewhat consensual core features: it may be basic or applied research, but it must be linked to a defined objective; the approach to complex scientific and technological topics is based on integrated analyses and evaluations, understood as iterative participatory processes of reflection and discussion in so far as knowledge (science) is coupled with action (politics); the participation of scientists, decision makers, and stakeholders is essential. Finally, it is imperative that sustainability science be multidisciplinary, or as stated by Clark and Levin (2010, 6), “extraordinarily multidisciplinary”.

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In the first edition of this book, we claimed that sustainability science (SS) could include Environmental History, a current aimed at addressing humanity’s problems of unsustainability. Yet the discipline’s recent evolution does not support this inclusion, precisely because the majority current within it uses cognitive frameworks and valuation languages that do not break with conventional frameworks and languages. González-Márquez and Toledo (2020) made a thorough criticism of SS and described it as “a paradigm in crisis”. The authors question the ability of SS to promote the necessary transition to sustainability. Indeed, after all the rhetoric, “the efforts and effects to date remain insufficient” and the world is still far from fulfilling the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In fact, the planet’s main ecological and socio-metabolic indicators have continued to worsen and fall ever further away from the sustainability goals, as pointed out in the introduction to the second edition of this book. Wealth concentration and social inequality have grown significantly since the eighties. In addition, four of the nine planetary boundaries have been crossed, threatening the conditions for human life to develop in safe environments (González-Márquez and Toledo 2020, 9). The questionable capacity of SS to solve the problems generated by the ecosocial crisis has been interpreted by the authors as an “accumulation of anomalies”. For Kuhn, this accumulation of anomalies was a manifestation of a paradigmatic crisis (González-Márquez and Toledo 2020, 10). The crisis results from a factor that Sterman (2012) calls “policy resistant”. Its causes are the underlying assumptions and mental models that explain sustainability science’s inability to solve socioenvironmental problems. González-Márquez and Toledo (2020, 12) highlighted that most solutions proposed by SS are predominantly technological in nature and use marketbased instruments. “Technology and policies can surely be part of the solution, but if they systematically fail to solve the problems, we need to review the mental models upon which their design is based (…) This includes not only the level of scientific theories, but also a paradigm’s fundamental claims and even the basic premises of our worldview”. The authors conclude that “In order to solve SS’s problem-solving power crisis and face socio-environmental issues more effectively, it is imperative to overcome these resistances and enable “out of the box” thinking” (p. 13). Sustainability science should therefore identify the flaws and correct the mental models that scientists operate with. This diagnosis of the paradigmatic crisis can be nuanced and completed with a less naïve interpretation of the “policy resistant” factor that, according to Sterman, explains the widespread failure of systems thinking. According to this author, the growing sustainability movement is neither effective nor sustainable itself, because the efforts of firms, individuals, and governments in the name of sustainability are directed towards the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem (Sterman 2012, 35). This is because the sustainability challenge approach often triggers conflicts between the economy, social equity, and the environment. These battles are resolved within existing institutional frameworks dominated by the liberal economic paradigm, the economic growth rationale, and the free market. It is not enough, as Sterman naively advances, “to develop specific tools and methods to develop our systems thinking capabilities, methods that avoid both self-defeating pessimism

2.4 A Frame for Sustainability

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and mindless optimism, while remaining true to scientific method and ecological realities” (Sterman 2012, 35). The shift from a metabolic regime to sustainability must become a social need common to a majority share of our societies. Only by transforming the institutional framework will a metabolic transformation become possible. This institutional change, however, must be accompanied by a paradigm or frame shift. Scientific activity, like any social activity, takes place within “frames” or “cognitive frameworks”. These frameworks constrain the scope of the knowledge that needs to be built. As Lakoff (2010, 71) argues, “All of our knowledge makes use of frames, and every word is defined through the frames it neurally activates”. These cognitive frameworks give meaning to complex phenomena, facilitate their understanding, and allow addressing them in a particular way. Lakoff gives the example of how deniers perceive global warming, despite its anthropogenic nature having been clearly shown long ago by scientific research. The explanation is that many people lack a mental frame that would allow them to comprehend the phenomenon and act accordingly. In this sense, today’s dominant historiographical current suffers from what Lakoff calls “hypocognition” in relation to nature and, therefore, to environmental problems. “The reason is that the environment is not just about the environment. It is intimately tied up with other issue areas: economics, energy, food, health, trade, and security. In these overlap areas, our citizens as well as our leaders, policymakers, and journalists simply lack frames that capture the reality of the situation [of the environment and its social implications] (Lakoff 2010, 76)”. Historiography builds stories in which nature and the environment are either overlooked or relegated to a secondary plane, i.e., as a backdrop to human action and never as an agent in and of themselves.

2.4 A Frame for Sustainability For the dominant frame to change, a new sustainability science based on a fresh cognitive framework and novel valuation languages—and naturally, on a new axiology— needs to emerge. It is within Environmental History that new narratives on humanity’s past as a species must be constructed based on this corrected sustainability science framework. Environmental History must contribute to raising awareness about the need to solve our societies’ unsustainability problems. In the pages that follow, we attempt to ground Environmental History in theoretical and epistemological frameworks that contribute to building a “sustainability frame”. The latter is designed to facilitate the adoption of solutions already laid out and proposes others that sustainability science in its present state has failed to design. Environmental history needs new cognitive frameworks in which knowledge can be adequately constructed. The dominant framework does not seem useful since it hinders or prevents the search for explanations to environmental problems and the pursuit of effective solutions. Lakoff himself illustrates what he calls Let-theMarket-Decide ideology “in which the market is both moral and natural–it’s the

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Decider, who rewards market discipline and punishes lack of it; there should be no authority higher than that of the market. Hence no regulations, low or no taxes, no workers’ protections or unions, no tort cases. Thus, environmental regulation and government subsidies for sustainable energy, green technology, and green jobs are seen as government interference in the market, and hence immoral” (Lakoff 2010, 74). This cognitive framework must be accompanied by assessment languages and methodological procedures that are functional. Lakoff argues in this regard that “present-day market fundamentalism assumes that greed is good. It supports the view that market principles should govern our conflicts between environmentalism and economics. One such principle is cost–benefit analysis (CBA). The basic math of CBA uses subtraction: the benefits minus the costs summed over time indefinitely. Now those ‘benefits’ and ‘costs’ are seen in monetary terms, as if all values involving the future of the earth were monetary. CBA is just the wrong paradigm for thinking about global warming, however” (Lakoff 2010, 75). As conveyed by the expressive title of Guimaraes Pereira and Funtowicz’s book, from a scientific perspective, we are facing “The End of the Cartesian Dream”. According to these authors, “the idea of a successor programme to replace the existing one is an essential task of our time. It must be substantially different from the existing paradigm because the world has changed and we have changed, precisely because of the transformative power of modern ideals and technologies. How to change and, at the same time, preserve the humanistic tradition of the European civilisation is a severe challenge” (Guimarães Pereira and Funtowicz 2015, 8).

2.5 A New Cognitive Frame and New Valuation Languages The present work seeks to contribute to the generation of a new cognitive framework. This new framework favors a thoughtful automation of perceptions, ideas, and behaviors that have sustainability at their heart and that help to overcome the policy resistance or systematic rejection of the dominant institutional framework (González de Molina et al. 2020). Environmental History’s main goal must be the creation of a new narrative about the past that serves the pursuit of sustainability. It must rest, therefore, on a different cognitive framework than the conventional one, i.e., the framework underlying the modern historical narrative, which is anthropocentric, technocentric and in which monetary values and the idea of unlimited progress prevail (González de Molina 2022). To contribute to this cognitive matrix—which is shared with the other hybrid disciplines—it seems appropriate to adopt a number of Political Ecology principles (Garrido Peña 2012), specifically: biomimicry, neuromimicry, and ethomimesis. Biomimicry is a common practice in ecological thinking. It consists of understanding and systematizing the structure, functioning and dynamics of ecosystems, and designing similar technological models based on that knowledge (Riechman 2006). Biomimicry is about “imitating nature” to rebuild human production systems

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making them compatible with the biosphere. This principle is useful to guide production according to criteria, potentialities, rules, and limits of natural and physical processes. Applied to Environmental History, the principle would serve to retrieve orientations, rules, limits, etc., from ecosystems and their functioning. This knowledge would help, in turn, to analyze the metabolic functioning of past societies and to determine whether they were compatible with the biosphere. By regularly applying this principle, the historiographical narrative would revolve around sustainability. In other words, the historiographical narrative would center on whether societies were sustainable or not in the past and how they performed in this regard. The functioning of ecosystems is not the only domain, however, that provides us with valuable information. The study of the human brain also offers quality information that helps us to analyze the past from a biophysical perspective. Neuromimicry is the copying of the devices, rules, and mechanisms that make the human cognitive system the most efficient and complex machine. The human brain weighs barely more than one kilogram (2.2 pounds) and consumes around 400 cal. Yet it can contain more than 100,000 million nerve cells or neurons and make a million neural connections per second, with a total potential inter-neuron connective density of 1014 (Garrido Peña 2012, 25). This is perhaps the greatest connective density in the known universe and even surpasses that of today’s supercomputers that expend higher amounts of energy by several orders of magnitude (Morgan 2003). Brain efficiency can be explained by its neuronal connective density, that is, its functional complexity, which is key to understanding the complex behavior of human societies. As Garrido Peña argues, “natural language or natural numbers are a monument to efficiency because using a finite and small set of symbols (consuming very small amounts of materials and energy) they can produce an infinite number of mental and social operations (meanings, representations, calculations, predictions, descriptions, etc.). The secret of neurocognitive efficiency lies in how it replaces materials and energy consumption with organization and information consumption. From a thermodynamic viewpoint, the brain is a model organism” (Garrido Peña 2012, 25). Far from any naturalistic stance, or any exceptionalist viewpoint, the etho-mimicry principle can help to study human behavior. Indeed, human behavior can be understood to be evolutionary and to share the same objectives as other species, focusing in particular, for example, on the most efficient ways of using resources and the most efficient relationships with nature. To illustrate this point, the most efficient evolutionary behaviors have proven to be cooperative behaviors, behaviors that encourage austerity in the use of natural resources, and social activities that require low energy and material consumption such as rituals or celebrations. As Garrido Peña (2012, 26) argues, “both primitive communities and great apes (especially bonobos) manage natural resources as finite resources and simulate social and emotional resources as infinite (games, parties, duels, sexual rituals etc.)”. Adopting this cognitive principle implies regarding the human being as one more biological entity, inserted in ecosystems and subject to the laws of thermodynamics and evolution. This cognitive principle casts aside the exceptional nature of the human species and implies

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a radical epistemological change, an environmental turnaround. These three principles (biomimicry, neuromimicry and etho-mimicry) can therefore guide Environmental History in its study of the human past and help the discipline to center on the relationship with the environment and sustainability.

2.6 A New Axiology The axiology of Environmental History must differ from that which still prevails in conventional historiography. It must reflect a transformation of both the intrinsic values and the functioning of historical discourse and historians. Indeed, history cannot be limited to a mere recounting of past events. As a social activity, the study of history is ruled by multiple values which give meaning to scientific praxis. The classical separation of facts and values is now obsolete. Scientific activity and, hence, its theories are deeply influenced by several value systems which need to be analyzed and elucidated (Echeverría 1995, 73). In that sense, the dominant paradigms of social science were founded on axioms that magnify progress and put science at the service of production, providing technological progress with self-referenced autonomy. In Economy, it was economic growth; in Sociology, it was social modernization with its urbanization and complex labor division sequels; in Anthropology, it was ensuring the industrial “I” over the otherness of indigenous peoples. Social sciences became subordinated to the common objective of modernizing societies, i.e., to the expansion of the way of life created by the Industrial Revolution. Modern historiographical discourse shared all these preconceived ideas and thus became a legitimization instrument for National States and industrialism. Providing historical discourse with a new axiology is an essential task to which Environmental History can make a decisive contribution. Indeed, it encompasses topics in which facts answer to most meta-scientific assumptions underlying most history syntheses and manuals, and even a large part of monograph and journal research publications. Among these assumptions, some provide character, as they are closely associated with the industrial civilization with which they were born and in which they became consolidated, and of which they have been blamed as responsible for the crisis: anthropocentrism, unlimited progress, ethnocentrism, preponderance of the economic and material, and others. Not infrequently do we find comments about the need to dominate nature in order to achieve human development and wellbeing, or the superiority of Western culture over other cultures—regarded as incapable of attaining a minimum level of civilization. These messages are either assumed or openly recognized, and democratic conquests or scientific advancements are linked to this statement, shamelessly defending an ethnocentric conception of history. Unlimited progress is perhaps the most difficult notion to eradicate from history books, maybe because it confers a meaning to the study of time which was introduced by religion when theology ruled the discourse. Thus, a lineal and progressive conception of time continues to be embodied in an unquestioned principle of material richness accumulation as an expression of progress. Progress has been turned into

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a socially evident and unquestionable fact through economic growth. The growth dynamics include: the trend to increment the system’s physical economic base; the need for ever-expanding consumption to perpetuate its own existence; and the identification of wellbeing with the possession of material commodities. A number of factors, however, have brought about the rejection not only of linear evolutionism— characteristic of many rational and modern utopias—but also of many sociological, economic, and, of course, historical theories. Among these factors are the ecological crisis, the nuclear threat, the incapacity to generate wellbeing for all the human species, the recession (instead of development) experienced by most third-world countries over the past decades, the skepticism that humanity is going in the right direction (if it was ever believed), the understanding that progress is the product of nature’s evolution towards greater complexity, or that social complexity automatically assumes the rationality set out by Weber. Any renewed historical discourse that is consequently reconciled with nature must restate the objectives that have hitherto remained within the domain of historiography: wealth creation, economic growth, nations’ technological development, and social equity. While these aspirations are legitimate, environmental historiography must also question whether these goals were achieved without endangering society’s long-term survival; that is, it must address the issue of their sustainability.

2.7 What is Environmental History Certain academic groups also designate Environmental History as Ecological History, which should not be confused with Historical Ecology. Historical Ecology is the subdiscipline of Ecology that deals with the study of ecosystems of the past. Although its origins go back to the eighteenth century, it was not defined until the 1950s (Rackham 2003). History has interested ecologists for a long time (e.g., see Peterken 1981; McDonnell and Pickett 1993; Worster 1993; Russell 1997; Meine 1999; Bowman 2001; Egan and Howell 2001; Foster et al. 2003; Rackham 2003; Verheyen et al. 2004; Crumley 2007; Dietl and Flessa 2009). Such an interest has arisen because it helps to understand present processes involving nature; because it facilitates both decision-making and the implementation of better supported modes of management of ecosystems (Newell and Wasson 2002; Thompson et al. 2009); and, finally, because History as a discipline situates Ecology in a more consequent interdisciplinary context (Bürgi and Gimmi 2007). Historical Ecology initially shared topics and some methodologies with Environmental History. Over the last decades, however, it has gravitated more towards Ecology, in particular towards the conservation of natural resources. No consensus has been reached among ecologists who define themselves as historical ecologists regarding the definition of Historical Ecology (Rackham 1986, 1998, 2003; Crumley 1994, 2007; Russell 1997; Egan and Howell 2001; Balée 2006; Bürgi and Gimmi 2007). However, given the fact that human beings have become one of the main explanatory factors of ecosystem dynamics, there is an agreement about its main

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object of study: the interactions between humans and nature in the past. While mainstream ecologists conceive human activity as a stressing agent for the environment, a new conception is gaining ground in which human activity is regarded as an agent of change and thus of the environmental dynamics (Dearing 2007, 31). In other words, it has become clearer each day that it is impossible to analyze nature and culture separately (Szabó 2010, 381). The terms Ecology and History as fields of study were defined by Crumley (2007, 27): the former including humans, and the latter, the planetary system and the physical and social past of the human species. Historical ecologists focus more on the large fluctuations of physical and biological cycles, particularly those relating to the climate, and their repercussions on human societies together with their reaction capacity (resilience). Their view of the past is rather naturalistic. They consider its functional rules and contemplate society as separate from nature, reacting differentially to environmental pressures. Environmental History, on the contrary, addresses the growing environmental concerns of the community and of historians, adopting a more social view. As a part of History, the human past remains the focus, but regarding material interactions, Environmental History remains engaged in studying the various past and extant societies as human ecosystems, or as subsystems of the more inclusive system of nature. If the objective of study of Historical Ecology is the ecosystem—broadly speaking, i.e., including anthropized ecosystems—that of Environmental History is the biophysical part of the functioning of human societies in the past. A priori, there should be no distinction between Historical Ecology and Environmental History, given that both attempt to build “a science of the past (Cornell et al. 2010; Costanza et al. 2012, 112)”. Let us examine the example of Agroecology. An agroecosystem is an anthropized ecosystem that would be unintelligible if we did not consider the energy supplied by human beings. Historical Agroecology can only be the Environmental History of agroecosystems. Thus, Historical Agroecology and Environmental History have one and the same object of study and are the same discipline. The ideal situation would be that both disciplines—Historical Ecology and Environmental History—merge into one based on the level of human intervention in the environment. To achieve this unification, a language, together with a theoretical and methodological framework, needs to be developed. They would need to be common, taking into account their diversity, or at the very least, they should facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue. In this regard, exchanges among academic communities are currently intense, and the boundaries of both disciplines are becoming increasingly blurred. Donald Hughes attempted to establish a more precise conceptual perception of Environmental History: “The idea of environment as something separate from the human, and offering merely a setting for human history, is misleading. The living connections of humans to the communities of which they are part must be integral components of the historical account. Whatever humans have done to the rest of the community has inevitably affected themselves. To a very large extent, ecosystems have influenced the patterns of human events. We have, in turn, have to an impressive degree made them what they are today. That is, humans and the rest of the community of life have been engaged in a process of coevolution that did not end with the origin

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of the human species but has continued to the present day. Historical writing should not ignore the importance and complexity of that process (Hughes 2002, 25)”. In consequence, a unification needs to be operated within a single field of knowledge, and the objective of Environmental History is not the study of the (natural) environment, but of human beings within the environment, i.e., of the relations between society and nature through time. According to John McNeill (2005, 13), one of the better-known environmental historians, Environmental History studies the reciprocal relations between the human species and the rest of nature. In this latter definition, to which we adhere, human beings are not an external and differentiated entity, but are part of nature together with all other living species, as we will reexamine below. Such a definition raises questions as to the tasks of Environmental History. Worster (2004, 126) stated that: “all the range of human interactions, both intellectual and material, with the natural world are assumed. This concept questions how natural or anthropogenic forces have transformed the landscape and how these changes have affected human life. It concentrates in the technological power that humans have accumulated and asks how that power has affected the natural world. The new environmental history also takes care of how humans have perceived the natural world and how they have reflected about their relation with this more than human world” (Worster 2004, 126).

2.8 The Goals of Environmental History Following the proposals of the most illustrious historians, Morgan (2018) systematized the desirable objectives or tasks of environmental historiography. For Donald Worster, Environmental History must study nature and its impacts on society, the social and economic relations stemming from environmental adaptation, as well as mental and intellectual interactions with nature. Donald Hughes’s objectives are similar: the influence of environmental factors on human history, environmental change produced by human beings, and ideas about the environment. John McNeill also identifies three categories of objectives: (a) physical; (b) cultural and intellectual; and (c) political. Finally, Carolyn Merchant proposes five objects of study: the interactions between humans and the natural world; environmental movements; ideas about nature; and the analysis of environmental change narratives. As Morgan warns, however, none of the above proposals consider all these aspects comprehensively or interrelate them (Morgan 2018, 4). This deficiency can perhaps be explained by the fact that within Environmental History, society and nature are persistently regarded as two separate worlds governed by different laws and conditions—though the interactions between both are indeed recognized. In our view, Environmental History should be conceived as the history of humanity within the environment. In other words, rather than considering humans as a foreign and separate body, they should be considered as a species that is more subject to the laws of nature, including the laws of evolution. We will come back to this in Chap. 4.

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The idea is not, however, to place the environment at the heart of the story. Historians such as Campbell (2010) established a very close relationship between weather and famine, climate and plague, as well as between climate change and war. It is certainly impossible to ignore the role of the environment in human history. But this does not mean we can overlook the role of other social variables in the construction of a new narrative. The fact of telling only one part of the story, in which the environment occupies a central position, may lead, paradoxically, to maintaining the artificial nature/society division. From an epistemological viewpoint, the consideration of human societies as nature, of the human species as one more species integrated into ecosystems, allows us to dispense with the debate on whether the environment should be the protagonist of history. Considering human societies as nature allows us to dissolve the boundaries between nature and society, thus enabling us to approach the history of humanity also as environmental history. As Worster (1988a, b) says, “each of our activities, however mundane, is ecological” and, therefore, subject to historical analysis. We can conclude, therefore, that environmental history should be the ecological history of the human species (Epstein 2019, 213). Environmental History is thus the history of humanity throughout its evolution on the planet. It does not seek to build a new human evolution narrative that would replace contemporaneous theories such as Marxism or Functionalism among others: such an ambition evaporated with the crisis of modernity. Environmental History is not either, however, a new historiographical discipline to be added to pre-existing—Economic, Agrarian, Political, and Social History—specializations, nor does it operate independently from them. It is not one more of the “crumbs” into which history has disintegrated in these postmodern times. Environmental History uses theories and methods, and constructs narratives that should be part of Economic History, Political History, or Social History. Thus, the knowledge it provides is transversal. It cuts across existing disciplines, as does its position regarding many ongoing historiographical debates that feed it.

2.9 Environmental History, an Alternative View of the Human Past Environmental History is not designed either to become a specific field of knowledge dominated by Natural Sciences, nor does it endow the environment with the capacity to explain human practices—which it obviously cannot do. Hence, it does not claim to understand everything from an environmental perspective, legitimizing the intrusion of Natural Sciences in History, and giving preference to natural scientists over social ones. Such a defensive reaction is common among many historians who see their status threatened by the specialized knowledge required to practice Environmental History and that is apparently outside a humanistic approach (e.g., Fontana 1992, 65)—and for which they are usually not qualified. The separation between social and natural sciences was abandoned long ago with the development

2.9 Environmental History, an Alternative View of the Human Past

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of human knowledge, committed to a transdisciplinary approach (Khagram et al. 2010). What Environmental History does seek to do is to reject and overcome the traditional division—and even the confrontation—between society and nature that has characterized the modern historiography narrative. As a result, Environmental History cannot be presumed to be a mere translation of concepts and schemes from the Natural Sciences into the historiographical field, just as it would also be unjustified to assume that History can be replaced with Ethology or Biology. Furthermore, it would be terribly unfair and restrictive to simplistically place Ecology—which shares many of its theoretical and epistemological postulates with Environmental History—in the realm of the Natural Sciences—understood as disciplines that focus exclusively on animal, physical, and biological realities. Environmental History is thus far from adopting any imperialistic attitude towards its methods and theories, as believed by some historians. The latter hold that historical knowledge should be reserved to the exclusive and unpolluted realm of pure Social Science. Environmental History does not claim that all historical phenomena have an environmental or material explanation, even when the latter is necessary to explain a historical event. Many historical facts can be accounted for by environmental variables, but many others can definitively not be justified this way. Although environmental variables provide much more coherent explanations to certain trends and historical phenomena, Environmental History abstains from making sense of it all through an environmental prism. Nor does the discipline build a new metanarrative in which the environment is the deus ex machina, providing the key to all understanding. Environmental History is an alternative way of understanding the evolution of human beings, and it requires a radical change of focus. Just as History studies human societies and their past evolution, Environmental History attempts to understand the strategic relations established by human beings—both between themselves and with nature—to organize their subsistence. This historical account must consider the relations of humans with the communities of organisms to which they belong, and account for the fact that any effect over the former will affect the latter (Hughes 2002, 26). For that reason, History also needs to be Environmental History: it must be an inseparable part of historiographical discourse, which should therefore be ecologized. Environmental History thus builds a narrative about the human past that contributes to constructing and making coherent a more general account of the evolution of the human species on Earth. Distinguishing Environmental History from History is useful above all to emphasize the relevant role of the environment in the course followed by humanity. In this way, it clearly reveals the necessary connection between History and Ecology regarding a series of common features—both of an epistemological and ontological nature—that form part of the new ecological paradigm. For example, among others: its inter- and multidisciplinary nature compared to the analytical spirit; the integral nature of the knowledge it generates rather than its fragmented character; the centrality of what is rational as opposed to a mechanic substantialism; the importance of the temporal dimension; and the

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biocentric perspective, all these key aspects imply a rupture with the hitherto dominant forms of historiographical discourses. And this fact deserves to be emphasized. The moment of Environmental History is, in addition, a constitutive period in the sense of Kuhn (1975), amidst the crisis of traditional historiographies. It is relevant to distinguish them clearly. Environmental History essentially deals with the material base of social relations. In that sense, it is materialistic and naturalistic (Price 2011). Such a qualification does not, however, imply that it chooses a materialistic and objectivist theoretical standpoint over an idealistic one, as artificially suggested by the social science dichotomy during modernity. Naturalism, as materiality, refers here to the object of Environmental History, i.e., the energy, material, and information flows to which all human practice can be reduced. Yet it also refers to the material nature of any cultural dimension of human practice. “Materialism should not mean not believing that cultural forms of production and consumption are determined by the physical environment, only the cultural behavior occurs within a material world whose properties limit what is possible and determine the environmental consequences of that behavior. In other words we need to support both the specificity of cultural motivations such as the universality of material laws” (Hornborg 2007, 2). As we will see below, every individual consumes a given amount of energy and materials to feed and sustain its organism—and this also applies to social groups as well as to whole societies—in order to move from one place to another, to dress, warm up, and even perform immaterial actions such as cultural and scientific activities. In the process, the individual establishes relations with nature and with other individuals that are relevant to Environmental History. However, the task of explaining these relations does not belong exclusively to Thermodynamics, Chemistry, Physics, or Biology. It also falls on Sociology, Economy, Anthropology, and naturally, History. The ideas and representations of nature, and how to manage nature—a subject that is immaterial—are even fundamental objects of study of Environmental History themselves. Environmental History is definitely materialistic because it attempts to study the manner in which the energy, material, and information flows have been organized through history according to the changing needs of endosomatic and exosomatic social metabolism. For that reason, the knowledge produced by Environmental History requires the support of theories, methods, and techniques from both the Natural and the Social Sciences adopting a transdisciplinary approach. But Environmental History does not seek to study it all, only the parts and the connections emerging from these parts through theoretical-methodological mediations. The objective is to reduce reality’s complexity—which is the significant historical fact for Environmental History—to explain it. In consequence, a distinction must be made between the globalizing ambitions, the recognition of multiple possible explanations, and the totalitarian ambition of modern historiography. Underlying Total History’s ambition was the hidden mission of building a normative meta-narrative to govern the historical fact, fitting it within a preconceived interpretative framework on the structure and evolution of social relations.

2.10 Is Environmental History Anachronic or Ephemeral?

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2.10 Is Environmental History Anachronic or Ephemeral? Some historians have raised questions about placing nature at the heart of human practice, judging it as one more of the ephemeral fashion of postmodern historiography. Yet is it really the mere consequence of today’s environmental concerns? Would this turn historical discourse into a form of Presentism, or make it anachronic? Wouldn’t this mean transferring environmental issues to past times when they did not exist? Environmental History is free, however, from such a risk provided we abandon the ethnocentric idea of environmental concerns expressed only in conventional scientific terms, and only by scientists—or at the most, Western ecologists. This would mean that following a careful analysis of the economic and social concerns of cultures other than Western cultures—rooted in the Enlightenment and drivers of modernity (but as mentioned, affected by a metaphysical illusion)—natural resources, the environment, and even about the sustainability of social relations with regard to environment has been a visible and habitual issue, albeit stated in different terms. Human beings have always cared for the relation of society with nature. Before anthropocentrism became established in our culture, and even in today’s oriental societies, nature was indissoluble from culture—and still is. One simply has to remember the widespread organismic conceptions of these societies. Through sacralization of space or resources, and the ritualization of main productive activities, they have pursued a harmonic relation with nature, among other reasons, because their survival as cultures depends on it. As rightly said by Hornborg et al. (2007), the interphase between the human and non-human spheres has always been omnipresent in cosmological explanations and reflections, from the ancient written documents of Mesopotamia and China, to the myths and metaphors of indigenous people today. Literate Occidental culture also contained environmental reflections back in early periods, often expressed through science. They rarely gained any relevance in the history of ideas, however, because they went against the tide. Grove (2002), among many other historians, regarded it a common fallacy to conceive environmental concerns as new—i.e., beginning after World War II. Environmentalist reactions to human-induced changes originated early in the well-read culture, of which Grove (2002) provides multiple examples from the fifteenth century to the present. Each society has nurtured its own perceptions of its environment and of its metabolic process with nature. The environment is not only a physical space defined by complexity and entropy, but also a social construct. The latter casts a shadow on the assumed universality and uniqueness of the nature and culture categories and on their artificial separation deriving from modernity (Redclift and Woodgate 2005). Indeed, such a conceptual differentiation between nature and culture is lacking in non-Western cultures and the society versus nature antagonism so evident nowadays is in fact an ethno-epistemological construct of Western culture. It is actually poorly suited to support any explanations of how other peoples or cultures speak about or interact with their physical environment (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols 2008). Yet, such a flaw is unacceptable even in epistemological terms. As a social and therefore historical construct, History could hardly avoid being contaminated

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by current concerns. Historical discourse goes beyond compiling stories. It also involves collective recalling in which past events are selectively recovered according to present stimuli. Historians disentangle the past using methods and theories that necessarily need to be expressed in current terms. This method differs little from that used by individuals to tolerate the mere fact of remembering. Many facts are discarded, be it consciously or unconsciously, just as we deliberately decide to evoke many others (Gaddis 2002, 176). A demonstration of the above is the mere existence of history as a professional discipline institutionalized during the building of nineteenth-century nation states. The constructed narratives of History have projected the existence of nations further back into the past, accentuating any elements that could create a sense of national unity since the beginning of time. Such a unity was obviously not—and could not possibly—be prior to the nation’s very constitution. In a similar way, methodologies belonging to nineteenth- and twentieth-century neoclassical economic history have been blatantly applied to societies in which the notion of growth was unknown. Many more examples could be brought forward to illustrate the frequency with which even the most reputed historiography relapses into presentism. As seen above, judging by the presence of a concern for nature in past societies—in other words, a concern for their own survival—Environmental History is free of such a risk.

2.11 The Theoretical Foundations of Environmental History Knowing that Environmental History deals with the material side of social relations causes a Copernican revolution in historiographical narratives: indeed, it bridges the social and natural worlds. Yet including environmental variables is not enough because not all theories that incorporate the physical and biological worlds serve the purposes of Environmental History. Indeed, the discipline’s theoretical foundations rest on an adequate understanding of the relations between society and nature. At first sight, it would seem obvious to reject any form of determinism, in particular that rooted in the nineteenth century and geographically originating in Europe, which sought to compare the different cultures and the spirit of nations through their habitat. Environmental History opposes any form of unidirectionality in the relation between the physical and biological environment in such a way that human behavior can be explained in terms of the relation between society and nature. Natural laws constrain the actions of human beings: no more, no less. This clarification is essential because Environmental History is frequently disqualified as deterministic, a pejorative adjective that precludes any serious and well-supported rebuttal. Yet another, more modern version of determinism equally threatens the scientific coherence of Environmental History: the fact of believing that some laws rule human behavior and do not substantially differ from those that apply to other species. Thus, History turns into Natural History, and Sociobiology (Wilson 1980) becomes its

2.12 Environmental History and the Coevolution of Nature and Society

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theoretical framework. Claiming that ecological laws could explain the dynamics of human societies would be as preposterous as defending that they could be explained without considering the influence of such laws. Variations of this environmental reductionism also include attempts made to explain human evolution in terms of energy (Odum 1972) or the fatalism that advocates the mechanical application of the Law of Entropy (Rifkins 1990). Attempts to explain society configurations as the result of various human groups’ adaptations to their respective environments do not support the objectives of Environmental History. Such approaches include, for example, the historiographical schools derived from Steward’s (1955, 1977) Cultural Ecology and from the neofunctionalistic Ecology of Vayda (1969) and Rappaport (1968, 1971; also Vayda and Rappaport 1968; Vayda and Mackay 1975, 1977). In the same line is Cultural Materialism: the Struggle for a Science of Culture by Harris (1975, 1977, 1983, 1985) and his Anthropology school that was so successful among U.S. environmental historians. Harris was an adept of functionalist explanations of relations between humans and their environment. He attempts to explain facts based on their advantages for the reproduction of social systems—for example, war is useful to limit population growth, which guarantees the reproduction of the ecological niche and thus, of the community. The fact that an event is useful does not imply that such usefulness explains the event: war cannot be explained by its consequences. A similar argumentation applies to the Ecological Anthropology of Hardesty (1979). Many major achievements have been reached based on these approaches that have guided a large number of Environmental History studies, and even some Ecological Anthropology research, although the latter is currently adopting a less unilateral perspective. Having Environmental History rest only on the theoretical arsenal and the methodological instrumentation of Ecology would be both too easy and too simplifying. Social practices—which are what History focuses on—are too complex to reduce to environmental analysis. It makes no sense to assert that all social relations are shaped by environmental restrictions or by an adaptation to them. As clearly stated by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen regarding the second law of thermodynamics, entropy has set limits to the material life of humans throughout their history, but it does not determine it (Georgescu-Roegen 1990a, b, 307). In other words, the laws of physics may constrain the behavior of living things, but they do not determine them as the complex organisms they are (Ulanowicz 2016, 2021).

2.12 Environmental History and the Coevolution of Nature and Society More recently, the relation between nature and societies has been advanced as a coevolution process in which both interact over time, making it impossible to understand them separately. This approach is popular among social scientists, perhaps because it does not introduce new questions. Instead, it adds a new variable to the

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conventional analysis of society in the form of an essential principle: the double determination of both worlds. They are conceived as separate from each other and can thus be separately explained by the social and natural sciences. Undoubtedly, nature establishes limits to human behavior, to which humans sometimes react adaptively. At other times, humans develop solutions that change the scale of nature’s limits or make them disappear. Society also certainly has various impacts on nature. Thus, the relations between society and nature are ruled by a mutual determinism (Deléage 1993, 275–300). Society and nature coevolve indivisibly throughout history: changes in ecosystem dynamics set global limitations that lead to changes in social organization through social mediation. Conversely, societies have triggered more or less definite changes that have even modified ecosystem dynamics (Margalef 1979; Norgaard 1987; Worster 1988a, b, 289–308). But the recognition of this reciprocity does not imply that we must consider both as separate worlds with their own dynamics, interacting through time. This perspective improves our comprehension of human relations with the natural world, but it does not imply a fundamental shift regarding traditional conceptions. Norgaard (1994) emphasizes that people’s activities transform ecosystems and that these, in turn, set scenarios for individual and social acts. Thus, Environmental History considers society within nature, with which human beings establish material relationships of exchange of energy, materials, and information. The concept of social metabolism has been adopted to refer to this multiple determinant relation, as we will see below. It thus addresses the relationship between society and nature in an integrated way. This means that it moves on to consider the social system as one more part of natural systems (Berkes and Folke 1998), or societies as biosphere subsystems, rejecting exceptionalism—as demonstrated by Catton and Dunlap (1978)—which has been and continues to be the dominant paradigm of the social sciences. Barbara Adam expressed it bluntly as the inexistence of a nature-culture duality: we are natural and our actions are natural, although we establish conditions in an evolutionary, historical process (Adam 1997, 171). Human societies, however, have an immaterial dimension that differentiates humans from other species. Human societies can thus be conceived as a hybrid between culture, communication, and the material world (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007, 8–10). In this way, societies’ cultural or symbolic aspects are subject to dynamics that do not belong to the natural environment. But all human actions, including their symbolic ones, can be analyzed in material terms: for example, a music concert that is seen as the epitome of a cultural practice, subject to non-material rules, can also be evaluated by calculating the endosomatic cost of energy invested by musicians during the performance and in previous rehearsals, but above all, in the exosomatic cost of transportation, instrument manufacture, lighting and maintenance of the concert hall, and so on. Even the act of thinking implies exosomatic and endosomatic metabolic costs whenever thought is transmitted in a book, television, or a newspaper, etc. All human activities, although not belonging to the material world, may have a cost in terms of energy, materials, and information, as well as a quantifiable impact on the natural world. That is precisely what Environmental History focuses on.

2.13 Environmental History as a Transdiscipline

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If we agree that social systems are part of nature, it becomes clear why Environmental History cannot be limited to a mere account of environmental damages triggered by human activity. The latter has been, as seen above, the most widespread version of Environmental History: a historical reconstruction of the undesired and unintentional consequences (or negative externalities) of human activity acting upon natural systems. This modality of Environmental History that Sieferle (2001) ironically called hygienist, and McNeill (2005, 19) decadentist has been marked by the consciousness of the ecological crisis. Many examples can be found, from pioneering accounts of the smoke caused by the Industrial Revolution to many works on deforestation (Brimblecombe 1987; Brüggemeier 1990; Kiss 1990; Totman 1989; Gadgil 1990), and countless others. Environmental History must go beyond a history of negative externalities, it must also be the history of each human society’s ecological rationality broadly speaking, both from the perspective of its productive models, and its ideas about nature and the impacts of physical-biological changes (Worster 1988a, b, 2004).

2.13 Environmental History as a Transdiscipline Based on all the above, Environmental History must be a field in which the natural and social sciences merge and adopt a transdisciplinary approach. Due to its very nature, the complexity of human action cannot be addressed through fragmented perspectives. Transdisciplinary approaches are necessary (Morin and Le Moigne 1999). Transdisciplinary analysis implies the interrelated use of different scientific disciplines. But not only. It also requires integrating different techniques and methodologies, as well as knowledge from other non-scientific social groups, as advanced in Agroecology and in other hybrid disciplines based on a “dialogue of knowledge” (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols 2008). Environmental History is a hybrid discipline. It therefore also regards this transdisciplinary ambition as the optimal means to face the challenges of our civilization crisis. As Giampietro (2021, 7) argues: “Combining different ways of knowing and learning will allow different social actors to work in concert, even with much uncertainty and limited information”. Consequently, historians must be familiar with the theories, categories, and methods of both sciences, stemming from a holistic and systemic approach. Scientific advances themselves have surpassed the cognitive virtuousness of the Newtonian paradox, in which it is possible to compartmentalize specific phenomena, as they can be disconnected from their universe of relations and later linked with others in a kind of pure causal relationship. In our world, all phenomena are connected through a vast and complex network of mutual relations that make them independent within the context of a dynamic process of constant evolution. Environmental History studies social processes with environmental significance, in a system in which physical, social, economic, and political factors are intertwined through complex links.

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The major role of the nature-society relationship obliges us to take into account the different time scales in which both operate, together with their interactions. Ecological time differs from political, economic, and cultural times. We can appreciate this more clearly when we compare the duration of long physical-biological processes and that of social processes. This is true whether we regard natural resources as socially appropriated chunks of nature, or the influence of environmental fluctuations on the ecological limits of society development, or whether we are referring to the disturbances to ecosystem dynamics brought about by entropic changes. As stated by Deléage (1993), the duration of biophysical processes largely exceeds the actual experience of individuals or even civilizations. The latter have in fact only been aware and used the phenomenological manifestations of such biophysical processes. What characterizes ecological time periods is the extreme brevity or length of their processes, resulting in an impression of stability held by different generations until today. Natural resource consumption well illustrates the contrast between the time needed to consume natural resources and the time invested by Nature to generate them—or what Puntí (1988) termed production time. The annual destruction rate of tropical forests currently exceeds 1 < 5 of their total coverage, but 400 years are required for their total recovery. At present consumption rates, oil will be depleted by the end of this century, but Nature invested millions of years of production time (Comoner 1992). Conclusively, from a human perspective, the regeneration and production cycles of materials and energy, and the productive capacity of ecosystems are determined in the long term and always depending on the presence of a certain measure of stability. These long physic-biological cycles condition the performance of societies. One of the best examples of this is climate fluctuations, which have been the object of research since the late fifties (Wigley et al. 1981; Pfister 1988; and more recently, Pfister 2007; Brázdil et al. 2010; McCormick et al. 2012). Le Roy Ladurie (1967) showed that continued rainfalls between 1646 and 1651 coincided with profound economic and social problems, eventually leading to the Fronde confrontation. Moreover, although no causal relation exists between climate and the insurrection, the climatic alteration generated a critical scenario. Earth has witnessed climatic periods related to modifications of the zonal flow of air masses. The first land clearings that ended Prehistory took place during a favorable climatic phase in temperature terms. The following cooler phase had an opposite effect, favoring the growth of forests and natural vegetation. Again, between the ninth and twelfth centuries, a temperate phase coincided with the peaking of agriculture in Western Europe and subsequently thereafter. An even more spectacular case is the late tenth-century Viking colonization of Greenland, thus called because of its vegetation due to mild climatic conditions. Centuries ago, Greenland was covered by snow and it became a hostile territory for humans, which undoubtedly contributed to the decline of Viking colonization from the fourteenth century onwards. Less prolonged climatic fluctuations have also significantly affected the evolution of agricultural activities. One illustration of this is the strong correlation found by Pfister (1988) between meteorological variables and

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the prices of cereals on continental Europe. It lasted until the expansion of railroad transportation and the integration of national markets. A meta-analysis by Hsiang et al. (2013) of 60 studies based on 45 databases about conflicts taking place during the last ten thousand years in the world demonstrated the considerable influence of climatic events on human conflicts. Deviations from normal precipitation and temperature levels systematically raised the risk of conflict, sometimes substantially so. In the period from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, climate had a definite, statistically highly significant influence on contemporaneous conflicts. The authors do not suggest that climate is the only factor to consider when analyzing the magnitude of conflicts, but they do conclude that in the eventuality of large climatic fluctuations, substantial effects are produced owing to the impact on conflicts (Hsiang et al. 2013). In contrast, the changes induced by humans are abrupt and occur within short periods of time compared to evolutionary trends that span hundreds, thousands, or millions of years. For example, Africa’s desertification was favored and accelerated after World War II by erosive processes due to deforestation, overgrazing, or agricultural mismanagement. Environmental History must encompass social and ecological timetables, which requires the coining of new—and perhaps proprietary—periods that differ from those of conventional History. One example is the Great Acceleration period characterized by high increases in energy and material consumption rates that occurred immediately after World War II. Such new periods, however, can coincide with essential hiatuses, such as the Neolithic Revolution or the Industrial Revolution, among others.

2.14 Sustainability, the New “Sense” of History At the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned that the Copernican revolution implied substituting conventional historiography with Environmental History. It is certainly not necessary for History to have a direction or sense. The project of modern historiography originated in a secular interpretation of the Christian sense of history and was grounded in the progressive realization of reason (Arostegui 1995; Hernández Sandoica 2004). Historical evolution followed a unique trajectory, designed by science and its applications. It was therefore traced by reason. Modern man’s mission was to accelerate the evolutionary mechanism by making use of Nature itself to achieve a maximum level of wellbeing. Progress was therefore materialized through material abundance, achieved, in turn, through science and technology. This perspective explains the predominance of Economic History: not only did it account for the material advances towards human progress in the form of technological achievements, but these advances were also achieved through Mathematics, the science closest to the Natural Sciences. Social History, second in importance, found its meaning in the corroboration of an evolutionary process towards ever more complex social models. The latter expressed a progressive social division of labor linked to economic growth and the material welfare of societies. Complexity was,

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henceforth, an expression of the growing rationalization of social organization. Political History was given a secondary role that consisted of measuring the degree of political modernization of societies. This was done in relation to an abstract model concocted from the past experiences of the more affluent Occidental societies in which democracy and National States had been enthroned as the most efficient political organizations. Surely enough, most orthodox Marxist historiographies identified the modern ideal with Socialism and Communism, and with internationalist forms of territorial organization. But all social historiographies preferred to focus on the social change towards complexity and the empire of reason, be it as a Communist society or as a Western democracy—a change performed by social classes or by their collective expression through social movements. Any economic, social, political, or ideological behaviors that did not fit into this general theory of modernity were condemned to an otherness in which a pre-modern or exotic characterization, moral rejection, and public curiosity were all at play. The pre-modern repertoire included peasants, indigenous peoples, poor countries, and non-Western cultures, whose number measured the degree to which these would sooner or later enter the route towards progress. History does not have to have a definite sense, nor does historical discourse need a finalistic or teleological evolutionary logic. Environmental History, however, is centered on sustainability concerns, in coherence with its materialistic orientation. This does not mean that it deals only with the physical and biological worlds, or with environmental constraints to human actions. We have already refuted such a deterministic position, as we also rejected analyzing society with the tools of natural sciences and considering Ecology as the main objective of Environmental History. The definitive contribution of the environmental approach is the concern for sustainability. In this way, the science of Environmental History is committed to the countless social and political movements that are struggling around the world to build a new sustainable society (Toledo 2003).

2.15 Epistemological Foundations of Environmental History The proposal of Environmental History advanced here is thus tightly linked to the ecological paradigm stemming from the confrontation of industrial modernity with a world vision. It shares most of the assumptions of the paradigm of complexity (see Tyrtania 2008; Luengo González 2021) and is thus the result of efforts of critical approaches and the pursuit of alternatives. It was built based on diverse materials deriving from this criticism, but also on new scientific disciplines such as Ecology, Thermodynamics, and Systems Theory. It has borrowed from the field of Ecology the relevant role of the interactions between components of the natural and social worlds, the recognition of the complexity of reality, evolution, change, and

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others. It adopted from Thermodynamics, the understanding of physical and biological processes in terms of finiteness, irreversibility, entropy together with negentropy as well as “order” (Prigogine 1971; Adams 1975; Baileys 1990), i.e., of sustainability. It borrowed from Systems Theory (Bertalanffy 1976; Luhmann 1996) the holistic and systemic approach allowing to articulate concepts and theoretical constructs that belong to Ecology, Thermodynamics, and Evolutionary Theory. In that regard, Bateson (1993) and Luhmann (1996) contributed to shaping an ecological theory of symbolic systems (language, mind, communication, culture, and so on). For his part, Morin (1984) laid the foundations for a new method, a conscious science centered on relation and complexity, a field in which the contributions of García (2006) are also worthy of mention. Finally, Adams (1975), Capra (1998), and Tyrtania (2009), among other researchers, have helped to build a general ecological theory of living beings, including social ones, in a synthesis that articulates the natural and the social sciences. Complexity is thus one of the main constitutive principles of the ecological paradigm, contrasting perhaps more than any other with the traditional epistemology. In the face of the exclusionary efforts of mechanistic science, it reintroduces the local and singular dimensions into explanations of phenomena. Regarding the reversibility of time, that permeates mechanistic science, it considers time as an irreversible process, endowing knowledge with historicity. In this way, it contradicts the widespread vision of human sciences depriving social relations of their temporal dimension and singularizes the structure that rules them. “While the simplifying thought eliminates time, or conceives but one time (that of progress or that of corruption), the complex thought confront not only time, but the problem of multi temporality in which repetition, progress, and decadence appear as linked (Morin (1999) 2007, 61)”. Contrary to the idea that reality can be reduced to its ultimate dimension, or to the elementary units that compose it, the ecological paradigm reaffirms science’s latest advances by focusing on interactions rather than on the particles themselves: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Reacting to the conception of the universe as an ordered entity with no room for randomness, chaos, or dispersion, the ecological paradigm vindicates that laws are insufficient to determine its structure and function, and states the need for its randomness—as a complement to the stochastic component of processes. Confronting the idea that all consequences have a cause, the ecological paradigm proposes that multicausality reflects the complexity of reality, where consequences contribute to configure the causes. This recursion principle allows us to understand that any organization’s emergent properties will ultimately interact with its components. This is particularly relevant to understand the forms of social organization: “interactions between individuals make society (…). However, society itself produces individuals, or at least consummates humanity by providing it with education, culture, and language (Morin (1999) 2007, 68)”. Addressing the dilemma of object and environment, subject and object, typical of traditional scientific thought, it reintroduces the observer within the observation (Woodgate and Redclift 1998). And finally, in opposition to the assumed capacity of the scientific method to generate true knowledge by means of empirical verification and mathematical demonstration,

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it vindicates paradox. Indeed, in a paradox, contradiction is not synonymous with error, but a reflection of deep or unknown dimensions of reality. “The epistemological predicament of complexity for science [in our case, Environmental History] entails that any model that generates an exact description of the observed system and provides crisp numbers can only do so because it only describes a finite set of attributes, which the scientist decided to use in the description of the system based on her/his narrative” (Giampietro 2021, 3). From an epistemological viewpoint, Environmental History must rest on ecological epistemology, at the junction between structuralism and naturalism (Blackburn et al. 2013). Subjective naturalism would be in the sense of Price (2011), who assigns the task of making the surrounding world comprehensible to Environmental History. Pragmatism would be in the sense of Putnam (1995), i.e., recognizing that Environmental History—since it is a science—will not produce absolute truths, but partial and provisional knowledge that will change over time, and its relevance will be proportional to its usefulness (Sini 1999). And finally, structuralism is defined by Moulines (2006) who postulated a structural conception of scientific theories. Because no theory can be exact, the Environmental History we propose seeks to produce approximations to the biophysical reality of societies. The theoretical development of Environmental History we pursue in this book must assemble the same conditions demanded by Moulines in his structuralist typology of the theoretical development of empirical sciences: to be intuitively plausible, to be formally precise, and to be uniform and systematic. In other words, it must propose a general scheme to which the diverse evolutionary forms can be attached and can be applied to reconstruct concrete cases (Moulines 2011, 12). In short, knowledge is not cumulative, nor does it “progress” linearly; it evolves through steps back and forth, through leaps and phases of stagnation. The task faced by environmental historians has become increasingly collective and interdependent. They need to engage in dialogues, debates, and mutual learning to address problems that are complex in nature. Also underlying the ecological paradigm are a new set of axioms and a novel model of social organization based on sustainability. And achieving sustainability depends on the orchestration of several sciences, including the social sciences, that need to cooperate to propose sustainable modes of interaction with nature. This is why the new paradigm requires transdisciplinarity. These constitutional elements of the ecological paradigm as well as others do not seek to be an alternative to science, but an equally scientific way of conceiving and practicing it. It does not claim either to be in competition with other existing paradigms but aspires to integrate and cooperate with them. The ecological paradigm questions the social utility of the knowledge it generates: its quality would therefore not be defined by the measurements conducted by scientists themselves following their own scientific logic, but result from the evaluation of the whole of society according to ethical criteria (Funtovicz and Ravets 2000). This integration of ethics and epistemology illustrates the normal modus operandi of the ecological paradigm. Together with social movements, and in particular with the environmentalist movement, the paradigm is collaborating in the quest for answers to the present social an ecological crisis.

2.16 History as a Post-normal Science

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2.16 History as a Post-normal Science Post-normal science is aware of the uncertainty of scientific knowledge and of the sometimes unpredictable consequences of the very “discoveries” it produces. It is therefore cautious about the appropriate steps to take to guarantee the social sharing of the decisions made and the control of scientific and technological development itself. Funtowicz and Ravetz (2000) propose epistemological changes—i.e., modifying the relation between facts and values, promoting axiological and strategic pluralism, introducing uncertainty and chaotic processes, adopting the systemic approach, articulating qualitative and quantitative methods, and others. Moreover, on the social plane, they suggest introducing a qualitative criterion to socially evaluate scientific and technological activities. “Post-normal science is dynamic, systemic, and pragmatic, and because of that, it demands new methodology and social organization of labor. (…) The principle of quality allows us to handle irreducible uncertainties and ethical complexities that are central to the solution of problems in this new style of science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 2000, 58)”. The recognition of uncertainty leads to advocating the co-production and co-learning of scientific knowledge based on extended peer community and stakeholder engagement (Martens 2006; Spangenberg 2011; Guimarães Pereira and Funtowicz 2015, 3). Solving the eco-social crisis requires that both scientists and the whole of society play an active role, co-generating a collective reflection on the existence of natural limits and discussing “desirable” future pathways with all societal actors (Giampietro 2021, 10). In that sense, ethics and its functionality play a similar part to that played by instincts and conditioned learning in animal species that are evolutionarily close to humans—such as higher mammals. Ethics founded on valuing criteria that are properly ecological and oriented towards the stimulation of behaviors and ecological actions, i.e., actions that generate social and environmental benefits. Ethics that, to be loyal to their nature, require expanding the limits of the moral community to include all living beings, whose ecosystemic organization makes life possible, given that their contribution is fundamental to maintain human life. In this way, the ecological paradigm adopts a biocentric perspective that is contrary to the anthropocentric ontology that subordinates the whole of nature to the human being, and that is responsible for the behaviors that have led to the ecological crisis. The ecological paradigm is thus founded on an alternative axiology that rests on an ethic that is conscious both of the ecological limitations to freedom and of equity, one of its main values—including intergenerational and interspecific equity. Finally, the ecological paradigm rests on the principle of precaution. Confronting the old axiom according to which all that can be made must be made—that is particularly operational in science—the ecological paradigm forces to reflect before acting and to question the social and environmental utility of science. Such a symbiosis between epistemology (post-normal science) and ethics (principle of responsibility) in the construction and use of the principle of precaution is another expression of the integrative mode of operation of the ecological paradigm.

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2.17 Environmental History and the Ecological Paradigm Environmental History adapts its modus operandi to this new way of generating knowledge, not seeking—as did the old positivistic and neo-positivistic historiographies—to arrive to the truth about what happened, but to produce a knowledge of quality, i.e., defined by its social usefulness (Guimarães Pereira and Funtowicz 2015, 2). The intellectual quest to know other past cultures, and even to learn from their experiences, is legitimate. Yet in doing so we would be building a history that is useful only to scholars and the curious-minded. The environmental crisis demands immediate solutions, and Environmental History must contribute to that search for solutions. Environmental History must produce historical accounts of the past, but a more urgent task is to make the history of the present, i.e., to explore the historical roots of today’s greatest social and environmental problems. Because the usefulness of historical knowledge cannot be defined by the unattainable goal of accounting for all that happened, but by its provision of an adequate genealogy of the present. It must look for explanations and experiences that give significance to reality, allow for its understanding, and think about a future with minimal physical and social entropy. Castel (2001, 69) stated: “The objective is not to tell it all, in case telling it all was a requirement of historical methodology, but it is about choosing well”. In that sense, historical discourse, understood as useful knowledge, must serve the seemingly more urgent objective of reversing the environmental crisis from the standpoint of humanity—and not of a country or a social class. Contemplating history from an ecological perspective implies a radical change in the historiographical discourse, or to paraphrase Rorty (1990), a necessary environmental shift. That, in turn, implies reconciling society with nature, placing nature back to where it should have never been displaced, i.e., inside the historiographical discourse from where it was removed by modern historiography. But it also requires abandoning the totalitarian and scientist pretensions of Marxist historiography, or the Total History of the Annals, without resigning to the aspirations of globalism, or to the consideration of its full equality with other social sciences. As rightly expressed by William Cronon (1983), Environmental History is totally comprehensive, and it is the only truly general or universal history. Environmental History avoids the fragmentation into multiple disciplines and topics. It is not uncommon for the latter to close in on themselves, becoming sometimes isolated from the global study of society, turning into the encased realm of a scientific practice that claims to be autonomous. It eludes atomization into microsectorial histories sometimes precluding—necessarily—the view of human beings in their entirety and of their relations with nature. In the face of this, according to Fontana (1992), it is essential to refrain from ever assuming the cause of Globalization again and to pursue a different globalization. The latter should be formed by integrating the fragments of the minced stories and to thus achieve a more unified view of human beings in all their dimensions, from their nurturing to their dreams, and in all their relations, between themselves and with Nature itself.

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As stated above, Environmental History is not an attempt to reify a totalitarian history, but it does have a globalizing ambition in which the particular and the global complement each other, as expressed in the old environmental adage: think globally, act locally. In fact, globalization is an essential condition of Environmental History discourse and of its connatural methodology: systems theory, forbidding the fragmentation and segmentation of historical knowledge no matter how limited or specialized its range of study may be. Environmental History cannot thus believe in the atomized specialization of knowledge. Rather, it believes that no proprietary method exists that would be different from that adopted by any other social science: the distinctions are always temporal and instrumental. This does not mean that it vindicates the unity of the scientific method, but the indissoluble unity of social and natural sciences in a multidisciplinary approach. Environmental History relinquishes the unitary and totalitarian project of modern historiography. It thus recognizes the existence of several histories within each society that vary in scale, purpose, content, and organization. For example, there are individual and family histories, church histories, ethnic group histories, and often, a master narrative promoted by the state. There should also be an Environmental History. Furthermore, Environmental History recognizes the possibility of multiple narratives about the relationship between society and nature through time, without this implying relativism. The compilation of History is a social process. It consists of an either active or passive retention of a selection of historical facts and organizing them into the group’s memory (Hassan 2007, 172). Historical discourse, as in the case of a map, is a representation of reality, but not reality itself. As stated by Gaddis (2002, 176), “it is a pitiful approximation to a reality which, despite the skill of the historian, would seem very strange to anyone having actually lived through it”. The goal is to generate a narrative that has a beginning, a plot, and an end or moral bottom line. It is not about telling what happened, as this would be preposterous given the time needed to fulfill such an intrinsically impossible task. It is about building a narrative that simplifies and makes what happened understandable, a story subject to future interpretations, and above all, devoid of any causality relation typical of more conventional historiographies. A plurality of causes can be argued to explain the historical event, rather than to define it. Environmental History is aware that it generates radically distinct historiographical knowledge. Paraphrasing Funtovicz and Ravetz (2000, 23), we could say that historical knowledge does not make progress, it evolves. Such a claim had already been made during the 1950s: in The idea of History, Collingwood wrote: “Each new generation must rewrite history in their own way, each new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, you should review the questions themselves, and—since the historical thinking is a river in which no one can enter twice—to the same historian who works on the same subject for some time may, in trying to rethink an old question find that the question itself has changed”. This feature approaches Environmental History with historicism, yet it departs from it when it admits the possibility of regularities or explanatory theories with no ontological ambition (Collingwood 1956, 248, quoted in Gaddis 2002, 140).

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Based on all the above, Environmental History does not claim to be the unique way to build history via a proprietary theory and methodology, which is an alternative to all other historiographical orientations. Loyal to its pluralistic approach, Environmental History considers that there are useful constructs in other paradigms and theories, given that it is not obsessed at all with exclusivity. In fact, there may be several possible forms in which Environmental History can be conceived and operated. Common aspects are reduced to the restitution of nature and all resulting implications within historical discourse, and to the founding of alternative axioms. As we shall see below, they consist of a new epistemology, new theories of historical change, and new methodologies which, among other things, move away from the typical fragmentation of traditional scientific knowledge. In this regard, Environmental History desists from reconstructing the old historiographical project of modernity, adapting it to new times with an environmental veneer. Quite the reverse in fact: Environmental History pursues a new discourse that, at the same time, can help to solve the ecological and civilization crisis by providing the material basis that historical discourse is lacking. The Environmental History we propose has at its core an entropic conception of historical time, i.e., irreversible time, leading to uncertainty regarding the final outcome, since there is room for negentropy. The main consequence of the fundamental laws of nature, in particular of the second law of thermodynamics, is irreversibility, given that the evolutionary process moves from order onto increasing disorder. When laying the foundations of Ecological Economics, Georgescu-Roegen (1990a, b) had already discovered that such a process applied to all human practices. This does not imply, however, the admission of a degradative conception of History held by the Greeks and Romans. Human beings may invert—in given space–time conditions—entropy to negentropy, creating “social order” although at a considerable energetic expense. This will be discussed in more detail later. Thus, Environmental History strongly vindicates an evolutionism in which humans interact with the environment, generating the facts that feed History. The latter leads, on the one hand, to giving an ontological status to change-continuity dialectics, and placing nature at the heart of the analysis of human beings, thus eradicating anthropocentrism. Thus, our proposal of Environmental History assumes that all human societies are self-organized (autopoietic) systems that unfold under some form of stable organization through space and time. But given its configuration and maintenance needs, it requires a continual input of energy, materials, and information from the environment, an inflow that increases entropy in the environment, thus generating dynamically adaptive processes that lead the course of evolution. Seen from that angle, historical evolution has increased the magnitude of the exchanges, expanding both exosomatic consumption and social complexity. As open systems, social systems are dynamic, and their properties change over time and impede any predictions as to their outcome, timing, or the direction of the evolutionary process. Not all can be explained by thermodynamics—the latter dictate only the reason for existence and evolutionary transformation (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). Evolution does not always result in progress—complexity is not progress, but is marked by uncertainty and risk, a reflection of entropic indetermination. The

2.18 A New Social Function for History: Species Memory

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objective of Environmental History as conceived by us is the study of the evolution of societies from this entropic viewpoint. Among social relations, we are most interested in those in which societies exchange energy, materials, and information with their environment. These kinds of relations can be qualified as socio-ecological because they stem from the relations of humans with nature. The organized ensemble of socio-ecological relations can be called socio-ecological systems (Ostrom and Cox 2010), which, throughout history, have presented various forms according to their space–time coordinates. We propose to study socio-ecological systems by means of the theoretical and methodological tool of Social Metabolism.

2.18 A New Social Function for History: Species Memory Philosophers of science are well aware that scientific activities and interventions in the world seek more than to improve scientific knowledge. They also strive to modify and transform reality, given the attempts to build knowledge in order to modify or even radically transform what is being known. Science has stopped being a pure philosophy and has become a practical one (Echeverría 1995, 39). In that sense, historical discourse has an unquestionable social utility; it makes the past accessible. As a modeler of the future, it is not a mere exercise in literature but has both an educational and practical significance. With this reifying dimension of a modest and prudent scientism, history preserves its practical, hence emancipatory, aspiration for change. Historical discourse must not only help to understand the present but also help to explain it, clarifying how changes can be made and how courses can be corrected. Explanation is the first step towards understanding, thus allowing the development of learning. Its pedagogical function is thus the same as that of social memory. As a result, Environmental History significantly alters the social function of the past and the discourses built around it. This new function resembles that of traditional cultures: to shape the group’s collective memory, storing the knowledge that helps us to face the present. In that sense, historical discourse is somewhat equivalent to a collective social memory and functions in a similar way to individual memory. Experiences and perceptions across space and time, awareness of change, and social dynamics accumulate in this memory. From there spring the ideas that guide behavior, molded by dominant ideological constructs and values. Successful or disastrous experiences guide practice. Obviously, History as a discourse about the past goes beyond a human group’s social memory, storing aspects that are forgotten or whose meanings are contradictory for its members. Yet, historical discourse must also accomplish that task without falling into an apparently objective position beyond social demands. For us, this is one task to be assumed by Environmental History, if not the major one. Collective memory contains not only the experience of one or several generations, but also of all those who are no longer with us. Memory is selective, and this selective process of information recovery is activated or materialized in situations or when

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facing issues imposed by the present. That is why historical discourse must stay strongly connected to the concerns of the present, a link that conventional history has largely broken. Memory is the decisive mechanism that makes the individual conscious of its own identity. Yet it is also the tool that helps to take decisions through the resources of life experience when facing alternative options. The same can be said about the group’s collective memory. As demonstrated by many mythological stories of ethnic nationalism, even the most idealized discourses about the past succeed at satisfying the need for identity. But for historical discourse to act as a collective memory, it is essential that the theoretical and methodological instruments that build recollections be as close as possible to reality. In that sense, most hegemonic social theories of historiography and social sciences continue to segregate human beings from nature. The mutual relationship between society and nature was absent from most theories rooted in the illustration such as Liberalism, Marxism, or Anarchism, among others, and in view of this, we can consider them as idealistic. An example is the notion of economic system shared in one way or another by all these theories, and that places the economy in an ideal world in which resources are endless, and environmental services are never degraded. As stated by Naredo (1987) in his splendid and enlightening book, Economy in Evolution: History and Perspectives of the Basic Categories of Economic Thought, such a notion is supported by the “mythology of production and growth … by assuming the dogma of the permanent, and at no extra cost, replacement of ‘production factors’, based on a technolatry that has little to do with scientific rationality (Naredo 1987)”. This example is significant because the economy addresses the way society is reproduced in material terms. Worster (2004) enumerated several of Environmental History’s possible contributions. It can promote environmental consciousness both within scientific disciplines and in society. Partly owing to Cronon’s book (Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, 1983), Worster says that scientists have changed their thinking about forest ecology. They are today much more willing than twenty years ago to recognize the role of the human hand in the formation of forest processes since the Ice Age, to see the forest as a historical process and even as a historical artifact. Hughes (2002, 24) gives a similar example showing how the knowledge provided by Environmental History can help to manage current environmental problems more adequately. The Canadian Department of Environment ran into a strange pollution phenomenon affecting the turbots of Lake Laberge, north of Whitehouse in the Yukon. It was only through historical research that the cause of the black mud polluting the fish’s liver was discovered. It originated during the 1920s with the exploitation of lead and silver in the middle of Yukon River that had been used for transportation. The lengthy thawing process that slowed down the exploitation and transportation of ore had been accelerated by applying a mixture of sod, used motor oil, and diesel oil. Company files showed that this practice was common in the mid-1940s. Environment History must mostly, but not exclusively, play the role of a species memory that stores humanity’s useful experiences accumulated along its history of

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relations with the environment. The social utility of Environment History is unquestionable (Margalef 1995; Hughes 2002) at a time such as ours in which both the social and natural sciences are required to contribute to reversing the ecological crisis. History has also acquired a decisively practical dimension: building a narrative that is part of the information flows allowing to revert the high degree of entropy brought about by industrial metabolism in both our environment and in the functioning of our society.

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McCormick M, Büntgen U, Cane MA, Cook ER, Harper K, Huybers P, Litt T, Manning SW, Mayewski PA, More AFM, Nicolussi K, Tegel W (2012) Climate change during and after the Roman Empire. Autumn 43(2):169–220 McDonnell MJ, Pickett STA (eds) (1993) Humans as components of ecosystems: the ecology of subtle human effects and populated areas. Springer, New York McNeill J (2005) Modern global environmental history. IHDP Update 1–3 Meine C (1999) It’s about time: conservation biology and history. Conserv Biol 13:1–3 Milanovic B (2003) Two faces of globalization: against globalization as we know it. World Dev 31(4):667–683 Milanovic B (2006) La era de las desigualdades. Sistema, Madrid Morgan AJ (2003) El cerebro en Evolución. Ariel Neurociencia, Madrid Morgan JE (2018) Environmental history. In: Handley S, McWilliam R, Noakes L (eds) New directions in social and cultural history, 1st edn (New Directions in Social and Cultural History). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, pp 213–231 Morin E (1980) El método, II: La vida de la vida. Cátedra, Madrid Morin E (1984) Ciencia con Conciencia. Anthropos, Barcelona Morin E (2001) Introducción al Pensamiento Complejo. GEDISA Editores, Barcelona Morin E (2007) La epistemología de la complejidad. In: Garrido F, González de Molina M, Serrano JL, Solana JL (eds) El paradigma ecológico en las ciencias sociales. Editorial Icaria, Barcelona, pp 55–84 Morin E, Le Moigne J-L (1999) L’intelligence de la complexité. L’Harmattan, París Moulines CU (2006) Ontology, reduction, emergence: a general frame. Synthese 151(3):313–323 Moulines C (2011) Cuatro tipos de desarrollo teórico en las ciencias empíricas. Metatheoria 1(2):11– 27 Naredo JM (1987) La economía en evolución: historia y perspectivas de las categorías básicas del pensamiento económico. Siglo XXI editores, Madrid Newell B, Wasson R (2002) Social system vs. solar system: why policy makers need history. In: Castelein S, Otte A (eds) Conflict and cooperation related to international water resources: historical perspectives. UNESCO, Paris, France, pp 3–17 Norgaard R (1987) The epistemological basis of agroecology. In: Altieri M (ed) Agroecology: the scientific basis of alternative agriculture. Westview Press, Boulder, pp 20–35 Norgaard R (1994) Development betrayed: the end of progress and coevolutionary revisioning of the future. Routledge, London Odum HT (1972) Environment, power, and society. Wiley, New York Ostrom, Cox (2010) Moving beyond panaceas: a multi-tiered diagnostic approach for socialecological analysis. Environ Conserv. 2010; 37(4):451–463. https://doi.org/10.1017/S03768929 10000834 Peterken GF (1981) Woodland conservation and management. Chapman and Hall, London, UK Pfister C (1988) Variations in the spring-summer climate of central europe from the high middle ages to 1850. 16:57–82. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFB0046590 Pfister C (2007) Climatic extremes, recurrent crises and Witch hunts: strategies of european societies in coping with exogenous shocks in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Medieval Hist J 10(1y 2):33–73 Price H (2011) Naturalism without mirrors. Oxford University Press, London Prigogine Y (1971) Thermodynamics theory of structure, stability and fluctuations. WileyInterscience, London Puntí A (1988) Energy accounting: some new proposals. Human Ecol 16(1):79–86 Putnam RD (1995) Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. J Democr 6(1):65–78 Rackham O (1986) The history of the countryside. Dent, London, UK Rackham O (1998) Implications of historical ecology for conservation. In: Sutherland WJ (ed) Conservation science and action. Blackwell Science, Malden, MA, pp 152–175 Rackham O (2003) Ancient woodland: its history, vegetation and uses in England, New edition. Castlepoint Press, Colvend

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Rappaport R (1968) Pigs for the ancestors. Yale University Press, New Haven Rappaport R (1971) The flow of energy in an agricultural society. Sci Am 224(3):116–132 Redclift MR, Woodgate G (2005) New developments in environmental sociology. organization & environment, (September 2007), 20(3) pp. 393–395 Riechman J (2006) Biomímesis. Libros La Catarata, Madrid Rifkins J (1990) Entropía: hacia el mundo invernadero. Urano, Barcelona Rorty R (1990) El giro lingüístico. Paidós, Barcelona Russell EWB (1997) People and the land through time: linking ecology and history. Yale University Press, New Haven Sieferle RF (2001) Qué es la historia ecológica. In: Gonzalez de Molina M, Martinez-Alier J (eds) Naturaleza Transformada: estudios de historia ambiental en España. Icaria Editorial, Barcelona, pp 31–54 Sini C (1999) El pragmatismo. Ediciones Akal, Madrid Spangenberg JH (2011) Sustainability science: a review, an analysis and some empirical lessons. Environ Conserv 38(3):275–287 Sterman J (2012) Sustaining sustainability: creating a systems science in a fragmented academy and polarized world. In: Sustainability science. Springer Science and Business Media LLC, New York, pp 21–58 Steward J (1955) The theory of culture change: the methodology of multilinear evolution. University of Illinois Press, Urbana Steward J (1977) Evolution and ecology: essays on social transformation. University of Illinois Press, Urbana Szabó P (2010) Why history matters in ecology: an interdisciplinary perspective. Environ Conserv 37:380–387 Thompson ID, Mackey B, McNulty S Mosseler A (2009) Forest resilience, biodiversity, and climate change. A synthesis of the biodiversity/resilience/stability relationship in forest ecosystems. technical series no. 43. montreal: secretariat of the convention on biological diversity Toledo VM (2003) Ecología, Espiritualidad, Conocimiento: de la sociedad del riesgo a la sociedad sustentable. PNUMA y Universidada Iberoamericana, México Toledo VM, Barrera-Bassols N (2008) La memoria bio-cultural. La importancia agroecológica de las sabidurías tradicionales. Icaria, Barcelona Totman C (1989) The green archipielago. Forestry in preindustrial Japan. University of California Press, Berkeley Tyrtania L (2008) La indeterminación entrópica Notas sobre disipación de energía, evolución y complejidad. Desacatos 28:41–68 Tyrtania L (2009) Evolución y sociedad. Termodinámica de la supervivencia para una sociedad a escala humana. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México Ulanowicz RE (2016) Process ecology: philosophy passes into Praxis. Process Stud 45:72–95. https://doi.org/10.5840/process201645215 Ulanowicz RE (2021) Socio-ecological networks: a lens that focuses beyond physics. Front Ecol Evol 9:643122 Vayda A (1969) Environment and cultural behavior: ecological studies in cultural anthropology. Natural History Press, Garden City, New York Vayda A, Rappaport RA (1968) Ecology, cultural and noncultural. In: Clifton JA (ed) Introduction to cultural anthropology: essays in the scope and methods of the science of man. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, pp 477–497 Vayda A, Mackay B (1975) New directions in ecology and ecological anthropology. Annu Rev Anthropol 4:293–306 Vayda A, Mackay B (1977) Problems in the identification of environmental problems. In: BaylissSmith TP, Feachem RGA (eds) Subsistence and survival: rural ecology in the Pacific. Academic Press, New York, pp 225–240 Verheyen K, Honnay O, Bossuyt B, Hermy M (eds) (2004) Forest biodiversity: lessons from history for conservation. CABI Publishing, Wallingford, UK

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Wigley T, Ingram M, Farmer G (1981) Climate in history. Studies in past climates and their impact on man. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Wilson EO (1980) Sociobiología, la nueva síntesis. Editorial Omega, Barcelona Woodgate G, Redclift M (eds) (1998) The international handbook of environmental sociology. Edward Elgar, USA Worster D (1993) History as natural history. In: Worster D (ed) The wealth of nature: environmental history and the ecological imagination. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp 30–44 Worster D (1988a) The end of the earth. Perspectives on modern environmental history. Cambridge University Press, New York Worster D (1988b) Doing environmental history. In: Donald Worster (ed) The ends of the earth: perspectives on modern environmental history. Cambridge University Press, New York, p 341. ISBN: 0-521-34846-3 Worster D (2004) ¿Por qué necesitamos de la historia ambiental? Revista Tareas 117:119–131

Chapter 3

Social Metabolism: Origins, History, Approaches, and Main Schools

3.1 Introduction The human species’ main challenge today is the future. The future is a growing concern. As never before, natural and social processes have become entangled and have generated unpredictable, surprising new dynamics and synergies that threaten the human species, planetary equilibrium, and life as a whole. We are witnessing a crisis of civilization: the crisis of modern, industrial civilization that requires new paradigms of a reality that has been transformed into a highly complex, socio-natural or natural-social system (Toledo 2011). In such a context, science as a whole must build knowledge of the past in order to draw lessons from it: in this way, we can adopt a rigorous historical perspective and achieve a comprehensive understanding of present situations. The implication of this scientific commitment is twofold: first, an integral and interdisciplinary conceptual framework capable of orchestrating research on nature-human relations must be developed; and second, a functional and meaningful analysis of such relations over time and space needs to be conducted. As pointed out in Chap. 2, efforts have been made in that direction around a new field known as sustainability science (Spangenberg 2011). Sustainability science still lacks an appropriate theoretical framework capable of coherently organizing the information coming from numerous fields and areas of knowledge. Social metabolism concept is a strong candidate to fulfill that objective: the concept is among the most robust instruments developed over the past two decades to explain today’s complex scenarios. In this chapter, we describe the origins, history, main schools, interpretations, as well as the trends of the theory of social metabolism. We also briefly review the related literature.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_3

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3.2 A Stellar Concept The concept of social metabolism has been gaining tremendous ground in the field of socioenvironmental studies since the 1990s. A general or standard definition of social metabolism was given by Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl (1997). They define it as the specific form in which societies establish and maintain their material input from, and output to, nature together with the way in which they organize material and energy exchanges with their natural environment. Social metabolism has also been used as a theory to explain socio-ecological change (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1997, 2007, 2011; Sieferle 2001; González de Molina and Toledo 2011), or as a kit of methodological tools to analyze the biophysical behavior of economies (Matthews et al. 2000; Haberl 2001a, b; Weisz 2007). In all its expressions, social metabolism offers a novel perspective on the relations between society and nature regarding the material bases, mainly through the study of flows of energy and materials. The concept was drawn from an analogy with the concept of biological metabolism, understanding that societies need flows of energy and materials to function and to reproduce themselves. Such flows increased during industrialization and their growing needs represent a major challenge in terms of sustainability (Fischer-Kowalski 1997; Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2014; Giampietro and Mayumi 2000; Giampietro et al. 2012). But, as stated by Padovan et al. (2022, 296), “Metabolism in not only a metaphor, but also a theoretical category useful for understanding, explaining and accounting for the relations of systems to their environments […] is a new ontology in the field of studying physical systems […]. This implies a reincorporation of the social into the biophysical realm”. Since the 1990s, the success of the social metabolism metaphor has been undeniable: methodologies have been formalized and applied in dozens of case studies, many of which are based on deep time perspectives. As a result, we currently have at our disposal detailed evidence that supports a better understanding of societies’ biophysical dynamics, especially that of industrialized societies.

3.3 The Origins The use of the social metabolism concept is peaking in the present century, but the concept actually dates back to the nineteenth century (see further below). Social metabolism reflects a whole new worldview, and to fully understand its birth, one needs to know the intellectual atmosphere that prevailed in nineteenth-century scientific thought. Science started to develop in European scientific societies in the seventeenth century, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the greatest scientific syntheses were elaborated and achieved. In those times, naturalists and social scholars shared reciprocal interests—unlike today, where the fragmentation of scientific knowledge often hinders any integrative vision. There was also a genuine desire—that we rarely see now—to discover universal patterns, principles, and laws that applied to all orders of matter.

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The evolutionary perspective, and analogical reasoning in particular, framed a large part of the nineteenth century’s scientific advances, providing crossties between the natural and social sciences. In terms of Padovan: “The theoretical systems of the early sociologists were deeply influenced by contemporary interpretations of nature, both because they thought that the sciences of nature and of the biological body, such as biology and medicine, were becoming more and more accurate and scientifically objective, and because these early sociologists thought that the nature of society itself depended, in many ways on relations with nature that surrounded it, with the environment. The conviction that there was an indisputable interdependence between social evolution and evolution within nature was due to the analogical cognitive structures which predominated (Padovan 2000, 2)”. The social metabolism metaphor originated in the analogical thesis according to which two systems can be obviously different, yet structurally similar. The idea that societies resembled living organisms was accompanied by yet another analogy: the laws of behavior and evolution ruling living organisms also apply to human societies. This entailed the need to study the energy and material exchanges between society and the natural world. Quoting Padovan: “In the eyes of positivist and organicist sociology, society was not separate from nature: the two could perhaps compete or struggle or, more often, co-operate and collaborate, but they were never considered in different ways. Human beings, like society, were part of nature and were linked, both mechanically and dialectically, to the same laws that govern natural evolution. Furthermore, society was more complex and more differentiated than any other living organism. But both the ends and the function of society and nature were very similar (Padovan 2000, 10)”. Amidst this intellectual turmoil, sociologists frequently assimilated the contributions of natural science. And all sorts of naturalists—including zoologists, botanists, geologists, and geographers—also rummaged through the theses of social scientists. Among the latter, Ernst Haeckel is known for coining the term oekologie in 1866 and for developing numerous analogical comparisons between social and biological organisms: both cells and individual human beings operate as units that build organisms. Haeckel even outlined a comparative anatomy of plants and animals based on a succession of forms of political organization that had been suggested by other authors. In the field of social science, the contributions of organicist sociologists such as Herbert Spencer, Paul Lilienfield, Auguste Comte, and Adam Schâffle have been reused in present-day socio-ecological analyses (Padovan 2000). Examples include the concepts of resilience, inputs and outputs, evolution, and its derivatives (integration, differentiation, and specialization), diversity, and heterogeneity, among many others. Spencer’s thesis on nature acted as a mirror for society’s organization, transformation, and evolution—and it preceded biomimetics by over a century. Despite these developments, analogical exercises faded out. Scientific domains became delimited and independent, leading to the loss of the comprehensive approach that had largely dominated nineteenth-century science. Specialization increased as each field of study gained in depth, eventually leading to modern scientific disciplines. The current scenario is one of fragmented and overspecialized knowledge, generated by tens of thousands of researchers throughout the world. In the case of

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sociology, criticisms of organicist conceptions emanated most frequently from those who decades later would be recognized as its legitimate founders: Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Célestine Bouglé, and Talcott Parsons. Sociologists brought down the curtains and proclaimed that social processes could only be explained by social factors themselves. The study of society remained entrapped by that exclusion principle for decades, until three authors from the US rigorously questioned this human exceptionalism paradigm in the late 1970s: Catton, Dunlap, and Buttel (see Catton and Dunlap 1978; Dunlap 1997; Buttel 1978, 1987). The result was the birth of a new discipline: environmental sociology. Followers have multiplied, especially in English-speaking countries (Redclift and Woodgate 1997). Paradoxically, there was only one observer of society, the most critical of the lot, who explicitly used the concept of metabolism to set in motion his own social theory: Karl Marx.

3.4 Darwin and Marx in London The nineteenth century was the era of the British Empire, and London was not only the world’s largest city (reaching a population of 6.7 million inhabitants within a century), it was also the global capital of finance, commerce, politics, and intellectual creative abundance. Many of the most enlightened scholars and researchers of the epoch lived in London, including two of the century’s giants: Charles Darwin (1809–1892) and Karl Marx (1818–1883). Darwin established his home in a town near London in 1842 after returning from his exploration voyage to the southern hemisphere. Marx arrived in London seven years later during his itinerary through several European cities and remained there until his death. Though they lived within sixteen miles of each other, Darwin and Marx never met. Their contact was limited to correspondence that had been initiated by Marx. The latter admired Darwin so deeply, he wished to dedicate his second volume of Capital to him: Critique of Political Economy. Following the publication of Darwin’s long-expected book, On the Origin of Species, in November 1859, F. Engels wrote to Marx: “Darwin, whom I am just now reading, is absolutely splendid. His book has achieved the demolishment of a certain theology upheld since some time ago”. In response, on December 19, 1860, Marx wrote to Engels: “This book contains the natural historical foundations of our conception”.

3.5 The Key Writings of Alfred Schmidt Although the intellectual links between Darwin and Marx have been recurrently studied both by historians of science (e.g., Gerratana 1973; Colp 1974) and by Marxist analysts (Foster 2000), we owe to Schmidt (1976) what ultimately proved to be a crucial revelation. During the spring of 1973, one of us (Víctor Toledo) discovered in a bookstore in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a 1971 edition of the English version of Alfred Schmidt’s book The Concept of Nature in Marx. The book

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is a translation from German of a doctoral dissertation by Schmidt—a philosopher of the Frankfurt School—that was published as a book in 1962. It has now been translated into eighteen languages and has become an indispensable source for anyone interested in the links between Marxism and ecology. Alfred Schmidt died not long ago, on August 28, 2012, in Frankfurt at the age of eighty-one (Gandler 2012). Marx had not only extensively read the works of naturalists of his time, but he had also perused the work of a major Dutch author of repute in European natural science circles at the time: Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893). Moleschott wrote several books, among which Der Kreislauf des Lebens (The Cycle of Life) published in 1852 and that constitutes a true nineteenth-century treatise on ecology. It is from The Cycle of Life that Marx derived the key concept that allowed him to build his critical theory of capitalism: Stoffwechsel, meaning metabolism or organic exchange. The term Stoffwechsel was used by Marx in his late 1850s manuscripts and in Volume I of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, published in Hamburg in 1867 (see also Martínez-Alier 1987, 200–226). Marx used two major interpretations of metabolism: as an analogy or biological metaphor to illustrate flows of commodities and in a more general way, as an exchange between man and land or between society and nature (Martínez-Alier 2004). Schmidt (1976) devoted a large part of his book to a detailed interpretation of the use of the metabolism concept and to a reflection on the social, historical, ecological, and cosmic implications of the concept, which he synthesized in a key premise: “Marx conceived labor as a process of progressive humanization of nature, an act which is coincident with the gradual naturalization of humans (Schmidt 1976, 81). Nature is thus thought by Marx as the material substrate of work, as the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor (Schmidt 1976)”. Schmidt states: “All act of giving form to a natural substance must obey to the peculiar laws of matter (Schmidt 1976, 84)”. Therefore, “…man can only proceed in his production in the same way as nature itself, that is he can only alter the forms of the material (Marx 1965, 43)”. The connection between Marx’s economic theory and natural processes derives from a key distinction between use value and exchange value: in Marx’s terms, “…as labor is a creator of use-value, is useful labor, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life (Marx 1965, 54)”. Because of this, Marx calls the natural, vulgar, concrete form of labor “use value”, and the supranatural, abstract, and general form of labor “exchange value”. This distinction allows in turn to establish a tacit difference between ecological exchange and economic exchange (Toledo 1981), which is crucial to build a theory of appropriation of nature (see Chap. 5). What follows is an assumption that preceded today’s interdisciplinary proposals, an epistemological forecast: “The sciences of Nature will engulf in the future the sciences of man, as will the sciences of man do with the sciences of nature; there will but a single science (Marx, 1975, 355)”. The significance of the metabolism concept in Marx’s thought was certified in a letter he wrote to his wife on June 21, 1856: “…it is not the love for man of Feuerbach, nor that for metabolism of Moleschott, or for

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the proletariat, but love for the cherished woman, in this case for you, what makes a man become once more a man (see Annali del Instituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan, Italy, 1959)”.

3.6 Marx and Energy Flows Despite his interest in the contributions of contemporaneous naturalists—led by Darwin—and the adoption of the Stoffwechsel concept, Marx was unable to link economic flows to energy flows. Over a century later, the latter would give rise to numerous proposals (led by Georgescu-Roegen and his Economy and Entropy), crystalized in what was named ecological economy (Martínez-Alier 1987). Quoting Martínez-Alier “Marx was a historian and economist, also interested in agricultural chemistry. He wrote that the metabolic flow of materials between human society and Nature was mobilized by human labor except in primitive gathering societies. Tool development by humans was essential for the metabolism. Marx did not consider energy flow (unless he did so in unpublished writings). He did not trace the distinction (as Lotka would do in 1911) between endosomatic use of energy in nutrition (bio-metabolism) and the exosomatic use of energy through tools (techno-metabolism). Humans have genetic instructions for bio-metabolism but not for techno-metabolism, which is very different between rich and poor countries, and is explained by history, politics, economics, technology, culture…Material metabolism (Stoffwechsel, exchanges of materials) was linked to the flow of energy at the level of cells and organisms in the 1840s. This was when it was also understood that agriculture implied changes in energy flows—not only in plant nutrient cycles (Mayer 1845, used Stoffwechsel or energy flow). Metabolism was used from that moment not only for materials but also for energy. Materials could naturally be recycled to some extent, but energy could not. The theory of the direction of energy flow was developed after the Second Law was established in 1850” (Martínez-Alier 2006, 5). A relevant case is that of the Ukrainian medic and philosopher S. Podolinsky (1850–1891). Podolinsky made bold new contributions to agricultural energy, as the author was the first to establish links between agriculture, agricultural production and productivity, and energy dissipation. On April 8, 1880, Podolinsky wrote a letter to Marx attaching one of his articles, in which he stated: “With particular impatience I wait for your opinion on my attempt to bring surplus labor and current physical theories into harmony (for details, see Martínez-Alier and Naredo 1982)”. Marx’s skepticism, nourished and shared by Engels, stalled the development of the subject. Today, it has become a strategic line of research. Martínez-Alier describes Podolinsky’s insight as follows: “Podolinsky looked at the energy return to energy input in a framework of reproduction of the social system. He thought that he had reconciled the Physiocrats with the labor theory of value, although the Physiocrats (in the eighteenth century) could not have seen the economy in terms of energy flow.

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He interpreted capital accumulation not as increasing the produced means of production or even less in financial terms, but as increasing the availability of energy (and certainly also its dissipation) (Martinez-Alier 2006, 9)”. Surprisingly, the pivotal nature of social metabolism had still not been documented almost a century later in any major essay on Marxism and ecology (Moscovici 1969; Skirbek 1974; Lefevre 1978). Moreover, the concept was also overlooked in Parsons’ (1977) detailed compilation of Marx and Engel’s ecological ideas.

3.7 The Rediscovery of Social Metabolism Social metabolism remained virtually dormant until the 1960s, when A. Wolman (1965) applied it to the biophysical analysis of cities, as did Boulding (1966) and economists Ayres and Kneese (1969) to industrial countries. Some authors (Lomas and Giampietro 2017, 11) also trace its origins back to a quantitative analysis methodology to study ecosystem metabolism developed by ecologists Odum and Odum (Odum 1956, 1957). Their theoretical framework made it possible to elaborate a biophysical accounting system of energy flows through the ecosystems, distinguishing the different energy flows that connect their various components. But it was Marina Fischer-Kowalski who formally re-launched the concept in a chapter of her book Handbook of Environmental Sociology published in 1997 (Radclift and Woodgate 1997). She presents it as a stellar concept useful to analyze material flows. Fischer-Kowalski also described the historical trajectory of the concept (FischerKowalski 1998; Fischer-Kowalski and Hûttler 1999). By that time, other concepts had appeared such as industrial metabolism, societal metabolism, socioeconomic metabolism, urban metabolism, and more recently, agrarian or rural metabolism, as well as hydric metabolism. These terms correspond to the study of portions or dimensions of the general metabolic process. As new hybrid disciplines emerged that preached and practiced interdisciplinarity, the social metabolism concept and its equivalents were mainly—but not exclusively—understood as a tool and method that belonged to the disciplines of ecological economy and industrial economy.

3.8 Industrial Metabolism The first works on industrial metabolism were part of the heritage of Industrial Ecology study groups (Ayres and Kneese 1969; Ayres and Simonis 1994; Ayres and Ayres 1998). Research in that field has focused on studying material flows in industrial societies, aiming at reconstructing the biophysical base of territories at the national and global scales. The main publications come from a recognizable group of institutes and research centers including the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI). The foremost productions of the latter include the reconstruction of the Economy-wide Material Flow Accounts (EW-MFA)

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of most countries in the world, detailing and analyzing the associated indicators of production, consumption, and commerce. The objective has also been to establish an instrument for environmental policy and to support the planning of resource consumption scenarios. The report elaborated by a selected group of researchers from the World Resources Institute in 2000 (Matthews et al. 2000) illustrates the kind of work accomplished in these material flow studies applied to industrial societies.

3.9 Urban Metabolism Urban metabolism was explicitly mentioned for the first time in the 1960s in an article by Wolman (1965) published in Scientific American entitled The Metabolism of Cities. Yet, the metabolic approach to cities developed at a much slower pace than that of the vertiginous expansion of industrial metabolism. The field of urban metabolism only became consolidated in the present century (Kennedy et al. 2007, 2011), as reaffirmed in several key publications: a special issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology (Vol. 16, Issue 6, 2012) dedicated to sustainable urban systems; the works of Gandy (2004), Brunner (2008), and Barles (2019) devoted to quantifying material and energy flows in urban systems, in order to identify environmental problems and to design more efficient urban planning policies; and the book Sustainable Urban Metabolism by Ferrão and Fernández (2013). In the same vein are the recent works of Newell and Cousins (2014) and Beloin-Saint-Pierre et al. (2017). This latter book attempts to establish a theoretical and methodological unification of urban metabolism. It reviews the criteria for city sustainability and provides a platform to assist ecological urban planning. As stated by the authors: “Cities at present are mainly linear reactors: their metabolism consists of consuming materials and goods from elsewhere, transforming them in buildings, technical infrastructures for energy or water supply, communications or mobility, and wastes, which are summarily discarded, typically involving very limited reuse or recycling” (Ferrão and Fernández 2013: xi).

3.10 Agrarian or Rural Metabolism Later to appear were studies on the metabolism of rural communities, municipalities, and regions focused on agrarian processes and specifically on the direct interaction between nature and humans. These studies—conducted at local or micro-regional scales—provide a detailed analysis of the relations between human communities and both the natural environment and other sectors they trade with (exchange of goods, commodities, and services). These works thus shed light on the comprehensive networks of ecological and economic exchanges in a given territory. Using dissimilar methodologies, they offer insights into both contemporary (Singh et al. 2001; GrauSatorras 2010; García-Frapolli et al. 2008; Cordón and Toledo 2008; Toledo 2008;

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Ortiz and Masera 2008) and historical (González de Molina 2002; González de Molina and Guzmán-Casado 2006; Guzmán-Casado and González de Molina 2009; Tello et al. 2008; Krausmann 2001, 2004; Krausmann and Haberl 2002; González de Molina et al. 2020) metabolic processes.

3.11 Regional Metabolism No centers, whether rural, urban, or industrial, perform their metabolism in isolation from each other. It is therefore necessary to study metabolism from the spatial (territorial) perspective, integrating centers, territories, and regions. Such a requirement for a different approach was recognized in the pioneering book by P. Baccini and P.H. Brunner, Metabolism of the Anthroposphere, published in 1991, revised and reedited in 2012. Based on a systemic approach, the authors apply the organism metaphor to cities, defining urban metabolism as a general framework. The metabolic study of regions by Baccini and Brunner (2012) introduced the new substance flow category—referring to material flows formed by uniform units that can be either pure chemical elements or compounds—that adds to the category of material flows— which includes substances and goods made up of one or more substances. During the past decade, E. Tello and collaborators have made novel contributions to the study of territorial and regional metabolism, developing an original methodology “which combines the energy and material flow analysis from an agroecology or an ecological economics standpoint with the study of land cover and land-use changes environmentally evaluated using the metrics and indices of landscape ecology (Tello 2013, 196)”. The results of Tello’s studies, which focus on the Spanish region of Catalonia, are methodologically robust. Indeed, they integrate three traditional socio-ecological analyses of concrete territories under the social metabolism conceptual framework: land use change, landscape ecology, and environmental history (see Cussó et al. 2006; Tello et al. 2008; Marull and Tello 2010; Marull et al. 2010).

3.12 National Metabolism Studies of national metabolism began to be analyzed comparatively in the late 1990s (Eisenmenger and Giljum 2007; Russi et al. 2006; Muradian and Giljum 2007; Muradian et al. 2002), attempting to achieve historical diagnoses, such as those for Spain (Carpintero 2005) and Austria (Krausmann and Haberl 2002). These studies assess the impact of human activities on natural resources based on the ecological footprint left by the human appropriation of net primary productivity (Krausmann et al. 2009). Methods, indicators, and sources of statistical information are now available that allow us to estimate nationwide material and energy flows in detail. This, in turn, enables us to quantify the energy and material metabolisms of different countries (Matthews et al. 2000; Haberl 2002) and to record their changes over time (e.g.,

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Krausmann and Haberl 2002). Most of these studies offer contemporary diagnoses and nearly all of them are limited to analyzing energy and material flows in correlation with economic parameters of interest (Haberl 2001a, b; Opschoor 1997). The metabolic profiles of almost thirty countries are currently available, including countries in the EU, Latin America (Chile, Ecuador, México, Peru, and Venezuela), and Asia (China, Laos, the Philippines, and Thailand) (Eisenmenger and Giljum 2007; Russi et al. 2006). In all these works, the social metabolism concept is merely used to perform simple calculations of input (appropriation) and output (excretion) flows together with imports and exports.

3.13 The Main Schools of Social Metabolism As we have seen, SM emerged within Industrial Ecology, Environmental Sociology, and Ecological Economics, but quickly integrated other branches of both social and natural science. As Haberl et al. noted, “SMR [sociometabolic research] can form a backbone of sustainability science by delivering consistent analyses of social metabolism that help to better understand the interdependencies between societal well-being and the physical services provided by society’s metabolism” (Haberl et al. 2019). The authors of the present book even believe that SM could represent the seeds of a unitary language of science, creating a interdisciplinary understanding and the basis of a transdisciplinary language. In the same line, several authors defend that this concept/metaphor could serve to overcome the academic isolation of various branches of environmental thought—such as urban ecology, ecological Marxism, or industrial ecology—and use it as a powerful unified instrument to study socioecological systems (Newell and Cousins 2014; Pauliuk and Hertwich 2015). Although the biophysical foundations of SM—referring to energy and material exchanges between society and its environment—are well established, SM theory and application differ according to the author. Since there is no single way to understand SM, it is worth highlighting the main similarities and differences in the use of SM. Over time, various schools of metabolic thought have arisen with distinct key approaches. The schools’ profiles are not always clearly defined, so we cannot merely enumerate them. Instead, we distinguished five major schools based on their theoretical and methodological coherence. In so doing, we excluded authors and approaches that focus solely on applying the most standardized methodology (EW-MEFA) to provide physical data on national or sub-national economic behaviors. The first school is the Vienna School (VS). It was founded by Marina FischerKowalski, who established the theory of SM with other colleagues and who carried the formalization of the MEFA methodology decisively forward. In 1986, Marina together with several collaborators founded the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna (at the University of Klagenfurt, now in Boku), which she directed until 2014. The Institute produced a large amount of works on current and historical metabolic profiles both globally and per country (https://boku.ac.at/en/wiso/sec). The approach arose as the authors were seeking biophysical indicators to complement monetary

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measures used in national accounts (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2011). The second school emerged in the late nineties around Mario Giampietro and the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of Barcelona (ICTA by its Catalan acronym). This latter school has generated a complex and multidimensional theoretical as well as methodological proposal called Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM, MuS onwards) (Giampietro and Mayumi 2000; Giampietro et al. 2011). The method is designed to integrate the theory of complex hierarchical systems into sustainability assessments. The rationale is that sustainability is multidimensional and therefore requires addressing economic, social, and ecological variables at the same time, taking different spatiotemporal limits into account (Giampietro and Mayumi 1997; Giampietro 2004; Gerber and Scheidel 2018, 190). The third school is inspired by Marxism and is called the Metabolic Rift (MR). It is led—not without controversy—by John Bellamy Foster. This school has been demonstrating the close links between capitalism and environmental degradation in both theoretical and empirical terms (Foster 1999). The fourth school emerged around the figure of Joan Martínez-Alier, also in Barcelona. The latter works at the same research center as Giampietro and maintains a strong connection with the Vienna school. He has applied the metabolic approach to the study of environmental conflicts (Martínez-Alier 2002, 2016), understood as conflicts of natural resource distribution (Distributive Conflicts, hereon DC). This school, described by some authors as “eclectic” (Gerber and Scheidel 2018), has recently published a voluminous work with detailed definitions (Villamayor-Tomás and Muradian 2023). Finally, the fifth school is not strictly a school, but a diverse and plural current that we could call “hybrid”. It goes beyond the conception of SM as a system of biophysical accounts and seeks to build a theory on the material behavior of social systems, integrating physical and social variables. The authors of the present book are part of this latter school. They are pursuing the task of building a theory and methodology which they began in 2007 with a first article published in Spanish (Toledo and González de Molina 2007). This latter current has specialized in applying SM to agriculture and the rural environment. We can therefore name the current Social Agrarian Metabolism (SAM). This current is today led by a network of connected centers: in Seville (Spain), around the Agroecosystems History Laboratory of the Pablo de Olavide University; in Morelia, Michoacán (Mexico) at the CIECO, around the figure of Víctor Toledo, which has led to implementations throughout Latin America; and finally in Barcelona, around Enric Tello at the University of Barcelona, in close collaboration with the Barcelona Institute of Regional and Metropolitan Studies (IERMB). All these schools and currents—except the Metabolic Rift—originate in today’s emerging ecological paradigm and embrace hybrid disciplines such as ecological economics, political ecology, sociology, and environmental history. Despite integrating some of these latter scientific developments, the Metabolic Rift essentially follows a Marxist, or rather neo-Marxist logic. We will now move on to characterizing the five schools based on the following factors: observable SM interpretation differences; the scope of their socio-metabolic proposal; the main instruments used

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to measure biophysical exchanges with nature; and lastly, the major themes to which the metabolic approach is applied. We will pay special attention to their prominent differences, especially the stock/flow or flow/fund approaches. We then finish by signaling gaps and problems that need to be addressed. Of note, each school profile may have been delimited a little strictly as the schools in fact share many common elements and instruments. The characterization we advance, however, provides a clearer vision of the divergences and internal coherence of each of them.

3.14 The Terms and Definition of the Socio-metabolic Approach Although the noun “metabolism” is at the heart of the concept, not all schools use the same adjective. The most widespread is the term “Social Metabolism” (VS, SAM, DC). The MuS uses the term “Societal Metabolism”. Less common terms include “Economic Metabolism” and “Socioeconomic Metabolism”, which are used synonymously. The MR school is the only school that uses a different denomination, in which metabolism is transformed into an adjective and “Rift” becomes the noun: the “Metabolic Rift” thus alludes to the breaking of the link between society and nature caused by the capitalist mode of production (Foster 2000). All schools agree on a Marxist understanding of SM, i.e., as the exchange of energy and materials between society and nature—albeit with different nuances. For the VS, SM corresponds to the “exchange of energy and matter between social and natural systems” (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007, 18). According to the MuS, the “‘metabolism of human society’ is a notion used to characterize the processes of energy and material transformation in a society that are necessary for its continued existence” (Giampietro et al. 2009, 314). SM can also be applied more broadly, for example, in the case of the SAM school. In line with the historical dimension it gives to the concept, SAM’s starting point is that human societies produce and reproduce their material conditions of existence through their metabolism with nature. Consequently, SM corresponds to the set of processes through which human societies appropriate, circulate, transform, consume, and excrete materials and/or energies from the natural world (González de Molina and Toledo 2011). SAM’s proposal seeks to embrace all aspects involved in the relationship between society and nature both today and throughout history. This is precisely the definition that the VS has recently given in its review of “sociometabolic research” contributions to sustainability science: “a systems approach to studying society–nature interactions at different spatiotemporal scales” (Haberl et al. 2019, 1).

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3.15 The Scope of the Metabolic Approach SM uses the metabolic functioning of living beings as a metaphor to study the biophysical bases of the functioning of societies (Toledo and González de Molina 2007; Pauliuk and Hertwich 2015). The five schools’ theoretical-methodological proposals differ, however, in scope. They fall into at least three large groups according to how they approach human societies and their relationship with nature. A first group collects all the researchers who analyze energy and material flows as an instrument to calculate the environmental burden of human societies. The use they make of the metabolic approach is solely methodological, not theoretical. Indeed, in epistemological terms, society and nature remain two separate worlds with distinct dynamics, which nevertheless affect each other. It is precisely because they do not break with the social sciences’ dominant epistemology that they have not formed a school as such. Instead, they have limited their use of SM as an instrument to analyze ecological economics or environmental sociology that can be used, among other purposes, to design environmental policies. Institutions such as SERI (Sustainable Europe Research Institute), the Wuppertal Institute, the World Resources Institute (WRI) or authors such as Giljum or Brigenzu (Adriaanse et al. 1997; Bringezu et al. 1998a, b; Matthews et al. 2000; Briguenzu et al. 2003; Giljum and Eisenmenger 2004) can be considered to belong to this current. A perfect illustration is Eurostat’s and UNEP’s adoption of the biophysical accounting system Economy-wide Material and Energy Flow Accounting (EW-MEFA) (Eurostat 2001). The method has produced environmental accounts as well as production, consumption, and resource trade indicators. Its main achievement is the reconstruction of the EW-MFA of many countries in the world, detailing and analyzing the production, consumption, and associated trade indicators. In doing so, it seeks to establish itself as an environmental policy tool designed to build and plan resource consumption scenarios. This first group has therefore not felt compelled to develop a theoretical or methodological corpus beyond the accounts system mentioned above. The second group is considerably more ambitious. It integrates the two main SM schools whose epistemology revolves around the society/environment relationship and who therefore consider that societies are a culture/nature hybrid: “Society reproduces itself biophysically and culturally over time through a system of mutual feedback loops and is, thus, a “hybrid” between cultural and natural spheres of causation” (Singh et al. 2021, 23; Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz 2004, 2016). The VS and MuS schools fall into this group. The VS uses the MEFA to analyze the relationship between society and nature, or between societies and their environment. It therefore focuses on “societies’ use of biophysical resource” (Haberl et al. 2019, 1). The VS’s methodology does not incorporate variables other than strictly biophysical, energetic, or material ones. As pointed out by Gerber and Scheidel (2018), the goal is the “physical representation of the economy”. This is because the declared breadth of the school’s proposal is to analyze the biophysical elements of societies or their economies in order to assess their degree of sustainability. They recognize that “social systems

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(like humans themselves) constitute hybrids of biophysical and symbolic systems shaped by discourses, power relations or monetary flows, and are subject to intentional organization” (Haberl et al. 2019, 1; also see Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2016, 22). Yet the latter does not translate into an integrated proposal that links social and economic variables with environmental ones, that is, energy and material flows with information flows. In other words, social, economic, and political dimensions are not considered in biophysical terms. They are thus integrated—when they are integrated—without breaking with the self-referential field of the social sciences. For its part, the MuS aspires to a more comprehensive vision of human societies and their degree of sustainability. The school considers that societies are selforganized, socio-ecological systems and it therefore applies the theory of complex hierarchical systems, which integrates social, economic, and environmental dimensions at different scales. This approach requires the study of hierarchically organized structural and functional compartments that operate at different spatiotemporal scales within each society (Giampietro et al. 2014). The MuS thus considers non-material variables. It does not, however, acknowledge the need to integrate them into the methodological proposal beyond time budgets and other social analysis instruments. One of the MuS’s major objectives is to study the internal functioning of societies, with the understanding that sustainability relies, among other things, on the coherence between the different components, between the flows and funds proper to all societies. The third group shares its socio-ecological conception with the second group but goes a step further in its conception of human societies as nature as it removes the boundaries between social and natural spheres. The two preceding schools distinguish, in practice, natural and social domains, even though SM focuses on the intersection between both. Natural dynamics (the natural sphere), above all evolution, are considered separate and so are social dynamics (the cultural sphere). Both spheres have their own dynamics. However, this third group considers that society lies within nature; that is, it is a part of it and is immersed in the process of evolution. Hence, the pursuit of a theoretical and methodological proposal unifies both spheres. Social variables are not considered as separate variables—which would characterize an independent social domain—but also as physical variables in the form of information flows. Responding to the conception that “thermodynamics, which only apply to biophysical objects, do not necessarily apply to the economy as a whole” (Pauliuk and Hertwich 2015, 87), this third group performs a thermodynamic reading of information flows or establishes analogies that allow applying the law of entropy to this area, as in the case of Shannon and Weaver’s information theory (1949). The SAM falls within this current and has made SM the basis of a theory that lays out a material vision of all dimensions of human practices. The present work attempts to establish both the theoretical and practical foundations of the school. The contributions of the VS and MuS schools are nevertheless regarded as extremely valuable, as we will see in this book.

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Finally, the MR school lies outside the theoretical and methodological developments of the ecological paradigm and largely outside political ecology. The school must therefore be addressed separately, as its theoretical and epistemological foundations are distinct (see Leonardi and Torre 2022). The MR is rooted in Marxist thought where nature and society are divergent worlds, the latter acquiring a social dimension through human labor. This school seems engaged in a somewhat anachronistic effort to search for ecological “traces” or approaches in Marx’s own writings in order to justify the introduction of environmental concerns—that is, environmental limits— into Marxist thought. It has even been stated that “Marx from his youth harbored a deep concern for ecological problems” (Escalera Briceño et al. 2018). The MR school is based on Marx’s allusions to social metabolism and on society’s past and present rupture or separation with nature, between the countryside and the city, triggered by a capitalist mode of production. Foster (2000) elaborated his proposal based on these references, attempting to reconcile Marxist theory with current environmental thought. In so doing, he highlights that Marx blamed capitalism for the metabolic rupture. Kohei Saito recently pushed this theory further in his work Marx’s Ecosocialism (2017b). According to Foster, “no other approach has the capacity to integrate a natural-scientific and social-scientific critique that can inform our practice in the Anthropocene” (Foster 2016). The last two schools, SAM and MR, are both clearly committed to socioecological change. Their approach is distant from the engineering orientation that predominates in many SM interpretations—as denounced by Pauliuk and Hertwich (2015, 90). Without a radical societal change, it will not be possible to achieve the sustainability levels needed to reverse the crisis. Both schools reach this conclusion precisely because they have developed a comprehensive approach that integrates social and environmental variables.

3.16 Operational Tools As indicated above, the VS has contributed to the biophysical accounts system called Material and Energy Flow Accounting (MEFA). The methodology has become increasingly standardized. It is used by an extensive community of researchers and enables the comparison of case studies across time and space. This standardization has even led to the development of a European system of biophysical accounts (Eurostat 2012), and international organizations have applied it, such as the UN in its UNEP section (2016). According to Eurostat, “EW-MFA is a statistical framework conceptually embedded in environmental-economic accounts and fully compatible with concepts, principles, and classifications of national accounts—thus enabling a wide range of integrated analyses of environmental, energy and economic issues e.g. through environmental-economic modeling”. Material inputs into national economies include the domestic extraction (DE) of materials in domestic environments, and physical imports (I) from other economies. Material outputs from national economies include materials released from domestic environments (e.g., air, water,

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and soil emissions) and physical exports (E) to other economies. Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) corresponds to the national consumption of materials. It is equal to the sum of domestic extraction plus imports minus exports (DMC = DE + Imports–Exports). In turn, the Physical Trade Balance (PTB) is the difference between imports and exports (PTB = Imports–Exports), or: PT = DMC–DE. These indicators have been analyzed in absolute, per capita, and GPD-related terms to obtain indicators of an economy’s degree of dematerialization. Material flows are expressed in tons, while energy flows are usually expressed in joules or similar units. The methodology has its own coefficients and converters together with a set of references similar to those used in the national accounts system (Fischer-Kowalski and Erb 2016). They are based on measures of the use of tons of materials or MJ of energy per capita or per hectare compared to monetary values such as GDP. The VS also employs other indicators that complement its accounts system, some of which were elaborated by the school itself. For example, the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Productivity (HANPP) (Haberl et al. 2007) measures the degree of human colonization of ecosystems. Others are taken from different biophysical approaches, such as the Ecological Footprint—designed to measure the impact of humans on ecosystems (ecological footprint)—the material and substance flow analyses (Huang et al. 2012), and the integrated assessment models (IAMs). Other indicators and methodological proposals are shared with other schools such as time budget, life cycle analysis, energy balances, and input–output analyses (environmentally extended input–output analysis, EE-IOA). The MuS, for its part, has chosen to restrain from formalizing its methodological proposal, claiming that the method varies depending on the purpose of the analysis, as it offers “semantic and open grammars rather than formal and closed guide” (Gerber and Scheidel 2018, 191). The MuS nevertheless eventually developed its own methodological corpus (Giampietro and Mayumi 2000; Giampietro et al. 2012, 2013, 2014). Its SM proposal has been used to study agrarian systems, rural societies, mining, urban waste management, water, the link between food, water, and energy, etc. Both schools have therefore developed specific methodological proposals using non-monetary quantitative indicators of a material nature, which are, to some degree, incompatible with monetary indicators. This has sometimes sparked cross-criticisms between the schools (Giampietro 2006; Haberl 2006). The VS indicators are more intensely aggregated and result from a reduction to MJ or tons of different materials and energy sources, as in the case of goods or services from a monetary viewpoint. This process has been criticized by the MuS school because the fact of mixing “apples with oranges”—i.e., grouping energy sources and materials that are not materially interchangeable, e.g., biomes with coal, etc.—hinders a detailed analysis of the economy subsectors (Gerber and Schaidel 2018). For its part, the SAM has designed a mix of both methodologies: it integrates the accounting method and the main MEFA indicators into a proposal partly based on MuS grammar. SAM has also developed new methodological tools to perform socio-metabolic analyses enabling the study of agroecosystems: tools for performing nutrient balances and fertility replenishment (Garrabou Segura and González de Molina 2010; González de Molina et al. 2015; García-Ruiz et al. 2012); net balances

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of CO2 emissions (Aguilera et al. 2019); new categories for classifying biomes according to their end use (Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2017); an innovative way to assess agrarian sustainability based on land cost calculations (land cost of agrarian sustainability, LACAS; Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2009; Guzmán et al. 2011); and an analytical method specifically designed to study energy fluxes in agrarian systems. Indeed, a multi-EROI analytical approach that considers the agroecosystem internal flows driven by farmers has been developed (Tello et al. 2015). Three agricultural EROIs have been produced to measure energy efficiency from a farmer viewpoint (Tello et al. 2016). Other multi-EROIS have been set up to measure energy efficiency from a purely agroecological perspective (Guzmán and González de Molina 2015, 2017; Aguilera et al. 2015; Guzmán et al. 2014, 2018; Soto et al. 2016; González de Molina 2020b). As a result of all these latter studies, several Spanish and Latin American case studies have been compiled in a monograph focused on energy analysis in agrarian systems (Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2017). The SAM school has developed a specific approach to agrarian systems that combines environmental, social, and economic variables. In this way, it has produced a dynamic model allowing to analyze the dynamics and functioning of food systems (González de Molina et al. 2020). The Energy-Landscape Integrated Analysis (ELIA) has been elaborated in the same line. It consists of a model that studies landscapes from a biophysical perspective, highlighting internal flows and their functions in agroecosystems (Marull et al. 2016, 2019; Font et al. 2020). Another SAM development is SAFRA, a model that serves to forecast different landscape configurations arising from the optimizing of land uses, labor, and other resources (Padró et al. 2019, 2020). The model is devised to improve deliberative processes of agroecological transitions towards more sustainable agri-food systems and territories (González de Molina et al. 2020a; González de Molina and Lopez-Garcia 2021). Other advances consist of initial calculations of social and gender inequalities from a socio-metabolic viewpoint (Marco et al. 2020a, b; Villa Gil-Bermejo 2017). Finally, the MR school has not developed its own methodology to conduct biophysical economic analyses. Owing to its Marxist affiliation, this school can limit itself to integrating indicators and methodologies typical of other environmental currents within historical materialism and its long analytical tradition.

3.17 Stock/Flow Versus Flow/Fund Approaches While some authors believe that societal biophysical structures should not be included within SM (Pauliuk and Müller 2014, 85), most schools do incorporate them in their analysis. The VS and MuS differ in their approach to these biophysical structures and to the function of energy and material flows generally. While the VS uses the flow/ stock approach, the MuS uses the flow/fund approach based on Nicolas GeorgescuRoegen (1971). This represents an advance—especially for the VS—in the analysis

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of an economy’s biophysical internal functioning, i.e., of that black box whose invisibility had been criticized by the MuS school (Giampietro 2006). VS establishes a link between energy and material flows and the stocks built by societies to produce services or goods (Pauliuk and Müller 2014; Haberl et al. 2016; Krausmann et al. 2017a, b). In a recent article, the VS defined the flow and stock nexus as an essential factor of the functioning of societies: “The functioning of social systems, including the economy, rests on successfully organizing energy and material flows to expand, maintain and operate its biophysical basis: human population, livestock and artefacts such as buildings, infrastructures or durable commodities. These stocks generate important flows, such as physical, intellectual or emotional labour, products such as bread, clothes or electricity, and services such as living space or mobility” (Haberl et al. 2019, 1). The flow-stock nexus has become the core of the VS’s metabolic analysis: “As in biological metabolism, a given society organizes material and energy flows through its natural environment and by way of trade for its sustenance and reproduction. Some material and energy becomes waste (outflows), while the rest of the flows are net additions to “stocks”. Stocks provide critical societal services such as housing, food, energy, transport, health, and education. In turn, stocks need to be maintained by flows, creating a dynamic feedback loop referred to as the “material stock–flow– service” (SFS) nexus (Singh et al. 2021, 24)”. Data produced by this school demonstrate the importance of this link: over 50% of extracted resources now go into building stocks, whereas the figure in 1900 was a mere 20% (Singh et al. 2021, 25). Yet more decisively perhaps, both stock size and stock composition condition current and future material flows, creating lock-in effects and path dependencies (Krausmann et al. 2020). The key factor is not only the flow quantity that needs to be invested in construction, but also the flow quantity that must be invested in its maintenance. The consequences of this MEFA methodological extension are significant indeed since a company’s metabolic profile is conditioned by stock size and needs. We will come back to this point in more detail later, but we can nevertheless advance that stock size and nature not only differentiate countries from a material wellbeing perspective, they also determine the types of energy and materials they need (Fishman et al. 2014). For example, built highways condition the type of mobility, prioritizing the automobile over other types of technologies. This factor clearly plays a key role in the energy transition (Krausmann et al. 2017a). We agree here with Gerber and Scheidel (2018) that the VS’s approach to stocks as a cumulative function of flows prevents us from appreciating their economic significance. For example, the flow/stock approach does not allow grasping the key role of nutrient replacement or the adequate upkeep of farming families to ensure agroecosystem sustainability. In this “passive” approach, decreases or increases in soil fertility or farmer stocks do not alter the quality of the agricultural goods and services produced—only their quantity. Nutrient flow reductions can have a major impact on harvests, just as lower farmer incomes may lead to a deterioration in the agroecosystem services they provide (Guzmán Casado et al. 2022). We will see some examples of this later.

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Based on Georgescu-Roegen’s distinction between stocks and funds, the MuS, for its part, prefers to use the relationship between flows and funds. This school understands funds as structures that steadily produce goods or services. To guarantee this provision, they require energy and material supplies—as well as information, we would add. Unlike stocks, funds not only receive inflows, but also generate outflows. Consequently, a proper functioning, that is, the outflow quantity and quality, depends on the inflow quality and quantity. A share of these flows must be dedicated to their maintenance over time. Therefore, Georgescu-Roegen argue that the economy’s true purpose should be to maintain the fund elements over time, that is, the reproduction of production factors (Lomas and Giampietro 2017). Consequently, the fund elements are not consumable during the production process but make the production process possible and constitute each economy’s specific structure, i.e., its identity. In agreement with the VS, the MuS holds that a society’s metabolic profile is determined by the size and needs of its fund elements. Nevertheless, the stock/fund distinction can sometimes be confusing or arbitrary since neither school applies any clear differentiation criteria. Situations abound in which a stock can be considered a fund and vice versa. In line with Gerber and Scheidel (2018, 191), we could say that the use of the stock/flow or fund/flow approach serves in fact different analytical purposes and, consequently, whether an element is regarded as a stock or a fund ultimately depends on the objectives and scale of the analysis being conducted. We will return to this issue in Chap. 6.

3.18 Main Applications The VS has produced a valuable biophysical characterization of many national economies as well as comparisons between them. The school is also developing a hugely significant characterization of the progress of the world economy. Its analyses of global energy and material flows provide an accurate measure of the world economy’s degree of unsustainability and the pressing need to reverse the situation. Their work forms the basis of many analyses and proposals elaborated by international organizations and NGOs to progress towards a more sustainable world. It is also worth mentioning that this school has applied the MEFA methodology to several case studies in the past, offering a comprehensive overview of the biophysical performance of societies (Krausmann et al. 2009; Schaffartzik et al. 2014). As we will see later, the VS has made an invaluable contribution to systematizing past and present metabolic regime transitions (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007). Its theoretical and methodological proposal can be applied to any scale and to any economic sector (Fischer-Kowalski and Erb 2016). Nevertheless, it does not a priori contemplate examining the relationships between the different scales, that is, an integrated or multiscale analysis. The latter is precisely the approach pursued by the MuS. Indeed, the MuS studies both sectoral and national current economies, focusing on the behavior of the subsectors that make up its structure. The study of an economy’s internal loops and their

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internal balance through the sudoku effect constitute the scaffold of the intrasectoral and multiscalar relationships that characterize this school (Giampietro et al. 2014). Special attention has been given to the energy sector (Arizpe-Ramos et al. 2011; Ramos-Martín et al. 2007; Giampietro et al. 2013) and water (Madrid-López and Giampietro 2015). In recent work, the MuS exploits—as does the VS—the links between economic subsectors (Giampietro et al. 2014). This school has also conducted various studies on the socioeconomic metabolism of several Latin American countries (see below), among which are China (Ramos-Martín et al. 2007) and Vietnam. Perhaps one of the school’s major shortcomings is its lack of historical depth, a limitation which it certainly shares with other SM currents. This deficiency may be due, however, to the difficulties in collecting historical data of sufficient quality to perform a MuSIASEM analysis. Although the MR school has specifically addressed agricultural industrialization, it has failed to produce a large body of work on national or local scales. The school has focused on denouncing capitalism’s past and present negative social and environmental impacts. The studies that have adopted this approach have been wider in scope, analyzing the effects of the capitalist production system on the genesis of the environmental crisis (York et al. 2003; Schneider and McMichael 2010; Jorgenson and Clark 2011; Gunderson 2011; Clausen et al. 2015; Saito 2017a). For example, the rift has been studied regarding soil nutrient cycles or in terms of structural changes in relation to global carbon, nitrogen, and water cycling. In a similar line, Moore (2014) has argued that capitalism can be regarded as a specific ecological regime in itself, characterized by persistent degradation and inequality, which he calls “Capitalocene” (Moore 2014). The DC school has advanced in a number of domains: the metabolic analysis of resource access and use; the environmental impacts of economic growth; and the distributional conflicts they have provoked. The school is currently working on a macro-project of mapping conflicts around the world (see Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (www.ejatlas.org)) that has led to numerous studies, especially in Latin America, as we will see in the following section. Finally, the SAM school published a book in 2011 in which it sought to adapt SM to Environmental History González de Molina and Toledo 2011. By including information flows, it incorporated social and economic aspects and thus developed a theoretical and methodological blueprint that goes beyond most Social Metabolism approaches. An English version with new similar developments led to the first edition of this book (González de Molina and Toledo 2014). The originality of this school lies not only in how it combines biophysical analyses with the economic and social analyses, but also in the useful tools it has developed to study sustainable agriculture and, more specifically, Agroecology. The MEFA methodologies have also been applied at different scales in Spanish case studies with an innovative agroecological approach (Infante-Amate 2014; Infante-Amate and González de Molina 2013; Infante-Amate et al. 2014a, b, c, 2015; Soto et al. 2016; Guzmán et al. 2014). The multi-EROI method has equally been applied to examine different countries, gathering up to 82 energy balances of past and present farm systems. Many of them were published in a special issue of Regional Environmental Change in 2018 (Gingrich et al. 2018a, b). This is the largest

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dataset published so far on farm system energy and soil nutrient balances and that applies the same calculation methods over a long-term historical perspective.

3.19 Other Topics, Other Domains of Metabolic Research Have the schools mentioned above elaborated a narrative specific to their territory of study? Socio-metabolic studies do indeed focus on the concerns and questions deemed most relevant in each world region to explain their respective past or present situations. This feature of metabolic studies seems entirely logical: it addresses the specific characteristics of the eco-social crisis in each area of the world. In the case of Latin America, studies have focused on the effects of extractivism and the unequal exchange of natural resources. In line with the essential role that the rural world still plays on that continent, a large part of the work also concentrates on this subject. Similarly, the study of environmental conflicts reflects today’s key role of environmental movements—which are closely connected to traditional social movements (Ramos 2021). This contrasts with the themes developed especially in Europe, where research has centered more on studying the limits to growth and other more global issues. The work of LaRota-Aguilera et al. (2021) reflects the state of the art of social metabolism in Latin America. According to this review, which focuses only on works published in English, the most extensively used method has been the MEFA, which has been applied at national and regional levels, and, to a lesser extent at a local scale (LaRota-Aguilera et al. 2021). We have added other important contributions published in Spanish. Although they are few and far between, some studies have focused on urban metabolism (Díaz Álvarez 2014; Parrado-Rodríguez et al. 2018), on the economies of Argentina (Pérez-Manrique et al. 2013), Peru (SilvaMacher 2016), Ecuador (Russi et al. 2008; Vallejo 2010), Colombia (Pérez-Rincón 2006; Urrego-Mesa et al. 2018; Vallejo et al. 2011), Costa Rica (Infante-Amate and Picado 2018), Mexico (Gonzalez-Martinez and Schandl 2008), and Chile (Giljum 2004), on regions of the continent (Crespo-Martín and Pérez Rincón 2019) and on continent-scale material flows (UNEP 2013). A substantial number of works have centered exclusively on agriculture (Delgadillo-Vargas et al. 2016; Infante-Amate and Picado 2018; Pengue 2005; Pérez-Rincón 2006; Urrego-Mesa et al. 2018). All these studies have revealed the unequal relationships that exist between these peripheral territories and the most industrialized countries. The latter are dedicated to the extraction and net export of resources once the initial and more environmentally expensive transformation into fuels or metallic minerals has been completed (Pérez Rincón 2006; Vallejo et al. 2011; Pérez-Manrique et al. 2013; Infante-Amate et al. 2020; Urrego-Mesa 2021). The latter has incremented energy consumption—mainly of fossil fuels—increased GHG emissions, and multiplied the negative impacts on the continent’s ecosystems and on the health of its people (Falconí and Vallejo 2012). Efforts have been particularly notable in Latin American commercial agriculture (Zuberman and Fernández 2016; de Astarloa and Pengue 2018; Pérez Gañan 2020).

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This growth in extraction and environmental impacts has also led to a rising number of clearly class-orientated conflicts and environmental protests across the continent (Arizpe and García López 2020; Martínez-Alier 2011; Martínez-Alier and Walter 2016; Muradian et al. 2012; Pérez-Rincón et al. 2018; Scheidel et al. 2020). In any case, this extractivist specialization process has not altered the dependency of most of the continent’s economies and “have not been enough to change the productive matrix of Latin America. Furthermore, it has not allowed overcoming the problems associated with LA’s insertion model in world markets since the economies still highly rely on biomass production and other primary exports. In other words, rather than developing a strong industrial sector, Latin America countries have deepened and expanded their extractive economies” (LaRota-Aguilera et al. 2021). The MuS school has published almost twenty papers on specific national and regional-scale economic sectors (Ramos-Martín et al. 2008; Borzoni 2011; Recalde and Ramos-Martín 2011; Silva-Macher 2016; Cadillo-Belalcázar et al. 2022). Its main findings are compatible with those of the previous school: energy consumption has increased in extractive sectors such as mining or the biodiesel industry, and in the metabolic profile of extractive countries generally, e.g., in Argentina. Brazil, Venezuela, or Chile. Numerous works and doctoral theses have been carried out within the SAM current and have had a significant impact in Latin America. Notable is the work on rural metabolism in peasant and native communities undertaken by Víctor Toledo (2008) and colleagues (Ortiz and Masera 2008; García-Frapolli et al. 2008; Cordón and Toledo 2008; Grau-Satorras 2010; González-Acevedo and Toledo 2016) published mostly in Spanish. It provides a detailed account of the structure and functioning of peasant economies that are based on a completely different logic than that of industrial agrarian economies. The SAM methodology has been implemented in works conducted in Colombia and especially in Costa Rica (Iodice and Guzmán Casado 2015; Delgadillo-Vargas et al. 2016; Montero et al. 2021a, b, c; InfanteAmate and Picado 2018; Urrego-Mesa et al. 2018; Goebel Mc Dermott 2022; Clare Rhoades 2022).

3.20 Main Gaps and Questions to Solve Our above review of the schools shows that SM is a remarkable instrument to perform biophysical analyses of human societies and their degree of sustainability. However, the review also revealed gaps and shortcomings that will surely mark future developments. Indeed, the schools we analyzed above have not sufficiently addressed theoretical aspects, and this prevents an all-inclusive account of the full set of variables included in the biophysical analysis of human societies. Indeed, SM could potentially lead to a theoretical and methodological framework capable of addressing industrial civilization’s unsustainability problems comprehensively. SM also lays down the seeds of a necessary convergence between the social and natural sciences. That is, it constitutes a transdisciplinary approach to the analysis of societies which,

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undoubtedly, represents a step forward in the science unification program. Yet for these developments to occur, it is necessary to go beyond a merely quantitative use of SM to measure an economy’s environmental sustainability or to collect information for future environmental policies. Instead, SM must become a theoretical proposal focused on socio-ecological relationships, that is, human beings, considered as one more species—albeit understood as an evolutionary novelty—inserted in their environment. In this way, SM could become the solid theoretical foundation of the sustainability framework required to reverse the eco-social crisis. In this sense, the metabolic theory must be ambitious and construct a theory of historical change and of socio-ecological change. Given the pressing need to find achievable solutions to the eco-social crisis, the study of metabolic change could decisively enlighten our understanding of how historical changes arose in the past and can be facilitated in the future. The metabolic theory that we defend must be rooted in the laws of nature, especially in the laws of thermodynamics. Both must form the common basis of its theoretical scaffold responding to the various foundations of the scientific disciplines in question. A thermodynamic reading, that is, an exergetic formulation of human work, would undoubtedly support a biophysical interpretation of economic proposals such as that of Smith, Ricardo, or Marx on the value of labor, bridging physics and economics. This ambition is not new. We began to develop it in the first edition of this book and we rested on those who, within the schools analyzed, attempted to understand and analyze human evolution using SM as an instrument. Notable among these authors is Marina Fischer-Kowalski, whose theoretical ambition has always been inspiring. Three major metabolic regimes were singled out since the emergence of the species and transformations that came with the transitions—that is, the changes that occurred with the passage from one regime to another—were examined. The fact that we are currently moving on to a more sustainable metabolic regime makes it even more relevant to approach SM as an instrument of analysis of historical change. Yet if the main purpose of SM is to study the degree of sustainability that human societies establish with nature, SM, as a comprehensive theoretical proposal, must include social, economic, and political variables in the analysis—not only biophysical ones. Almost all SM schools fail to include or adequately integrate these variables. As Padovan et al. (2022, 299) rightly criticize, “All these approaches address the physical account of metabolic process, but they rarely study the practices of agents that shape the metabolism dynamics”. Virtually, all schools have taken steps forward, but the latter remain insufficient. Converting SM into a theory of socio-ecological change would require at least filling the gaps described next. First, in line with the above, information flows must be incorporated into the analysis and, therefore, into the theory: not only information of a somatic nature, but also, fundamentally, exosomatic information, transmitted by cultural or symbolic mediations. This human innovation in the evolutionary landscape implies understanding metabolic exchange not only as an exchange of energy or of materials but also as an exchange of information. These information flows help to explain the structure and functioning of energy and material flows. While there is certainly room for several economic or social variables in some

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of the works of the schools studied, political-institutional aspects are decisive insofar as they regulate the other flows. Second, all schools are deeply aware of the environmental impacts that the various metabolic patterns have on the environment. Nevertheless, no measurement instruments have been developed that would additionally maintain or be consistent with the proposed metrics and indicators. For example, the MuS has proposed to measure environmental impact using methodologies that calculate environmental pressure or load such as: Environmental Loading Ratio, Ecological Footprint, Ascendancy, Ecological Integrity Indexes, or Nature Index (Lomas and Giampietro 2017); but these methodologies are external to the MuSIASEM and largely out of context. All the above should give rise to a theory of socio-ecological transformation that guides the changes to come and enlightens our transition to sustainability. In this sense, it would be highly relevant to develop a theoretical corpus that considers environmental protest not only as the result of a distributive problem of resources and environmental damage, but as a progressive or regressive driver of change towards the transition, as suggested for example by Marina Fischer-Kowalski and John McNeill (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2019). Social protest, understood as collective human action, has an entropic or negentropic impact, depending on its intentions and execution, as illustrated, for example, by works on historical peasant conflicts (González de Molina et al. 2009). We will come back to this issue later. Finally, a theory of socioecological change must alter the object around which new socio-ecological narratives are built: we must shift from economic growth and living standard to sustainability in all its dimensions. This implies radically altering our perspective and moving from the study of flows to the study of funds and stocks. As noted above, it was Georgescu-Roegen (1971) who suggested this shift when he proposed to move from the study of production to the study of the reproduction of the factors that make the production of goods and services possible. This book is an effort to advance in that direction and to build that theory of socio-ecological change so urgently needed to address today’s eco-social crisis.

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Chapter 4

The Biophysical Bases of Social Metabolism

4.1 Introduction In this chapter and the ones that follow, we present and discuss the basis for a theory of social metabolism. In doing so, we will go beyond its usage merely for accounting purposes and the field’s predominant cybernetic orientation. In such a mainstream view, social metabolism interpretations to date take into account mainly the matter and energy flows as well as the nexus between stocks and funds. The social or immaterial dimension of metabolism, when it is taken into account, belongs to the exclusively human domain of culture and is therefore not usually included in the analysis. Therefore, the immaterial dimension, which is essentially exosomatic, should be integrated into the SM framework. Yet, when we explore the intangible, symbolic, and cultural dimension of metabolism—i.e., its sociological interpretation—we face the old dilemma of recognizing whether social processes either are exclusively social or are also encompassed by natural laws. If the former implies a paradigm of human uniqueness, the latter implies the risk of falling into a form of reductionism. However, the more recent advances of the complex systems theory are oriented towards solving such a dilemma by demonstrating that, regardless of their degree of complexity, systems—be they physical, biological, or social—achieve higher levels of complexity without violating the more general laws of matter: the laws of thermodynamics. The above also implies a thermodynamic interpretation of social practice: all human acts require the appropriation and consumption of a given quantity of energy and materials from nature and the expulsion of residues to nature. We thus assume that entropy is common to all natural processes, be they human or of any other nature. Even emotional, symbolic, or merely conceptual processes are subject to the thermodynamic principle of entropy regarding their internal logic—not only their biophysical basis (Haimovici et al. 2013). Linked to this consideration is the recognition of the existence of other dimensions of human actions having different explanatory logics, and that cannot be reduced to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_4

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a given biophysical or material scale. The latter scale is used to measure the behavior of matter organization levels or of less complex living organisms than the human species and its social relations. The complexity and autonomy of social and human processes prevent them from being totally reducible to the computation of the entropic principle order and disorder in its application to less complex degrees of matter organization. We thus reach a fundamental axiom: social practice and social relations cannot be explained by the analysis of energy and matter alone, but they cannot be explained either without examining such flows. Reciprocally, social relations order and condition the material exchanges with nature. In other words, the material relations with the natural world—connecting human beings with their biophysical environment—are but one dimension of social relations and therefore do not account for their totality. A strictly human or social domain of social relations therefore exists that cannot be explained solely by the laws of nature. It is the product, as we shall see, of the human being’s evolutionary specificities. But this self-referential domain can also be considered and analyzed in biophysical terms: what is immaterial or intangible can be reduced to information flows. In this sense, the laws of physics can also be very useful to interpret culture as a distinctly human manifestation from a biophysical viewpoint. Our aim is to build a theory that allows studying the biophysical bases of human societies and their evolution over time, providing useful knowledge both to examine the past and to solve today’s eco-social crisis. This theory counters the exceptionalist approach which still dominates the social sciences. Exceptionalism separates the human being from nature and has sought to construct explanatory theories of human behavior in which nature plays no part. Our theory is also poles apart from the physicalist view of societal functioning, which gives the laws of nature, especially the laws of thermodynamics, the ability to explain the functioning, and dynamics of human societies. This physicalist illusion moves away from physical reality itself, which incorporates culture as a human flow of information. The theory we are advancing also differs greatly from the widespread combinations of both approaches one can find in socio-metabolic studies. As we argued in Chap. 3, human societies are not a hybrid mixture of culture and nature, as defended by the Vienna School (FischerKowalski and Weisz 2016). They are nature. We are not before two separate domains that interact and are governed by different logics, but before a single social domain that is both natural and social. Consequently, we can study human behavior from a biophysical perspective if we also regard the symbolic or cultural dimension as a material flow of information. In this way, we can use the laws of nature or an analogy to explain them. Overall, we are facing a strange paradox: when we assume that we need to explore the information flows—the software of the metabolic process—we are compelled to rely on the physical interpretation of social system thermodynamics in order to fully understand their particularities or specificities as emergent systems or evolutionary novelties. The fact of giving the model a sociological nature, which is absent from cybernetic approaches, implies also attributing a legitimate physical nature to it.

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What we are witnessing is a return to the ideals of nineteenth-century knowledge, analogical thought (see Chap. 3), and the ambition of building a general theory of reality that is equally coherent and pragmatic. Hence, we seek to theorize about the material structure, functioning, and dynamics of human societies along history based on a thermodynamic understanding of human societies as biological systems, which is what they also are. Such a thermodynamic conception rests on the key role played by entropy, both within societies and in their relationship with the biophysical environment. The latter prompts the differentiation and description of several kinds of entropy: physical, social, and political or regulatory. Our theoretical proposal is still a work in progress so in the present chapter and those that follow, we will address only the initial foundations of the theory. Indeed, essential aspects of the theoretical framework are still missing. What we can advance, nonetheless, are the three essential interrelated principles the theory rests on: first, human societies are not external to nature nor do they simply interact with nature, they are nature; second, they are therefore subject to a biophysical interpretation; and, third, this socio-ecological theory must integrate the cultural or symbolic dimension as an essential element and as a singular expression of the human species.

4.2 Society is also Nature As a result, we reject the separation established between nature and society from the perspective of its physical and biological functioning, as suggested by the founders of modern sociology (led by Emil Durkheim and Max Weber). Based on the reasons exposed in Chap. 2, we defend instead the view that social systems are natural systems, and therefore that society is also nature. This means that the laws of nature operate and affect human beings together with the artifacts they construct. Consequently, the entropy principle applies to social practice: social systems are subject to the laws of thermodynamics, which are perhaps the physical laws that best explain the evolution of the human species over time. Indeed, these laws are essential to elaborate a theory that explains the functioning and evolution of social systems—as natural systems—through evolutionary interaction with other physical and biological systems, without discarding complexity as an emergent property of social systems. This approach provides unity and coherence to a discourse based on the ecological paradigm or if one prefers, on the complexity paradigm. Indeed, recognizing that the laws of nature operate in human societies and that human societies cannot be understood without them does not imply any physical determinism. Our theoretical proposal does indeed give a key role to the laws of nature, not only to understand the structure and functioning of human societies, but also to understand their dynamics, integrating other social variables. Physical determinism is criticized by those who consider the self-referential nature of human will and action. Yet the laws of nature, including those of thermodynamics, make physical determinism impossible. “A theory of physics is expected to provide predictions,

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but the statistical physics of open systems reveals that detailed trajectories of social changes cannot be forecasted because neither energy nor energy flow pathways are conserved within an evolving system” (Anila and Salthe 2010, 1338). The theory we propose here lies on a different plane than that of other social science attempts to apply the laws of nature to human societies, e.g., the “Cultural Materialism” trend in Anthropology. This latter current is based, like our own proposal, on applying the laws of thermodynamics and especially the law of entropy to human societies. It defends the material dimension of human action, seeks to explain human performance through physical-biological processes, and considers that cultural changes are associated with energy consumption transformations (Anila and Salthe 2010). For our part, we do not seek to explain human behavior only (or mainly) through environmental or ecological factors—which undoubtedly do enter the equation. We seek rather to analyze the functioning and evolution of human societies from a biophysical viewpoint. This explanation must include other factors that belong to the social sphere (economic, social, political, etc.) and not to the biophysical sphere, but which must also be considered as a physical expression of the human species. A number of non-biophysical factors undoubtedly also explain human behavior and influence both its unpredictable behavior and the impact it has on society itself. Our approach cannot therefore be qualified as environmental determinism because it is based, paradoxically, on the very laws of nature, that is, on the entropic indeterminacy that results from the laws of thermodynamics themselves. At the other extreme lie other approaches that use terms borrowed from physics and biology to defend the self-referentiality of social systems and, therefore, human exceptionalism. For example, Mavrofides et al. (2011, 365) state forcefully: “it is the meaning that stands out as a sine qua non in social systems, not survival; the reconstruction of their identity as sameness, that is, a condensation of the temporal manifestations of the systems a self referencing, always present, unity”. They identify “social energy” with “symbolic capital” which is apparently the least closely connected to the physical world. This theoretical proposal, which applies the laws of thermodynamics to the dissipation of social energy, seeks to develop a sociological theory of the functioning of human societies. As we will argue later, however, from a biophysical viewpoint, the main objective of human action is collective and individual survival—not identity. In the same way, the basic principle underlying the functioning of human societies is the free energy extracted from the environment and not the meanings generated within them. Humans are interested in the survival of society, and to survive, society requires energy flows: social meaning is not possible without the dissipation of free and available energy. Another proposal that assigns human action to a separate domain is “Sociophysics”. This current starts by creating an analogy between social or individual interactions and several concepts from physics. It then applies models from physics to explain social phenomena. These models have been used to study complex social systems such as cultural dynamics, crowd behavior, information dissemination, social conflict, and economic matters (Kaufman et al. 2020). When used as a methodological tool, the approach can certainly produce useful explanations of collective social

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behavior, e.g., car driver behaviors or certain types of social conflicts. These models, however, are not sufficiently complex to explain social behavior generally. In short, it is not possible to explain human behavior by solely or mainly using biophysical laws. Nor is it possible to explain human behavior without them. Human action can be analyzed from different angles: from the motivation viewpoint; from the perspective of its manifestations or practical expressions; or from the angle of its impacts. All of them can be analyzed from a social or self-referential perspective, but human action, whether collective or individual, is characterized by motivations, expressions, and environmental impacts that must certainly be part of the explanation.

4.3 Society as an Adaptive Complex System Let us begin by assuming that human societies constitute adaptive complex systems. Social systems have a dual complexity: a quantitative complexity—they have countless components—and a qualitative one—there is a dense connectivity within the network that interconnects countless elements. Our understanding of human societies is also complex because their complexity is associated “with the impossibility of using an algorithm to compress the information required for a given representation without losing valuable information (Giampietro et al. 2011, 65)”. The interconnections in the system generate organization, so complex systems are autopoietic—i.e., they are capable of self-maintenance and self-reproduction (Maturana and Varela 1980). The adaptability of complex systems derives from feedback—connections between the system and its surroundings—that leads to the system’s survival thanks to its adaptation to the environment (Marten 2001, 50). Societies, as adaptive complex systems, are non-lineal, dynamic systems that are capable of learning and therefore, of transforming themselves through cumulative experience. In that sense, societies are animated systems (Ruiz Ballesteros 2013, 301–302). Social systems are also multiscalar because of the emergent properties they present at different scales of integration. Complexity must be understood as more than the result of a function with numerous variables and beyond the impossibility of a comprehensive acquisition of all the information needed for its understanding. It should also be approached as the result of the thermodynamic laws ruling the system, in particular the principle of entropy. Societies—understood as complex, evolving biological systems that exchange information, energy, and material with their environment—are subject to the laws of thermodynamics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is perhaps one of the most famous laws of physics, yet it has also given rise to more controversial and even contradictory interpretations, which have been applied to a very broad range of fields such as philosophy, biology, economics, sociology, and communication. As is well known, the Second Law of Thermodynamics establishes that any transformation of energy (defined by the First Law of Thermodynamics) is inefficient, so part of the energy is dissipated as heat. The dissipated energy remains as energy, but in a state that is incapable of generating work, moving objects, or driving metabolic processes of plant and animal

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cells. Entropy is an indicator of the amount of useless energy (Tyrtania 2008, 66; Mavrofides et al. 2011, 355). Its contents and scope have even been disputed, especially when applied to living things, but we shall not reproduce here the history of its inception and subsequent development since Carnot. A summary can be found in Schneider and Kay (1994). The most controversial issue is the formulation, based on Boltzmann, that identifies entropy with disorder, opening the door to “the ‘scientific’ interpretation of everything disorderly’ including ‘the decline of society’” (Floyd 2007, 1032). Following Lambert (2002), Floyd states that entropy is not a measure of disorder or chaos and that the driving force in biochemical living systems is the diffusion, dissipation, or dispersion of energy in a final state compared to an initial state. Kozliak and Lambert attribute to Boltzmann the statistical characterization of changes in a system’s entropy as its passage from order to disorder and, therefore, the identification of entropy with disorder. According to Floyd (2007, 1037), “there are numerous common examples of simple chemical systems in which a spontaneous increase in entropy is accompanied by what might be interpreted as an increase in ‘orderliness’, or ‘organisation’, of the system’s component particles”. For this author, Boltzmann attempted to make the law of entropy understandable by using the metaphor of the passage “from order to disorder”. He was alluding to the way in which energy is distributed across a system and not to the way in which the matter that composes it is organized (Floyd 2007, 1038). For this author, “the second law of thermodynamics describes a necessarybut-not sufficient condition for self-organisation” (Floyd 2007, 1039), a quality that distinguishes biological processes, which, as we saw earlier, are autopoietic and also require information. In fact, it is commonly accepted that entropy represents a lack of information (Brissaud 2005, 69). In any case, regardless of whether entropy can be identified with disorder or not, it seems that clearly, boosting a system’s organization requires work and the dissipation of a certain amount of free energy, thus increasing total entropy. In that sense, a certain form of order or coordination results from that dissipative process of organization. The law of entropy certainly has limits and cannot be applied to any phenomenon. But Boltzmann’s (1896/1964) statistical interpretation of entropy is very useful in the present work, as it helps to establish Social Metabolism as a theoretical and methodological proposal. We will return to Boltzmann in the following chapter. Indeed, the implications of the entropy principle derived from the Second Law of Thermodynamics are decisive for the theoretical conception of social metabolism. The assumption is that entropy implies radically rejecting any conception in social sciences—and particularly in historiography—that social relations are beyond the laws of thermodynamics acting only on nature. The major consequence of this is the irreversibility of physical and biological processes. Irreversibility rises from the energy loss predicted by the second law in processes of energy transformation, the total amount of energy remaining constant. Thus, all physical processes are irreversible due to heat loss. As a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, physical time always proceeds forward in the same direction. For example, the process initiated by the ignition of a piece of coal is impossible to revert; the resulting ashes cannot be burnt again (Swanson et al. 1997, 46).

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In his book What is life? Schrödinger (1984) stated that living organisms are neither exempt from, nor in opposition to, thermodynamic laws, but that they conserve or increase their complexity by exporting the entropy they generate. Human societies are also self-maintained (autopoietic) systems with emergent forms of stable organization across space and time, but following a process of dynamic configuration. The existence, configuration, maintenance, and reproduction of societies require a continued supply of energy and material, as well as the dissipation of part of that energy. Entropy is the key element in the functioning of societies. Schrödinger turned towards non-equilibrium thermodynamics to explain how living organisms counteract the law of entropy, taking energy from their environment and processing it to maintain a high state of organization (Schneider and Kay 1994, 26). This local order is achieved in exchange for an increase in global entropy. Schrödinger thus reconciled the law of entropy with the self-organization characteristic of living beings. As Maturana and Varela argued, living systems are autopoietic, and they are continuously recreated (Mavrofides et al. 2011, 362). The same applies to human societies, which are also living organisms. As mentioned above, to be realized, this self-organization requires information, not just energy. Indeed, information plays a key role in the use of available free energy in a more organized living system (Trambouze 2006, 117). The implications of this statement will be discussed in the next chapter. Living beings therefore increase their level of self-organization in response to an increasingly entropic environment. This reaction to increased entropy fuels the evolutionary process (Gladyshev 1999). It was Boltzmann who first described the struggle for existence in terms of the second law (Skene 2015, 5527). Human societies reproduce the same pattern. As living organisms, human beings also struggle to stay away from thermodynamic equilibrium by maintaining the material conditions that ensure their reproduction and, therefore, their survival over time. As described by Tyrtania (2021), this continuous battle is a “struggle for life” and for the resources that compensate entropic losses, allowing it to be maintained. This struggle drives evolution, and therefore, from a biophysical viewpoint, it is the main objective of human action. In accordance with Schneider and Kay (1994, 35), we can characterize life as a dissipative structure that, locally, keeps the living being away from thermodynamic equilibrium. The same can be said of societies and of the human species in general. As Trinn (2018, 751) describes, “human beings as biological organisms require high-quality energy in order to sustain their structures, energy they extract from negentropy sources in the macro-physical environment (nutrients and fuel) (Gill 2000). At the same time, they seek to fend off harmful influences. Extractive and defensive processes are enhanced by various technological means, all of which require energy for their production. In their bodies and tools, humans store causal potentials that, when realized, become known as ‘labour’”. At a smaller scale, humans construct dissipative structures allowing them to steer clear of thermodynamic equilibrium (evolutionary death or failure) by continuously dissipating free or useful energy, as described by Prigogine. We discuss this below. “This is done at the cost of increasing the entropy of the larger “global” system in which the dissipative

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structure is imbedded; thus, following the mandate of the second law that overall entropy must increase” (Schneider and Kay 1994, 29). According to this biophysical perspective, we can define economic activity as the creation and maintenance of the dissipative structures that ensure the survival of individuals and societies. That is the real goal of economics or, to put it differently, of metabolic activity, as argued by Georgescu-Roegen (1971, 345). Not surprisingly, this author considered the law of entropy as the most economical of all the laws of Nature, since scarcity is the basis of the economy: “If the entropic process were not irrevocable, i.e., if the energy of a piece of coal or of uranium could be used over and over again ad infinitum, scarcity would hardly exist in man’s Life” (1971, 6). Consequently, “the primary objective of economic activity is the self-preservation of the human species. Self-preservation in turn requires the satisfaction of some basic needs—which are nevertheless subject to evolution. The almost fabulous comfort, let alone the extravagant luxury, attained by many past and present societies has caused us to forget the most elementary fact of economic life, namely, that of all necessaries for life only the purely biological ones are absolutely indispensable for survival” (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, 277).

4.4 Entropy and Negentropy in Social Systems The second relevant consequence of entropy for human societies is the natural tendency—as any physical and biological system—to go towards a state of maximum entropy. Social systems depend on dissipative structures to balance this trend and to remain away from maximum entropy. Dissipative structures transfer entropy to the outside environment and thus gain internal negentropy, which gives rise to some kind of order. To generate order, all human societies share with the rest of the physical and biological systems the need for a controlled, efficient processing of energy extracted from the surroundings. Such is the proposal of Prigogine (1983) regarding non-equilibrium systems (thermodynamics of irreversible processes), which is one of the basic concepts of our metabolic theory: generation of order from chaos. In the 1970s, Prigogine and his collaborators elaborated non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the theorem of minimal entropy production, and the theory of dissipative systems. Prigogine challenged classical or equilibrium thermodynamics, according to which dissipation of energy causes disorder, with his proposal of non-lineal thermodynamics. The latter says that in conditions of non-equilibrium, dissipation could be a source of order and of generation of structures. We will return to this crucial matter later, but in any case, understanding social systems under Prigogine’s view replaces the “mechanistic view of a perfectly ordered reality” with “the uncertainty of a world on the make; a visibly imperfect world, whose order emerges as a sort of subproduct of the dissipation created by itself (Tyrtania 2009, 18)”. A third crucial consequence derives from considering entropy in human societies. Assuming that the biosphere as a system is closed to material exchange but open to energy exchange leads to considering that the planet provides human societies with

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a closed, but not isolated environment, and therefore, the local reduction of entropy results in the rise of entropy elsewhere (Slesser 1978, 17). The generation of negative entropy (Schrödinger 1984) or negentropy (Brillouin 1953) irreversibly increases the system’s entropy. This asymmetry has social consequences relating to poverty and social inequity that are crucial to our proposal. We will discuss this further on. Finally, the thermodynamic approach to human societies also explains its levels of complexity. In fact, Prigogine (1979, 201) said that thermodynamics is the science of complex systems or of complex behavior (Prigogine 1987). Complexity results from the system avoidance of thermal equilibrium—i.e., death, in the case of living organisms—and it can be understood as a characteristic feature of energy-dissipating systems, in other words, that generates order and chaos at the same time; dissipative systems occur between order and chaos. The further away a system is from the state of thermal equilibrium, the higher its complexity (Adams 1988). However, the implications of thermodynamic laws go beyond fuel combustion and use of materials to generate negentropy. It is also possible to conceive thermodynamics in a useful way to study the functioning of human societies by adopting a broad conception of energy. As held by Adams (1988), all efforts are ultimately made to stay away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Thermodynamic laws are involved in every social process, including the cultural process, which, in this sense, can be considered as natural and therefore irreversible processes. In 1871, L. Boltzmann formulated the second law in statistical terms, widening the realms of thermodynamics from thermal machines to all complex systems. Boltzmann (1896/1964) associated the dissipation of energy with probability, thus giving a statistical interpretation of the entropy principle. According to the second law, changes in systems imply going from a more to a less ordered state. For Clausius (1879), a physical system’s entropy is the amount of energy it dissipates. The entropic change of reversible processes is zero, but in irreversible processes, entropy grows with dissipation of heat and reaches its maximum value when the potential for work has been totally consumed. Physical systems reach their equilibrium at their maximum level of entropy—reaching total disorganization (Swanson et al. 1997, 46). If entropy is proportional to the system’s disorganization, negentropy is proportional to its order and organization. Boltzman’s proposal of a statistical conception of entropy opened the door to the concept of information—which would be developed further—and to the application of thermodynamics beyond its thermal dimension, i.e., to the analysis of phenomena as complex as social phenomena. An analogy derived from Boltzmann’s identification of entropy as molecular (and atomic) disorder—which he made before atoms were commonly accepted by most twentieth-century scientists—is the measurement of entropy in terms of homogeneity (Wagensberg 1985): the degree of a system’s order is related to the number of its possible states (homogeneity). In social terms, order and disorder have no moral implications of justice value associations. Contrary to the interpretation of order and disorder of classical Sociology, the concept must be interpreted in thermodynamic terms and not as expressions of sociopolitical order against anarchical chaos. But when the material behavior of human beings is studied, there is a connection between order and disorder and between social stability and instability, which we will return

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to later. We will see how, based on this assumption, the unity of society and nature, the social and the biophysical environment, and all realms are ruled by the same natural laws. Let us now return to one of the basic features of society as a complex adaptive system: autopoiesis. Working systems generate entropy and thus become disorganized, so in order to maintain systems, they need to regenerate and reorganize continuously, generating order. As Erwin Schrödinger already stated in the aforementioned book (1984), biological systems conserve or increase their complexity extracting energy, materials, and information from nature and exporting entropy. Thus, organization resulting from autopoiesis is possible by an uninterrupted flow of energy, materials, and information operating through exchanges with the environment. Clearly, this is the physical basis of Social Metabolism theory. As stated by Morin (1977, 156–157), organizational order over disorder is built and conquered.

4.5 The Evolutionary Originality of Human Societies As mentioned earlier, complex adaptive systems are dynamic and non-lineal systems evolving through autopoietic processes of adaptation. According to Lotka (1925, 24), evolution is no more than the history of a system experimenting irreversible changes occurring in a world whose entropy is constantly on the rise and is also irreversible. From any perspective, evolution can only occur in a world in which entropy increases. Therefore, the principle of entropy has become one of the main explanatory factors of evolution. As stated by Nicolis and Prigogine (1977, 442), evolution is driven by the impulse of energy dissipation. Taking thermodynamics into account, evolution implies complex systems in a constant struggle against disorder—i.e., entropy—by means of the organized dissipation of energy, a process that generates qualitative changes driven by the second law and embodied in biophysical and socioeconomic processes (Georgescu-Roegen 1975). Natural selection assumed as the main evolutionary mechanism could be understood as a thermodynamic selection process that favors systems that reduce their entropy and maximize their flow of consumed energy. In other words, an evolving system is not an energy-consuming system, but one that consumes energy in such a way that it increases its capacity for survival (Tyrtania 2009, 142). In consequence, evolution is driven by natural selection, a process that can be expressed in terms of thermodynamics. Both Lotka (1925) and Prigogine (1955) showed that evolution follows a shared pattern: maximizing energy flow and minimizing entropy. Therefore, the negentropy-entropy binomial can be considered the common denominator of the evolutionary process. Evolution follows a unique course in which physical, biological, and social evolutionary processes interact, each with its own specificity. As expressed by Lovelock et al. (1992, 99), organisms evolve closely interacting with the evolution of the environment, both being part of the same evolutionary process.

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Evolution is thus a process of formation of dissipative structures resulting in a higher complexity. Complexity is the product of evolution, the qualitative change brought about by combinatorial innovation, and the unidirectionality of the second law (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, 395). Biological evolution certainly displays stationary states, but there is no inherent element to complex systems that compels them to reach such states—i.e., evolution to higher levels of complexity results from evolutionary interaction with the environment and is not predetermined. It does not follow an unavoidable path. In that sense, evolution has a memory: it generates a sort of dependence path, which does not, however, imply linearity. Evolution behaves stochastically (Tyrtania 2008, 57) combining a random component with a selective process (Bateson 1993, 242). Human societies share the same evolutionary precepts as physical and biological systems, but represent an innovation that differentiates their dynamics making them specific, adding complexity and connectivity to the total evolutionary process. Social systems cannot be explained by a simple application of the laws of physics, even though human acts are subject to them. The reason for this is that despite evolution being a unified process, human society is an evolutionary innovation that emerged from the human species’ reflective (selfreferring) capacity that is more developed than in any other species. The most direct consequence of this human mental feature is the capacity to build tools—an ability also found in other higher animals, though rare—and therefore, to employ energy outside the organism, i.e., to use exosomatic energy. To build and operate tools, it was necessary to emit as well as to transmit information, i.e., generation of culture was required. Culture involves a symbolic dimension containing, in addition to knowledge, beliefs, rules and regulations, technologies, etc. Accordingly, evolutionary innovation is humans’ ability to use information, energy, and materials exosomatically, moreover bringing about a new type of complex systems: reflexive complex systems (Martínez-Alier et al. 1998, 282) or self-reflexive systems and self-aware systems (Kay et al. 1999; Ramos-Martin 2003). As we will see further on, this will be an instrumental feature. Indeed, it gives social systems a unique neopoietic capacity that is absent from other systems or species. It confers an essential, creative dimension to human individuals and to an even greater extent, to their collective actions. In fact, the human species was able to construct its own cognitive orthoses (language, technology, knowledge) making it capable of gathering, processing, and generating large amounts of information from nature and the social system, thus enabling humans to reach very high levels of complexity and autonomy from the natural environment. Culture is largely the product of the use of complex tools operating not solely as exosomatic heat extractors, but also as generators of information. As one can logically infer, the appearance of language—about 600,000 years ago—was key in the evolution of human societies, an event that occurred in synergy with biological transformation, such as the increase in brain volume and cooperative behavior, turning humans into a eusocial species (Wilson 2012). In analogy to living organisms, culture is the transmission of information by nongenetic means, a metaphor that became popular in the academic world. Cultural evolution has been described as an extension of biological information by other

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means (Sahlins and Service 1960; Margalef 1980) and the diffusion of genes has paralleled the diffusion of culture. Throughout the expansion of humans to all habitats available on the planet, the human species became differentiated into linguistic groups or cultural species. About 50,000 years ago, the world contained a diverse cultural universe of 12,000 cultures distinguished by language. A correspondence exists between the linguistic and genetic classification trees of the human species (Cavalli-Sforza 1996), and based on these data, it is possible to establish a detailed route and dates of human displacements over thousands of years. The ideas, knowledge, beliefs, laws, and regulations, etc., contained in a culture would be the genetic instructions ordering the use of exosomatic energy. Sieferle holds that: “In order to understand this we have to comprehend the specific human strategy of ‘cultural evolution’ as an emergent phenomenon that came into existence historically and whose origin must have been evolutionarily selected for as well as any other organs or traits. In the organic world, programmes leading to the synthesis of replicators are in principle fixed on DNA molecules… The emergence of culture or of cultural evolution proper as our species’ basic strategy can be reconstructed as the result of an evolutionary process… The disposition for certain behavior is thus partly inherited, and this genetic basis does not totally vanish even in humans but is transformed by cultural codes. The stage of cultural tradition is reached when information that was individually acquired and stored in a single nervous system can be transmitted over generations without being fixed in the genome (Sieferle 2011, 316)”. In sum, the uniqueness of social systems in the evolutionary principle lies in how it processes and transmits information not by means of biological inheritance, but by means of language and symbolic codes. Culture is thus the designer of metabolism fund elements and the combinations of energy and material flows that make them function and reproduce. But culture also produces and reproduces the information flows that order and give structure to energy and materials flows. This does not exclude the entropic costs—whether material, social, and regulatory—of the physical consequences of information transmission. Culture, in this sense, does not discriminate humans with respect to other species purely through symbolic and immaterial flows. The laws of thermodynamics also operate in the realm of information flows because all information requires material support. Culture can thus be understood as an innovative manifestation of the adaptive complexity of social systems. Culture is the name of a new complexity genus provided by the environment to perpetuate and reorganize a particular kind of dissipative system: social systems (Tyrtania 2008, 51). However, as we will see below, culture is more than a mere adaptive strategy of social systems. As also affirmed by Sieferle, “when cultural evolution started, it continued organic evolution, and its emergence must have been awarded as a successful adaptation since culturally controlled species experience the same selective pressure as species, whose behavior was completely controlled by genetic programmes. Culture is not, however, merely an instrument of adaptation. Culture developed specific system properties that soon gave it characteristics that are not exclusively adaptive (Sieferle 2011, 317)”. Culture is but an emergent property of human societies; it is society’s way of making its living (Anila and Salthe 2010, 1328). Its performative or neopoietic

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character, its creative nature (Maturana and Varela 1980; Rosen 1985, 2000; Pattee 1995; Giampietro et al. 2006), allows configuring new and more complex dissipative structures at even larger scales by means of technology (Adams 1988). Biological systems have a limited capacity for processing energy—mainly endosomatically— due to their genetic load. But human societies, thanks to their mobility, technological capabilities, and their power to expand the energy boundaries of their exosomatic metabolism, exhibit a less constrained dissipative capacity that is only limited by the environment. Societies adapt to the environment by changing their structures and frontiers by means of association, integration, or conquest of other societies, something biological organisms cannot do. In other words, as opposed to biological systems with well-defined boundaries, human societies can organize and reorganize, thus acquiring the capability of avoiding or overcoming local environmental limitations. That explains why societies operating with industrial metabolism maintain exosomatic consumption levels that are above the means of their local environments without falling into a steady state. All these innovations confer a certain specificity to the human evolutionary process within the normal development of complex adaptive systems. Human societies build ever larger and complex dissipative structures with which to compensate for the growing entropy that is transferred to the environment. They are unable to evade the second law, but can control the rate of the entropic process and even the direction of evolution itself from the standpoint of social objectives (Adams 1988). Perhaps due to all this, social evolution can occur at a much faster rate than biological evolution because cultural mutations are not only random events (Marten 2001, 58) but also a consequence of reflective, intentional actions. What is specifically human is exosomatic energy consumption. Since no genetic load regulates such exosomatic consumption, this consumption takes place as codified by culture, involving a faster but less predictable evolutionary rate. This means that there is no progress, and what does exist is a self-written process occurring in the present. Evolution does not present any concrete direction. Human evolution is not progress, it does not respond to a specific purpose. Quoting Tyrtania: “If evolution has no aim, as once said Karl Popper, its advantage over other conceptions of the universe consists in that we can assign one to it. For that, the only thing we need is to have enough time, energy, materials, and information. The evolutionary processes are paradoxical. Marked by uncertainty and risk, they only obey to the law of entropic indetermination (Tyrtania 2008, 48)”. In this way, randomness must be accepted as a major component of the evolutionary process. Moreover, randomness forbids environmental historians to suggest any preconceived plan or an evolutionary path towards progress.

4.6 Evolution, Complexity, and Sustainability Alfred Lotka strengthened the link between biological evolution and the laws of thermodynamics (Lotka 1922) by stating that natural selection led to an increase in both energy efficiency and total energy efficiency. Odum and Pinkerton later established the principle of maximum power as the basis of systems ecology, stating that the

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principle was universally applicable. According to this latter principle, “during selforganization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency” (Odum and Pinkerton 1955). The species that survive in ecosystems are those that channel free energy into their own production and reproduction, increasing total dissipation in the ecosystem (Schneider and Kay 1994, 46). Consequently, the more complex and orderly a system is, the greater the global disorder or entropy it achieves in the hierarchically superior system in which it is integrated (Skene 2015; Mavrofides et al. 2011). Authors such as Fenchel (1974), Swenson (1989), or Ulanowicz (1997) would continue in this line until concluding that natural selection is contained in the law of entropy (Annila and Salthe 2010) and that evolution follows the trend towards the production of maximum entropy (Skene 2015, 5540). This has implications regarding complexity: “As biosystems grow and develop, they should increase their total dissipation, and develop more complex structures with more energy flow, increase their cycling activity, develop greater diversity and generate more hierarchical levels” (Toussaint and Schneider 1998). As Skene (2015, 5532) argues: “Entropy production would be expected to increase with increasing metabolism, population size, organismal complexity, trophodynamic complexity and ecological succession (…). The overall direction of evolution encompasses these changes. The driving force is the second law of thermodynamics and the fundamental outcome is maximum entropy production”. The ability to influence their own evolution or control their future is part of the evolutionary novelty of human societies. Human beings can build exosomatic dissipative structures by means of artifacts or tools, i.e., through knowledge and technology, and can do it faster and with greater mobility than any other species. Paradoxically, this means that social systems are an exception, an evolutionary exception within nature. Social systems undoubtedly constitute dissipative structures capable of perpetuating and reproducing through the exchange of energy, materials, and information with their environment. That means they evolve, contracting or expanding from an energy perspective, varying their structure and organization. As is known, a complex system presents several levels of integration resulting from the battle against entropy: the system seeks energy from environments that are ever further away, being forced to integrate other dissipative structures, and to adopt ever more complex self-regulation and control systems that, in turn, consume more energy (Adams 1975; Ulanowicz et al. 2009). The entropic deficit stimulates interaction, which means that the amount of energy handled by a society corresponds to its structural complexity. As explained by Steward (1955), the evolution of the human species has shown that very same evolutionary pattern, through its succession of new types of organization that are increasingly complex. White (1964) even suggested measuring the advancement of civilization in terms of the increase in energy consumed per capita. The latter would be a measure of the intensity of energy dissipation and, hence, the distance of a society from its state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Applying this typical pattern of complex adaptive systems, however, could lead to a sort of evolutionary straitjacket that would be contrary to historical indeterminacy.

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For example, Tainter (1988) defines complexity as a differentiation of structures— i.e., more system components and more types of components—and as a variation in organization, understood as constraints on potential ranges of behavior. “In human societies, differentiation in structure occurs in such areas as institutions, roles, technologies, and activities. Organization consists of constraints on behavior arising from such things as social norms, peer expectations, and hierarchical direction (…). The development of complexity is thus a paradox of human history. Over the past 12,000 years, we have developed technologies, economies, and social institutions that cost more labor, time, money, energy, and annoyance, and that go against our aversion to such costs. Why, then, did human societies ever become more complex? (Tainter 2011, 89–90)”. But such an interpretation, which is possible ex post facto, suggests a process of constant increase of complexity and, consequently, of energy and materials consumption, as an unavoidable trajectory of human evolution. The indetermination ruling evolution from the thermodynamic perspective allows for non-predetermined social arrangements at different levels of entropy. Therefore, their duration is variable. Throughout history, there have been societies whose dissipative structures have remained in a steady state for millennia. In contrast, over the past two hundred and fifty years, the increase in complexity has accelerated, though not equally throughout the planet. The relative dematerialization currently experienced by the more industrialized countries—i.e., the countries with the highest levels of complexity—can be simply due to a matter of efficiency, generating the rebound effect described by Jevons. It does contradict, however, the apparently lineal relation between the increase in complexity and energy dissipation. In that sense, the most important factor may perhaps not be the tendency to increase in complexity, but its connection with the energy level increase. For Tainter, this connection can be viewed in two ways. The first view is progressivist: it holds that complexity increases because it can, i.e., because there is a surplus of energy that makes it possible. Thus, energy precedes complexity and allows for its emergence. Such an event has occurred when humans adapted energy sources that presented such a high potential that the adoption was followed by an increase in population, wealth, and the complexity of societies. Nevertheless, such events have been so rare that they have been assigned significant terms, such as Agricultural Revolution or Industrial Revolution (Tainter 2011, 90). According to the second view, defended by Tainter himself, the energy increase derives from the increase in complexity. If human beings rarely possess surpluses, the availability of extra energy can hardly be the main driver of cultural evolution. Indeed, complexity has costs. In non-human species, this cost is merely a question of additional calories. But for humans, the cost is estimated depending on the amount of resources, time or money, or on more subtle matters such as discomfort. Complexity is a tool that allows solving basic problems (problems of sustainability, i.e., issues that threaten the continuity of societies). When such problems are confronted, we often respond by developing more complex technologies, establishing

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new institutions, adding more specialists or bureaucratic levels to existing institutions, increasing organization and regulation, or gathering and processing more information. In addition, this increment in complexity functions as a spiral. Energy abundance generates more complexity and simultaneously creates new types of issues, such as wastes or climatic change. Solving these problems requires complexity for growth, imposing the need for ever more energy. Complexity thus emerges before there are any additional sources of energy available to maintain it. This lineal conception of complexity has consequences in terms of sustainability. Tainter holds that according to the most common interpretation of sustainability, industrial societies need to consume fewer resources. This leads sustainability discourse to focus excessively on the voluntary or forced reduction of resource consumption and an increased efficiency, perhaps implying a lessening of complexity. The most widespread conception of sustainability follows a progressivist view: resources are understood to precede and facilitate innovations, which increase complexity, and in this way, complexity is seen as a voluntary, social choice. But the fact that complexity and its costs grow as problems are solved suggests the opposite conclusion: as a general rule, a society cannot voluntarily reduce its long-term consumption of resources. On the contrary, when problems appear, their solution involves the increase of both complexity and resource consumption. The case of the Roman Empire is a typical example of growing complexity leading to civilization collapse. In consequence, for Tainter “complexity is not something that we can ordinarily choose to forego (Tainter 2011, 94)”. Tainter’s conclusions are dismaying and, to a certain extent, legitimize what we are witnessing. The first such conclusion is that the solutions commonly recommended for promoting sustainability—i.e., conservation, simplification, valuing of resources, and innovation—can only be applied in the short term. In the long term, such measures may even be adverse. The second conclusion is that long-term sustainability depends on solving the great social issues that will converge over the next decades: they will require more complexity and more energy consumption. Sustainability is not a stasis issue, but a process of continual adaptation in which new problems are confronted, the goal being to ensure the availability of resources allowing for their solution. “One implication of this discussion is that modern societies will continue to need high-quality energy, and securing this should be the first priority of every nation with a research capability (Tainter 2011, 94)”. Evidently, it is always possible to reduce complexity by generating the consequent decrease in energy use, as claimed by Marten (2001, 149), or vice versa, reducing the use of energy to reduce complexity. Nor does evolution necessarily imply material progress—as interpreted by social sciences until now—and nor is complexity a positive effect deriving from the former. High-entropy social systems, such as in the industrial metabolic regime, have generated more complexity, but at the same time, a higher level of unsustainability. Any social system aiming towards sustainability must reduce its complexity by reducing in parallel its energy and material consumption, or vice versa. This would be a way to avoid the complexity trap posed by Tainter. The fact of addressing unsustainability, which is linked to planetary boundaries and the availability of free energy (and also of materials), does not necessarily lead to

4.7 Material and Energy Flows, Entropy, and Dissipative Structures

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an increase in complexity which, in turn, produces an increase in energy dissipation. A number of ecological economists have suggested that complexity growth is achieved, even in this case, by increasing information dissipation and not free energy, thus contradicting Tainter’s second vision (Jackson 2009; and in the same line, Ulanowicz et al. 2009). The basis of this proposal can be found in the distinction made by Trambouze (2006, 116) between “random complexity”—which implies disorder and chaos and therefore increased entropy—and “organized complexity”— which allows increasing the social system’s order or structure through information flows. Humans have certainly survived and prospered throughout history; that is, they have been successful from an evolutionary viewpoint, at the cost of increasing social complexity and energy dissipation. That success has been possible because human beings have been able to make the most of free energy. The question, however, is whether they will be able to do so in the future: it is physically impossible to maintain an R pattern and to increase complexity indefinitely whether in exosomatic consumption or numbers. If survival is the objective, planetary limits require the adoption of a K pattern. This will force humans to reduce their population and complexity, even if solar energy capture becomes more efficient. Therefore, sustainability is realizable. It is a possible result of evolution. As stated by Leonardo Tyrtania, “sustainability is a possible outcome of the self-organization of an open system. It is a possible result, as others, because a system can either remain in a steady, fluctuating, oscillating, unstable, and even chaotic state. They can remain in any of these states for some time, before definitively being confounded with the environment (Tyrtania 2009, 130)”. Sustainable society will not be a perfect society but will necessarily be a low-entropy society and, assuredly, with lower complexity levels, remaining in a steady state with low-entropy dissipative structures—or with higher levels of information-intensive complexity and much less energy-intensive complexity.

4.7 Material and Energy Flows, Entropy, and Dissipative Structures Human societies give priority to two basic tasks: on the one hand, producing goods and services and distributing them among their individual members, and on the other, reproducing the conditions that make production possible in order to gain stability through time. In thermodynamic terms, this implies building dissipative structures and exchanging energy, materials, and information with the environment so that these structures can function and be sustained over time. A large number of social relations are oriented towards the organization and maintenance of such exchanges of energy, materials, and information. In fact, interactions between the system components are no more than the exchange of energy, materials, and information. The application of the flow term to exchanges of energy, materials, and information makes the dynamic, unidirectional, and irreversible nature of energy, material, and information transfers

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explicit from one point to another within the system, or between the system and its environment (Adams 1975). From an economic point of view, the function of such flows is to configure and feed the fund elements and stocks built up by societies to generate goods and services. This different understanding of the main objective of economic activity implies that from a biophysical perspective, we need to shift our attention away from energy and materials flows and center instead on fund elements and stocks. In other words, our focus must switch from the production and consumption of goods and services to sustainability. This approach allows us to understand sustainability as the indefinite maintenance of both production and consumption. In that sense, the distinction introduced by Georgescu-Roegen (1971) between flow and fund elements is essential (or stocks if we adopt the Vienna School’s approach). The configuration and maintenance of such funds and stocks require a continuous flow of energy, materials, and information to counterbalance the principle of entropy by generation of order. Fund elements are dissipative structures that use inputs (flows of material, energy, and information) to transform them into goods, services, and waste (Scheidel and Sorman 2012). They process energy, materials, and information at a rate determined by their own structure and function. To do so, they need to be periodically renewed or reproduced. This means that part of the inputs must be used in the construction, maintenance, and reproduction of the fund elements, thus limiting of course their own processing rhythm (Giampietro et al. 2008a and b). Prigogine (1955, 1961, 1962) independently developed a similar conception from a thermodynamic point of view, distinguishing between equilibrium structures and dissipative structures. All complex adaptive systems are kept away from thermodynamic equilibrium by means of a controlled dissipation that is consistent in transferring part of their entropy to the environment. An open system’s structures are maintained thanks to the system’s transfer of a part of the dissipated energy through its conversion processes; hence the term dissipative systems (Glandsdorff and Prigogine 1971, 288). The transfer is possible through the building of dissipative structures using the energy, material, and information flows for performing work and dissipating heat, consequently increasing their inner organization. Order emerges from temporal patterns (systems) within a universe that, as a whole, moves slowly towards thermodynamic dissipation (Swanson et al. 1997, 47). Prigogine described this configuration of dissipative structures as a process of system self-organization. But the equilibrium structures lack their own reproductive dynamic (Adams 2001); that is, they cannot dissipate energy so they cannot perform work either. Crystals are commonly used as physical examples of these types of structures. In the social realm, an example would be ceremonial buildings (e.g., cathedrals) or jewels that do not require consuming energy and materials for their maintenance and functioning. These are the sumptuary goods whose symbolic function is to mark social differences, for which they do not need to consume energy and materials (Bataille 1989). The use of sumptuary goods is typical of societies with low metabolic entropy.

4.8 Information Flows

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Accordingly, from the biophysical perspective, human societies can be considered as dissipative structures, or more precisely, as made up of dissipative structures exchanging energy, materials, and information with their environment. It is this exchange that lies at the heart of the metabolic relationship and of the theoretical proposal of Social Metabolism. Adams (1975)—who calls dissipative energies (combining energy and information) “energetic forms”—considers human societies as a conglomerate of human and non-human forms, of forms in equilibrium and out of equilibrium, of living forms, which we can understand as constituting a society’s equipment, its material or symbolic fund. Prigogine also made a relevant distinction between internal entropy and external entropy, which also underlies our metabolism proposal. He distinguished between the entropy produced inside the system and that imported from the environment into the system. Prigogine’s equation of open systems is: ΔS = Δe S + Δi S, where ΔS is the total change in system entropy, Δe S is the production of external entropy imported by the system, and Δi S is the internal entropy generated by the system’s irreversible processes. While Δi S remains constant or increases, Δe S can be negative if enough energy, materials, and information are imported inside the system. When that happens, the total change in entropy (ΔS) can be negative, so the system’s order and organization can be increased (Swanson et al. 1997, 48). We will insist on this point later on. For analytical purposes, we will distinguish between two types of exchanges: a purely physical exchange of energy and materials and a second type of exchange, the exchange of information which, at first glance, is more ideal or immaterial.

4.8 Information Flows The entropy concept used in information theory is analogous to the concept arising from the laws of thermodynamics. Yet these two concepts are not in fact similar, and this often creates confusion. The physical consideration of information differs from the widespread interpretation of the term information, understood as an already ordered message with a precise meaning. Shannon and Weaver (1949) were interested in building machines that transmitted information regardless of its meaning and warned that information and meaning were two different concepts. “What travels through the wires or electromagnetic waves is not that meaning. It is simpler. It is just information (Hidalgo 2015, 14)”. The information has no meaning per se, the meaning emerges during its processing. The meaning appears when a message reaches a living being or a machine with the capacity to process information, including human beings. Therefore, the meaning of a message is not part of the message, it is constructed through the processing of the information (Hidalgo 2015, 16). As a result of evolution, human beings have a strong capacity to also process information in an exosomatic way, which is visible both in material culture (technology) and in symbolic culture. Culture, as an evolutionary innovation, is a mixture

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of information flows. “The processing of information by means of symbols is the novel characteristic of the sets evolved as social sets (…) Due to their capacity for symbolization and use of language, humans create systems without precedent in nature. This does not mean that social systems cease to be natural. All systems exchanging energy, materials, and information with their environment are natural. Culture only intensifies such exchanges (Tyrtania 2008, 47–48)”. As Gintis (2009, 233) has remarked, culture can also be considered as an epigenetic mechanism of horizontal, intra-generational transmission of information among humans: i.e., of the system’s memory along the evolutionary process. In short, it is culture that designs and organizes the dissipative structures of social systems. Culture is, therefore, an expression of the human capacity to process large volumes of information. In this sense, the order expressed by an object, a certain technological tool, or an administrative procedure can be understood, in turn, as the result of the combination of matter and energy flows with information flows. Information does not confer order by itself. Order is created by the processed information that gives it its meaning. Consequently, what is of interest to us in this chapter is the fact that dissipative structures constructed by society are made of flows of processed or “informed information” (Mavrofides et al. 2011, 360) which can be considered in turn to be incorporated information, both in its form and in its functionality. From a thermodynamic viewpoint, the identification between entropy and disorder—and, conversely, between negentropy and order—has been questioned (see Sect. 4.3). Yet we can affirm that the physical or material order of the dissipative structures built by human beings requires flows of processed information (Trambouze 2006, 117). It is in this sense that we consider, in this book, that information can generate physical order. The entropy of information itself is a separate concept. Shannon (1948) defined it as the number of bits needed to communicate the microstate of a system or the multiplicity of a state (the number of states that are equivalent). We will come back to this in the next chapter. From a physical perspective, processed information is the opposite of entropy as it involves order (embodied information). All physical and biological objects contain information on how they are structured or organized. Social systems also generate information flows, but differently from the latter. The flows are exosomatic and are generated through communicative processes involving the material or immaterial translocation of signs, symbols, and values from one part of the system to the other. In this sense, information is also a physical phenomenon. Although the word information is usually associated with an immaterial state, it also designates a physical phenomenon: it has its own “physicality”. “Information is not tangible; it is not a solid or a fluid. It does not have its own particle either, but it is as physical as movement and temperature, which also do not have particles of their own. Information is incorporeal, but it is always physically embodied [emphasis added]. Information is not a thing; rather, it is the arrangement of physical things” (Hidalgo 2015, 13). In any event, whether information is considered a physical or immaterial phenomenon, generating, transmitting, and storing information has physical costs; that is, information requires flows of energy and materials.

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Therefore, social organization (order) is an autopoietic product that is definitely influenced by information flows. There is no structure without information, as has been demonstrated in the biological world (Margalef 1995). In the social world, systems are also subjected to the laws of thermodynamics, given that they occupy time, space, and energetic resources. From this perspective, we can apply Boltzmann’s statistical interpretation of thermodynamics to explain flows as a unidirectional and irreversible process going from its state of order—its more obvious manifestation—to a state of disorder, whose organizative properties have disappeared. Therefore, the main function of these flows is negentropic: “Information, in this technical sense, is the patterning, order, organization, or non-randomness of a system. Shannon showed that information (H) is the negative of entropy (S). Consequently, a precise relationship between measures of entropy and information has been identified… Information, however, is more than the physical negentropy in concrete (physical) systems. The field of cybernetics has identified a subjective doubling of the connection between negentropy and information. It permits reciprocal transitions between the two terms (negentropy → ← information) (Beauregard 1961). The meaning of information is different for each transition. The direct transition negentropy → ← information signifies the acquisition of knowledge and the reciprocal transition negentropy ← information indicates power of organization (Swanson et al. 1997, 47)”. Therefore, information flows are here considered capable of reordering and reorganizing the different components of the physical, biological, and social systems in which they function. That is, they have characteristics that produce action (change). In that sense, the authors distinguish between the information having meaning in a system and that reflecting mere observations about a system. Information flows are the basic vital ingredients of the organization processes of social systems. Information is here defined in a pragmatic or operative way as a codified message (processed information), which helps to make decisions to regulate entropy levels. A paradigmatic case of processed information flow is money. As suggested by Swanson et al. (1997), money is a commodity, but it is also information: if money is assumed to be a measure of entropy value, its value can be considered as proportional to its capacity to lower a system’s entropy levels. Money is thus both a good and an information marker (exchange marker) at the same time. As a use value (good to be consumed), it becomes an entropic factor that can increase the level of internal entropy. Conversely, as an exchange value (information), it can be a dissipative factor increasing the efficiency of materials and energy use. During the process of money commodification, the transforming function lies in the information flow autonomy from the regulatory center (the state) to multiple non-state centers (social). Therefore, the information flow originally aimed at the political reduction of social entropy becomes an incremental factor of social entropy because it loses informational properties and acquires flow functions. Money as a commodity increases flows and decreases organization and order (Swanson et al. 1997). It would be too long here to develop a theory of information flows and their role in complex adaptive systems. We direct interested readers to Luhmann (1998, 1984) who largely developed this theory. Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic social systems

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is instrumental to build a theory of information flows and their role as organizers of the dissipative structures that all societies build to compensate for entropy (disorder). Ultimately, not only are biophysical flows exchanged in every metabolic relationship, but also information flows. They are usually excluded from metabolic methodologies, perhaps due to their complexity and measurement difficulties. However, these flows have the capacity to order and organize components of physical, biological, and social systems. They are therefore essential to understand not only the specific configuration of metabolic regimes, but also their dynamics. For example, agricultural work should be considered as a workflow containing decisive information that organizes agroecosystem structure and functioning through its management.

4.9 Physical Entropy: The Thermodynamic Foundation of Social Metabolism According to complexity theories, humans’ way of approaching reality consists of building models of reality and verifying their pertinence (Arnold-Cathalifaud 2010; Dockendorff 2012). In the following paragraphs, we will attempt to perfect a model of social metabolism that is isomorphic with the physical reality to which we belong, i.e., the material reality of social systems. The model consists of interacting, dissipative structures—or energetic forms—that exchange energy, materials, and information with their environment. Naturally, the model only partially explains the complex social reality. It is a provisional model whose only ambition is to help to build a more sustainable world regarding the several dimensions contained in the term. Social metabolism has been defined as the organized exchange of energy, materials, and information between society and the environment (see Chap. 3) with the purpose of producing and reproducing its material means of existence. Since natural processes are irreversible and energy cannot be reused, human societies, as open systems, must compensate for the entropy they produce through exchanges with the environment. In terms of the second law of thermodynamics, we can say that social metabolism pertains to the flow of energy, materials, and information exchanged by a human society with its environment to form, maintain, and reconstruct the dissipative structures allowing to keep it as far away as possible from the state of equilibrium. In other words, all societies generate order by importing free energy and materials from the physical environment, and exporting dissipated heat and wastes to the environment. We call the organization of this stable exchange of energy, materials, and information social metabolism. From that perspective, the theoretical key is the consideration of human societies according to their evolutionary innovations, their built structures—in the sense of Prigogine—that dissipate heat (entropy) to the environment, obtaining free energy from it. These structures are not only biological (endosomatic) but also technological (exosomatic), thanks to the species’ capacity to build tools as well as mechanical,

4.10 Internal Entropy and External Entropy

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electronic, and digital artifacts. The distinction between endosomatic and exosomatic metabolisms was introduced by Lotka (1956) and adopted by GeorgescuRoegen (1971) in his biophysical interpretation of the economy. As we have seen, while endosomatic metabolism is genetically determined, exosomatic metabolism is culturally determined and, therefore, subject to purely social constraints in addition to environmental ones. Hence, a society’s metabolism will be the sum of the endosomatic and exosomatic metabolisms built by society itself through time and that makes its members’ individual metabolisms possible.

4.10 Internal Entropy and External Entropy The exchanges of energy, materials, and information are naturally asymmetrical and are always unidirectional; some structures gain order (organization) and others lose it, the total amount of entropy always increasing. Open systems can become ordered by means of ensuring a continued flow of energy from their environment, to which the resulting entropy is transferred. Such behavior theorized by Prigogine (1947, 1955, 1962) allows the construction of a theoretical model of social metabolism that can go beyond its mere use as a method for measuring sustainability. Indeed, Prigogine’s proposal can be translated into an equation explaining the material functioning and physical dynamics of human societies. For Prigogine, the total change of a system’s entropy is equal to the sum of the external entropy produced that is imported into the society and the internal entropy due to the irreversibility of the processes occurring inside it. ΔSt = Sin + Sout

(4.1)

where ΔS t is the increase in total entropy S in is the internal entropy and S out is the external entropy. In other words, order is generated within a society at the expense of increasing total entropy through the consumption of energy, materials, and information through its dissipative structures (fund elements and stocks). This level of order will remain constant or will increase if sufficient quantities of energy, materials, and information are added, creating new dissipative structures. This will in turn increase total entropy and, paradoxically, will reduce order or make it even more costly. Complex adaptive systems have resolved this dilemma by capturing the required flows of energy and materials from their surroundings to maintain and increase their level of negentropy, transferring the entropy generated to their surroundings. That is, the system’s total entropy tends to increase, reducing internal entropy at the same time if external entropy increases. To put it in another way:

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∇ Sin = ΔSout

(4.2)

Physical structures consume resources—both for their construction and for their functioning. They have been built to provide health care, education, security, food, clothing, housing, transportation, etc. The magnitude of dissipative structures determines the amount of energy and materials consumed by a society, that is, its metabolic profile. Each and every structure needs inputs of a determined amount of energy, materials, and information and evacuation to the environment of the generated wastes. The variations between different countries’ installed dissipative structures explain their differences in terms of resource consumption (Ramos-Martín 2012, 73), and therefore, the variations in metabolism size. These differences in order generation capabilities could also indicate differences in economic and social wellbeing. Consequently, a society’s level of entropy is always a function of the relationship between internal and external entropy and, therefore, it is a function of the natural asymmetrical relationship established between a society and its environment, or between one society and another. This asymmetric relationship can even be transferred, as we will see below, to the relationship between different groups or social classes. But human societies do not always find the amounts of energy, materials, and information they need to increase their internal order (domestic extraction) in their environment, so they tend to resort to imports from other societies. The greater a society’s flow of energy and materials extracted from its own territory or imported from others (or both together), the more complex the order created by that society. If we translate this into the accounting language of the MEFA Metabolism methodology, for example (see Schandl et al. 2002), we can approximate a society’s total entropy by using the total amount of energy it dissipates during a given year as a proxy. Accounting per capita energy consumption facilitates comparisons between societies and allows obtaining their metabolic profile. Hence, the level of entropy will be equal to annual domestic energy consumption (DEC yr−1), and the metabolic profile will be equal to annual domestic energy consumption per capita per year (DEC population number−1 yr−1). Accordingly, Prigogine’s equation as formulated in Eq. 4.1 would take the form: DEC = DEI − Ex,

(4.3)

becoming DEI = DE + Im then DEC = DE + Im − Ex where DEC = domestic energy consumption; DEI = direct energy input; Ex = exports; Im = imports; DE = domestic extraction.

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Equation 4.2 focuses on internal and external entropies in human societies seen as thermodynamically open systems exchanging energy, materials, and information on Earth, a planet that can be considered closed, even though it exchanges energy from the sun and its own surroundings. Consequently, a society’s level of entropy is always a function of the internal and external entropies. Therefore, an essentially asymmetric function is established between societies and their environment or between societies, as we shall see in the next chapter. The above excludes any assumptions about proportionality between the levels of external and internal entropy changes; that is, it’s not because one increases that the other necessarily has to rise as well. This is clarified by the distinction between high- and low-entropy societies but does not mean that this relationship is proportional or that an increase in one will always give rise to an increase in the other. To understand this, it is useful to distinguish “high entropy” and “low entropy” dissipative structures. A society that requires low amounts of energy and materials to maintain its fund elements reduces its internal entropy, generating, in turn, low entropy in its environment; in other words, low levels of domestic extractions and/or imports. In this case, the society would produce low total entropy. In contrast, a different society may need large amounts of energy and materials from its environment and, if these are insufficient, it might need to import energy and materials on a large scale in order to reduce its internal entropy. In this case, such a society would generate a much higher level of total entropy. This asymmetrical relationship between society and the environment also translates into differentials of complexity between the environment and system, where the system is always much less complex than the environment. This forms the basis of the “biomimicry” strategy (Benyus 1997; Commoner 2014; Blok and Gremmen 2016) developed intentionally by humans and other high-order species to extract information from the environment, and unintentionally by other living organisms.

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Luhmann N (1984) Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeine theorie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt Luhmann N (1998) Complejidad y modernidad. De la unidad a la diferencia. Editorial Trotta, España Margalef R (1980) La biosfera. Entre la termodinámica y el juego. Kairós, Barcelona Margalef R (1995) La ecología, entre la vida real y la física teórica: investigación y ciencia junio. Academic Press, Barcelona, pp 66–73 Marten GG (2001) Human ecology: basic concepts for sustainable development. Earthscan Publications, London Martínez-Alier J, Munda G, O’Neill J (1998) Weak comparability of values as a foundation for ecological economics. Ecol Econ 26:277–286 Maturana HR, Varela FJ (1980) Autopoiesis and cognition. The realization of the living. Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, Boston Mavrofides T, Kameas A, Papageorgiou D, Los A (2011) On the entropy of social systems: a revision of the concepts of entropy and energy in the social context. Syst Res Behav Sci 28:353–368 Morin E (1977) El método, I: La naturaleza de la naturaleza. Cátedra, Madrid Nicolis G, Prigogine I (1977) Self-organization in nonequilibrium systems. Wiley, New York Odum HT, Pinkerton RC (1955) Time’s speed regulator: the optimum efficiency for maximum power output in physical and biological systems. Am Sci 43:321–343 Pattee HH (1995) Evolving self-reference: matter, symbols, and semantic closure. Commun Cogn Artif Intell 12:9–28 Prigogine I (1947) Etude Thermodynamique des Phenomenes Irreversibles. Liège, Paris Prigogine I (1955) Thermodynamics of irreversible processes and fluctuations. Temperature 2:215– 232 Prigogine I (1961) Introduction to thermodynamics of irreversible processes (2.ª edición). Interscience, Nueva York Prigogine I (1962) Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Interscience, New York Prigogine Y, Stengers I (1979) La nueva alianza: metamorfosis de la ciencia. Alianza Editorial, Madrid Prigogine I (1983) ¿Tan sólo una ilusión? Una exploración del caos al orden. Tusquets, Barcelona Prigogine I (1987) Exploring complexity. Eur J Oper Res 30:97–103 Ramos-Martin J (2003) Empiricism in ecological economics: a perspective from complex systems theory. Ecol Econ 46:387–398 Ramos-Martin J (2012) Economía Biofísica. Investigación y Ciencia 68–75 Rosen R (1985) Anticipatory systems: philosophical, mathematical and methodological foundations. Pergamon Press, New York Rosen R (2000) Essays on life itself (Complexity in ecological systems). Columbia University Press Ruiz Ballesteros E (2013) Socioecosistemas y resiliencia socio-ecológica. Una aproximación Compleja al medio ambiente. In: Ruiz Ballesteros E, Solana Ruiz JL (eds) Complejidad y Ciencias Sociales. UNIA, Sevilla, pp 295–331 Sahlins M, Service ER (1960) Evolution and culture. University of Michigan, Michigan Schandl H, Grünbühel CM, Haberl H, Weisz H (2002) Handbook of physical accounting. Measuring bio-physical dimensions of socio-economic activities MFA—EFA—HANPP. Social Ecology Working Paper 73, Vienna Scheidel A, Sorman A (2012) Energy transitions and the global land rush: ultimate drivers and persistent consequences. Glob Environ Change 22(3):588–595 Schneider ED, Kay JJ (1994) Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. Math Comput Model 19(6–8):25–48 Schrödinger E (1984) ¿Qué es la vida? Tusquets, Barcelona Sieferle RP (2011) Cultural evolution and social metabolism. Human Geogr 93(4):315–324 Shannon CE (1948) A mathematical theory of communication. Bell Syst Tech J 27:379–423, 623– 656 Shannon C, Weaver W (1949) The mathematical theory of communication. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, p 8 (1963)

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Skene KR (2015) Life’s a gas: a thermodynamic theory of biological evolution. Entropy 17:5522– 5548. https://doi.org/10.3390/e17085522 Slesser M (1978) Energy in the economy. Macmillan, London Steward JH (1955) Theory of culture change: the methodology of multilinear evolution. Illinois University Press, Urbana Swanson GA, Bailey KD, Miller JG (1997) Entropy, social entropy and money: a living systems theory perspective. Syst Res Behav Sci 14(1):45–65 Swenson R (1989) Emergent attractors and the law of maximum entropy production: foundations to a theory of general evolution. Syst Res 6:187–197 Tainter JA (1988) The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Tainter JA (2011) Energy, complexity, and sustainability: a historical perspective. Environ Innovation Societal Trans 1:89–95 Toussaint O, Schneider ED (1998) The thermodynamics and evolution of complexity in biological systems. Comp Biochem Physiol 120:3–9 Trambouze PJ (2006) Structuring information and entropy: catalyst as information carrier. Entropy 8(3):113–130 Trinn C (2018) Criticality, entropy and conflict. Syst Res Behav Sci 35:746–758 Tyrtania L (2008) La indeterminación entrópica Notas sobre disipación de energía, evolución y complejidad. Desacatos 28:41–68 Tyrtania L (2009) Evolución y sociedad. Termodinámica de la supervivencia para una sociedad a escala humana. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México Tyrtania L (2021) ¿Me da su hora, por favor? Es tiempo de ecopoiesis. en Benítez M, Rivera-Núñez T, García-Barrios L (comps) Agroecología y sistemas complejos. Planteamientos epistémicos, casos de estudio y enfoques metodológicos. CopIt-arXives y SOCLA–México, México CDMX, pp 1–26 Ulanowicz RE (1997) Ecology, the ascendent perspective. In: Ulanowicz RE (ed). Columbia University Press, New York Ulanowicz R, Goerner SJ, Lietaer B, Gomez R (2009) Quantifying sustainability: resilience, efficiency and the return of information theory. Ecol Complex 6(27–3):6 Wagensberg J (1985) Ideas sobre la complejidad del mundo. Tusquets, Barcelona White L (1964) La ciencia de la cultura. Paidós, Buenos Aire Wilson EO (2012) The social conquest of the earth. Liverigth Publishing Co., New York

Chapter 5

The Social and Political Basis of Social Metabolism

5.1 Introduction In this chapter, we set out the social and political foundations of Social Metabolism. We do so, however, from a biophysical perspective: that is, based on the relationships that every human society establishes within itself and with its physical environment for its survival. Within this framework, the notion of “entropy” remains useful indeed. As we saw in the previous chapter, the term is highly controversial in both the fields of natural sciences and social sciences. The question here is whether the use of entropy in the social domain is sufficiently supported by the laws of thermodynamics. Dinga et al. (2020, 3–4) distinguish at least three positions in this debate. According to the first, it is neither possible nor advisable to apply entropy to social phenomena, and the phenomena are not at all governed by this physical law. This stance somewhat rests on the exceptionalism that we criticized in the previous chapter. The second posture advances the opposite thesis: entropy, as an expression of the second law of thermodynamics, is applicable to social phenomena and contributes to explaining or understanding them. This latter position has been strongly criticized in the domain of Physics itself as well as in the natural and social sciences generally. According to the third and last standpoint, entropy can be applied to social phenomena, but social phenomena does not behave according to the second law of thermodynamics. Although the controversy is far from over and there is no consensus in sight, our view is that, indeed, no social thermodynamics could be applicable to the functioning of social relations—which constitute the raw material of societies. There is no “social energy” that dissipates and generates social order, nor is there an inevitable tendency towards thermodynamic equilibrium, which in the social sphere would be equal to chaos or the disappearance of human society itself. This third position seems the most reasonable. Indeed, an analogy can be drawn between physical entropy and social entropy since social relations exhibit similar behavior patterns. This is especially true when they are analyzed from a biophysical or material perspective. Thermodynamics themselves often draw analogies to explain

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_5

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concepts as complex as entropy. Notions such as freedom (of choice), disorder, information, complexity, etc. have very different meanings in the context of the second law. If analogies are commonly used in thermodynamics, why not apply them to the social domain. Using the analogy of entropy can also help to understand political phenomena, the functions of institutions, and even the connections between physical, social, and political phenomena. In this exercise of entropic theorization of social relations and of human practice, especially that of a socio-ecological nature, social inequality plays a major role. It is especially useful to understand the connection between the different types of entropy. We address these subjects in this chapter. First, we define social entropy, reviewing the different meanings that have been given to the concept and examining its close links with physical entropy. We then discuss the thermodynamic roots of social inequality and the role it plays in social entropy. The section that follows focuses on the different behavioral strategies that generate inequality. We delve into the concept of money as a generator of future negentropy. The last part of the chapter centers on the definition of political entropy, beginning with the role of institutions in regulating physical and social entropies and the potentially negentropic role of social protest.

5.2 Social Entropy There are two major understandings of social entropy. The first is based on the direct application of the laws of thermodynamics and its language to explain social phenomena—or to build a theory that follows the same rationale (Dinga et al. 2020). The second uses an analogy with the second law and attempts to explain social phenomena from a biophysical perspective. The first approach clearly belongs to the pioneering author in this field, Bailey (1985, 1990, 1997a, b, 2006a, b). The latter elaborated a Theory of Social Entropy that attempts to measure social entropy via an indicator of a society’s internal state: the level of disorder as a temporal variable. Bailey’s approach is based on Boltzmann’s statistical interpretation of entropy ([1896] 1964). Statistical entropy can refer to the degree of disorder present in the interactions between social actors and their level of communication (Swanson et al. 1997, 61). Although our starting point is also Boltzmann, we do not consider it necessary to transfer the second law of thermodynamics to human societies, nor, as mentioned earlier, to affirm the existence of dissipating social energies or inevitable tendencies towards thermodynamic equilibrium or social death. In fact, Prigogine’s interpretation of the second law allows us to advance that human societies combine free energy with information precisely to move away from thermodynamic equilibrium. To do so, they build dissipative structures that ultimately generate a greater or lesser degree of social order. Consequently, we do not believe that the second law needs to be translated into the social sphere. It is sufficient to establish an adequate analogy to analyze the biophysical functioning of human societies.

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As mentioned, the starting point of our analogy was Boltzmann’s interpretation of the second law, when he associated entropy with disorder and situated it at the other extreme of order. Indeed, entropy can be calibrated in two ways: by measuring the energy dissipated in a closed thermodynamic system, or by measuring disorder. “The first measure is associated with the conversion of heat energy to mechanical energy. The second is associated with the probabilities of the occurrence of a particular molecular arrangement in a gas” (Mavrofides et al. 2011, 354). Prigogine’s theory of irreversible processes, together with Shannon’s information theory, are also very useful to draw an analogy and interpret social entropy based on the order/disorder dichotomy. In this sense, we agree with Dinga et al. (2020) regarding the existence of an inverse relationship between social entropy and social order and that “social entropy is taken far away from its technical (inappropriate) features from Thermodynamics and is approached as a social artifact (like social order)” (Dinga et al. 2020, 2). We thus conceive social entropy as an isomorphic exercise with regard to the second law of thermodynamics that contributes to a biophysical understanding of social processes. That is, although social energy is not dissipated, order or organization can themselves be “dissipated”, generating disorder or social entropy. Just as physical entropy is a path of no return or a unidirectional movement from free to dissipated energy, so too “can” social order deteriorate and generate disorder that may result in social death—although this course is not inevitable or unidirectional. In his statistical interpretation of the second law, Boltzmann (1896) associated entropy with freedom or randomness and assimilated it with disorder. Conversely, order means the reduction of uncertainty and randomness. In this way, order is associated with negentropy (Brillouin 1953) or certainty (Mavrofides et al. 2011, 354; Trinn 2018, 750), and disorder with entropy. As stated previously, a number of thermodynamic physicists reject the relationship between entropy and disorder. Here, we use the term “disorder”, however, in the sense that Brissaud defined it, i.e., as “What doesn’t contribute to the global motion” (Brissaud 2005, 85), that is, what does not contribute to the collective (social) motion. This conception of social entropy must be complemented by an adequate understanding of the evolutionary behavior of the human species. As argued in the previous chapter, the struggle for life drives evolution and, as such, it is the main objective of human action from a biophysical viewpoint. Indeed, from a biophysical perspective, human beings’ main objective, like other species, is to survive and sustain themselves over time, which means fighting for the free energy available. This objective can be described as a reproductive goal, both from an individual viewpoint (the preservation of one’s own body and descendants) and from a social vantage point (maintenance of dissipative structures). In this struggle for reproductive or evolutionary success, human ethology oscillates between competitive and cooperative behavior and can be singled out. It derives from the fact that resources (free energy and materials) are always scarce since their availability is mediated by human work and knowledge (information). Achieving biological and social reproduction therefore implies competitive or cooperative behaviors, depending on the strategy used.

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When competitive behavior reigns, frictions between individuals or groups of individuals increase. Indeed, Morin (1977) said that under certain circumstances, interactions become interrelations—such as associations, unions, combinations, etc.— and generate forms of social organization. In contrast, egotistic, free-rider behaviors are the opposite of cooperation and tend to generate conflictive frictions. Individuals, social groups, and nation states can adopt competitive behavior. Continuing the analogy with thermodynamic laws, social relations can be understood as frictions (a term used in Tribology) between social actors, whether the latter are individuals or collectives (Santa Marín and Toro Betancur 2015). These frictions thus correspond to uncoordinated and uncooperative interactions that affect social organization. Impossible cooperation makes it unviable for societies to survive, or, to draw an analogy with thermal death, the impossibility of cooperation leads to social death.1 As shown by Robert Axerold, cooperative coordination is the most efficient and adaptive way of crowning social interaction (Axelrod 2004). Social disorder must not be identified with the total absence of cooperation, which makes it very difficult to organize social and ecological reproduction activities, i.e., to maintain the flow of social metabolism. It is not possible to maintain stable metabolic activity (that ensures the required distance from thermodynamic equilibrium) without a certain degree of social cooperation. Therefore, societies in thermodynamic equilibrium are societies in which coexistence is impossible. Social disorder would be the result of social friction motivated by divergent interests or competition for scarce resources, situations that generate social conflicts. Indeed, asymmetries in the allocation of goods and services (i.e., in the opportunities for subsistence and reproduction) are always a source of conflictive frictions, i.e., of social conflicts. “Social energy” that deteriorates and cannot be reinvested in social work can translate into protests, violent clashes, criminality, and, above all indicators, into exploitation and lack of cooperation. It is the permanent nature of social frictions or conflicts that distinguishes this conception from a radical structuralist and functionalist perspective. Our proposal differs considerably from Bailey’s approach (1990), in which social entropy results from the dysfunction caused by assigning macrosocial mutable factors (population, territory, information, life standard, technology, and organization) to microsocial immutable characteristics of individuals (skin pigmentation, sex, and age). While Bailey’s characterization of social entropy is a far stretch from functionalism, it shares its forbiddance of individuals’ and groups’ capacity to perform, i.e., it omits the capacity of individuals and social groups to change (neopoiesis). Said in another way, Bailey’s conception places human beings in a condition of alienation. In any case, a more congruent conception with socio-ecological reality must arise from the recognition that human actions, whether individual or collective, are capable of increasing the social system’s total entropy, or of decreasing it and producing order 1

If thermal equilibrium in the case of living organisms is equivalent to death, in the case of society, thermal equilibrium is equivalent to social death, that is, to the impossibility of reproduction. Consequently, if the increase in physical entropy leads to thermal equilibrium, the increase in social entropy is produced by human behavior that endangers society, i.e., the life of the collectivity.

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(Tyrtania 2021). Entropy and negentropy are possible results of human actions and practices. Since social reproduction tasks exceed individual capabilities, building dissipative structures is a collective (social) task. The task requires reducing uncertainty by encouraging cooperation to counter selfish behavior. This is achieved through cooperative social relations or collective action that are sufficiently continuous and stable. We call these stable relations institutions, and their mission is to coordinate individual interests and behaviors, making reproduction possible, that is, maintaining fund elements or dissipative structures. An anomic society, where all individuals compete against each other to maximize their chances of survival, is incapable of fulfilling its reproductive tasks. The institutions’ main mission is to reduce social entropy or, in Prigogine’s terms, to keep society as far away as possible from social death. We will come back to this later.

5.3 Social Order and Information Flows The function of social systems is thus to reduce the environment’s complexity. Social subsystems reduce the environment’s chaotic (entropic or random) complexity by increasing the system’s internal (non-chaotic or organized) complexity by transducing external complexity into information through signal selection and the emergence of external energy processing patterns (Trambouze 2006). Indeed, for Niklas Luhmann (1986, 1995), human beings (psychic systems) do not belong to social systems but to nature as biological entities, an animal species with special characteristics. Social systems are exclusively made up of communication and function by means of knowledge generation, i.e., symbols. Psychic systems do not communicate directly between themselves—because their nervous systems cannot interact directly—but through a social system, and in doing so, they reproduce that social system. All communicative acts are inherently social and vice versa: there cannot be any communication outside the social system. The components of the social system are precisely the communicative acts because systems are built based on communication. Communication starts: “… by an alteration of the acoustic state of the atmosphere (Echeverría 1998, 143)” (that is, language). Following Adams (1975), a broad concept of energy is applicable here, such as the capacity to perform work or its potential physical equivalent in energy, i.e., the capacity to modify things. In addition to the physical flows already considered (physical entropy), this faculty is possessed by information flows capable of creating dissipative structures that revert social entropy, a synonym of disorder (Boulding 1978). In that context, entropy can be defined as communication uncertainty and in reality, it is a measurement of the state of information. For its part, information, according to Shannon, is the measure of the statistical entropy reduction, i.e., of disorder (Mavrofides et al. 2011, 360). Therefore, processed information inside systems has the function of establishing coordination and cooperation subsystems that reduce frictions, hence also entropy. Coordination can be achieved by means of multilevel cooperation and collective

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action, or by means of centralized, coercive, and unequal regulation. Through the processing of information flows of an exosomatic or cultural nature, societies build social dissipative structures with the function of generating order and avoiding that the group enters a state of maximum entropy. Some social relations or interactions create organizational or institutional forms that become sources of conflicting frictions, and thus of potential disorder. Among other examples, we can mention the following: the unequal allotment of goods, services, and wastes; a decoupling between population size and resource availability; reproductive failures; and the patriarchal system of discrimination based on the sex-gender subsystem. The different forms of social inequity are the main source of conflictive friction and, therefore, of social entropy. In short, strictly speaking, no social entropy or a second principle of thermodynamics governs “social energies”. We consider “social entropy” as an analogy that highlights the key role of information flows in the fight against physical entropy. Information is used by human beings to build and operate the dissipative structures that keep society away from thermodynamic equilibrium. In that sense, from a physical perspective, certain types of social relationships constitute information flows that prevent individualistic or egoistic behavior from dissolving society. For example, social relations favoring cooperation are much more efficient than those favoring non-cooperation. In terms of tribology, cooperation decreases the wear caused by increased frictions (inherent to complexity) by means of designing such frictions (institutional relations) and their lubrication (motivation) through stimuli and penalizations. Friction results from a conflict, or better, friction is conflict: a relation of competition and confrontation between two individuals or groups. Frictions (conflicts) can be regulated cooperatively or be deregulated non-cooperatively. The underlying wear in non-cooperative deregulation is much more severe and the motivation much weaker than in cooperative regulation. An illustration is the difference between the ordered evacuation of a crowd from inside a stadium guided by rules, signals, and counting, with accessible exit areas, and the same crowd evacuating the stadium by means of chaotic movements against one another. In an ordered evacuation, there are fewer frictions (physical contacts) and less wear than in a chaotic evacuation. An example of misunderstanding of how incoordination leads to high levels of physical entropy can be found in the so-called tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968), where grassland is made the responsibility of the community that owns it. An aggregated set of individuals and non-coordinated behaviors certainly lead to an unsustainable level of exploitation of any resource; but as shown by Ostrom (2011), it is the lack of communal management that leads to overexploitation—not the reverse. Individual, non-coordinated action is an example of maximum friction causing physical entropy to rise, but also a long-term increase in social entropy due to growing inequity and scarcity of resources. Possible answers to the problem of individual incoordination include the granting of property rights (a market alternative proposed by Hardin), or centralized management by an external, coercive regulator. Yet, as shown by Ostrom (2011), these answers carry their own dose of entropy since they incentivize competition and inequity. Communal, cooperative management of resources is the form of coordination that generates the least social, political, and

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physical entropy because it minimizes social frictions, and therefore it disincentives non-cooperative behaviors. As we have seen, survival and social reproduction require using free energy to build the dissipative structures that keep human societies away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Social entropy increases when reproductive goals are unfulfilled, so there is a direct link between social entropy and biophysical entropy, in other words, there is a link between physical negentropy and social negentropy. According to Trinn, “as society’s subsystems are environment for each other, structuration in one subsystem simultaneously leads to displacement of entropy to another subsystem” (Trinn 2018, 753). This applies to the social subsystem as well as the physical subsystem and, as we shall see later, also to the political or regulatory subsystem. Each of these subsystems, in which human societies are organized, reduces its internal entropy by displacing it towards the others. This implies that social entropy levels are directly related to the level of negentropy extracted from the subsystem or biophysical compartment of society. The free energy extracted from this section is thus essential to generate social order. As described earlier, order is created by combining free energy and information, but this information needs to be processed through stable social relations or institutions. This regulatory or political function of the two types of entropy resembles that of Maxwell’s demon. In fact, this “demon” has historically played an essential role in shaping societies and their metabolic profile, establishing a trade-off between physical and social entropy, as we will see below.

5.4 The Thermodynamic Roots of Inequality An aspect that tends to be overlooked when analyzing the factors underlying social metabolism dynamics is social equity, which depends on the forms of distribution of goods and services produced and wastes generated. Social equity plays a key role in the functioning of social metabolism. Because of that role, any approach to the study of each society’s physical, material dimension must account for the causes and levels of inequality and its consequences, especially regarding the conflicts this causes. Social inequality is reflected in the unequal assignation of goods and services among social groups or their territories, thus creating a hierarchy of societies. A physical interpretation of this social disequilibrium is the unequal distribution of energy and materials flows as well as waste recycling—i.e., the ecosystems’ absorption service. As seen above, changes in entropy are always asymmetrical, hence unequal, and relative to both terms of the equation: the internal and external entropy levels. The environment and its resources pay the costs of this asymmetry, whether within the domestic territory or in another society’s territory. Asymmetry is thus at the core of each dissipative process because the latter processes follow two contrary directions: they produce work and generate unusable heat. This dichotomy is also a powerful stimulus for individuals and groups to interact in their quest for more energy and materials to stay away from thermodynamic equilibrium or social death. Thus, a

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substantial share of social relations aims at exchanging energy, materials, and information. As stated by Tyrtania: “…based on Boltzmann, the struggle for existence is in first stance a dispute for available energy. At an ampler scale, we could agree with Wagensberg (2002) in that progress of a corner of the universe implies the regression of another corner of the universe (Tyrtania 2009, 70)”. The origin lies in asymmetrical access to energy and material sources (including human labor) or to the goods and services that fund elements (dissipative structures) or stocks provide to individuals or social groups. Access to these resources and services is usually regulated by institutions to varying degrees of intensity according to the different forms of social organization, and segmented according to criteria of class, race, gender, beliefs, etc. For Schaffartzik and Krausmann (2021, 55), controlling stocks and fund elements also implies controlling energy and material flows. Current ownership patterns of stocks or funds are decisive in the distribution of resource use and of the services thereby generated. Applying the thermodynamic analogy, we could reformulate Prigogine’s equation to apply it to social systems: the change in social entropy of a given human social group is directly related to (physical) entropy and its distribution through society. For example, social organization units with proper coherence and identity (e.g., social classes) can increase their internal order or wellbeing by transferring their (physical) entropy to other social classes, or to society as a whole. A social group’s appropriation of the surplus (a determined amount of energy or materials) is but a way of obtaining order at the expense of other social groups that will experience entropy increase. It is a form of socio-thermodynamic exploitation. Such has been the usual behavior of societies, according to Flannery and Marcus (2012) at least for the past 2500 years, based on competitive social relations and the institutionalization of social inequity. These authors produced a detailed and amply documented account of inequality in human societies, its genesis, history, and modalities. “By 2500 B.C., virtually every form of inequality known to mankind had been created somewhere in the world, and truly egalitarian societies were gradually being relegated to places no one else wanted (Flannery and Marcus 2012, 15)”. Since then, conflicts and inequality seem to have amplified along history until the present. The same can be said of the asymmetric relationship between dominant and dominated kingdoms or states. This would become highly visible under industrial metabolism, as countries and social classes have shown marked differences in social inequity levels. Conversely, the predominance of cooperative social relations and institutions favoring equity helps to decrease internal social entropy. An evident relation can be established between social and physical entropy. Rising physical entropy has been one of the most recurrent ways to compensate the increase of social entropy, as we will see further down. Therefore, inequality between social groups is a socially established mechanism of entropy transfer, which may generate more entropy if not counter-weighed by more energy and materials from the environment or by socially constructed negentropic structures. This also means that a rise in social complexity often results from social inequity, in other words, as inequality increases—a process that is apparently peaking now—more energy and materials are consumed, increasing complexity (see

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Turchin et al. 2018). Why are capitalism and its industrial metabolic regime based on an increased inequality? Because they require transferring the high entropy they generate to their social or territorial surroundings. The price of the easy and abundant availability of exosomatic energy (fossil fuels) enjoyed by capitalism and industrial systems has been a high degree of social (inequity) and metabolic entropy. Consequently, asymmetry is applicable to relations between groups or classes within a society and directly affects their environment. For instance, a social group can push towards the overexploitation of one or more resources if it accumulates or consumes a growing share of the energy and materials available to a society within its territory. In other words, the creation of internal order by a human group can have environmental consequences for society as a whole. Let us give a concrete illustration of this: in feudal or tributary societies based on organic metabolism, rent increases forced peasants to offer a portion of their crop, or another natural resource, to the detriment of the amount needed for self-consumption, and this could drive them to clear new plots, fish or hunt more individuals, and extract or gather a higher volume of products. The expansion of agricultural frontiers in the absence of enough land forced to break the equilibrium between land uses, provoking social metabolism instability that could lead to overexploitation or to ecological collapse. A similar process took place with the extraction of lumber and firewood from temperate and tropical forests. In societies with organic metabolism, it is a zero-sum game (Sieferle 2001, 27)—i.e., a game in which the gains of one party are balanced by the losses of other parties. Indeed, as the exosomatic consumption of the affluent or dominant classes increases, the consumption of the rest of society declines, even to the point of affecting its endosomatic consumption. From an environmental perspective, social inequality is thus an ecosystemic pathology (Guzmán et al. 2000), a permanent source of metabolic instability and a powerful stimulant of socioenvironmental conflict and transformation.

5.5 The Modalities of Social Inequity In view of this asymmetrical relationship, human societies have built dissipative structures of a social nature (see below). The latter are based on cooperation and equity, without which social life and evolutionary success itself would be impossible, given that the maximizing of asymmetry would lead to social disorder or thermodynamic equilibrium. Nevertheless, free-rider behaviors are common among human groups, in which, in order to maximize order, they increase entropy in the whole of society, the most harmed being those deprived of enough dissipative structures. This behavior is evident both in the struggle for resources (energy, materials, and information) as in the fight to avoid the effects of physical entropy (e.g., pollution). This is when conflicts arise due to power relations (between individuals or groups) and control relations of certain individuals or groups over the fund elements and stocks, or over

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the energy and material flows (Adams 1975). The dispute is expressed across three types of behavior shared by humans with other species. The first of these behaviors is what ecologists call competitive exclusion, consistent with a territorial appropriation by a group of humans, and thus the use of its resources and services, excluding all other groups. For example, a local community can exclude others from appropriating a common territory; or a noble arguing a territorial right can exclude numerous peasant families from the appropriation of a communal land, a mechanism that was rather common during Feudalism. The situation can originate conflicts and subsequent protests by the excluded. Appropriation by means of legal norms, such as property, forms part of this type of inequity. A society in which the majority is excluded from the use of natural resources and services becomes a source of social and environmental imbalances. The second behavior is parasitism, occurring when a social group manages to live at the expense of another group or their resources. Such behavior is typical of Neocolonialism and is made possible through unequal exchange (see below). In this form of parasitism, the parasite group is interested in maintaining and reproducing such a relation, hence the parasitized group. The latter implies that an essential part of such resources and services goes to the parasitized group to contribute to its sustenance. As we will see further on, this parasitic relation is possible through the simultaneous exploitation of humans and nature. The third behavior is predation, implying the violent (through conquest or invasion) or pacific (through market or diplomacy) pillage of environmental goods and services and the territory owned by a human group. In predation, there is no interest in conserving environmental resources or services, but simply appropriating them regardless of the effects on the predated territory or on the societies settled within it. Examples of predation are slave capture, wood or mineral extraction from colonial forests, and spoils of war. Throughout history, societies have combined these three types of inequality to varying degrees. This has in turn required the organized and habitual use of violence by dominant groups, the creation of social consensus regarding the normativity and institutions ensuring the unequal assignment of resources, and the generation of an ideology that dissimulates, justifies, or legitimates such an unequal assignation. Good illustrations of such consensuses are the social legitimacy of private property, international trade agreements, or free commerce among countries. Another excellent example is the fact that classical and neoclassical Economics deny that exploitation mechanisms exist in economic trade between sectors or countries, together with the assignation of a purely monetary price to natural resources, which is usually below their real value.

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5.6 Market, Money, and Entropy Perhaps the most generalized form of expression of these asymmetric relations that characterizes inequity within a given social metabolism is parasitism. There have been different ways in which some human groups have created more order around them at the expense of other groups. They can, however, be classified into two main behaviors: the extraction of economic surplus based on coercive measures, or surplus through mercantile mediations and trade. We are interested here in the biophysical part of this process, which feeds the dissipative structures enjoyed by a society through energy, material, and information flows, with obvious effects on social metabolism dynamics. Surpluses can be extracted by means of a payment of a tribute—often imposed— either in money, commodities, or work—which has been the most widespread historical form of surplus extraction by privileged or dominant groups. Another form of extraction that was theorized by Ricardo, and above all by Marx, is characteristic of capitalism: the owner’s appropriation of the production means of a share of the labor value and the appropriation of unpaid biological and social reproductive work (see Chap. 6). It is the property of the production means—in our case, a significant portion of the dissipative structures or fund/stock elements—that directs the income flows towards the proprietor. But surpluses are also extracted through the market. The market is an institution that reflects the social relations of power and is in charge of the exchanges of goods and services. From a biophysical viewpoint, the market is the institution that makes it possible to transfer a given amount of energy, materials, and information from one society or group to another. Paraphrasing Tyrtania (2009, 218), the market enables utilizing the main advantage derived from humans’ possession of transportation: the capacity to put to work larger amounts of energy and materials. Through this mechanism, societies can go beyond the limits imposed by the availability of local resources, allowing them to raise their metabolic profiles above domestic extraction, thus compensating for resource deficits and waste surpluses. This means that the market, an institution created to regulate trade, plays a key role in regulating entropy: the market is the main pacific mechanism allowing to alter a society’s balance between internal and external entropies. Most flows circulating through the market are energy, material, and waste flows, as well as currency flows in their different monetary and financial manifestations. The market acts by distributing access to negentropic flows in exchange for money. Marx described the functioning of markets as the exchange of commodities (C) mediated by money (M): C-M-C. Following the same biophysical reasoning as above, money will then be used to acquire the flows of energy, materials, and information needed to build and reproduce new dissipative structures in the destination society. In this way, following the rationale of the German philosopher, the mercantile relation should also be: M-C-M. Swanson et al. (1997) have shown that money is but a marker providing information about the future potential of external and internal entropy and negentropy: “The money-information simultaneously causes and measures fluxes at

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having economic value and being exchanged, automatically measure, on the attributespecific exchange value, changes in negentropy and entropy as they control transfers of matter-energy forms (Swanson et al. 1997, 64)”. In other words, money represents the future possibilities of free energy and the benefits obtained from trade are only a plus for future negentropy. Yet, as mentioned earlier, the relation between internal and external entropy is always unequal and the market is not free from such a characteristic. In fact, thanks to its inequality, the market has historically represented one more way to extract surplus: trade is an exchange of commodities in which one of the parties acquires an advantage in terms of future order. Alf Hornborg explained the deep mechanisms underlying the so-called unequal exchange and how they reflect not only the asymmetric relations among countries, but also the habitual mode of operation of trading relations: “How, then, can we posit the occurrence of ‘unequal exchange’? This can be done by analytically demonstrating that there is, in very general terms, a systematic relation between (a) flows of productive potential, (b) flows of ‘utility’ or exchange value (price), and (c) economic growth and the accumulation of capital. But this relationship is not usefully expressed, as Marx or Odum would have it, that investment of labor or energy somehow translates into exchange value. Rather, there is a kind of inverse relation between productive potential and price that follows with logical necessity from the juxtaposition of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the social institution of market exchange. We know that energy is not so much ‘invested’ as it is dissipated in a production process. Finished products must represent an increase in entropy compared to the resources from which they were produced; yet they must be priced higher. If we consider, longitudinally, the transformation of a given set of natural resources into an industrial product, Odum’s measure of ‘energy memory’ must necessarily correlate positively with ‘utility’ or price, but objectively speaking, the amount of remaining available energy will be negatively correlated with price. As utility or price increases, there will be less of the original, available energy left. This means that industrial centers exporting high-utility commodities will automatically gain access to ever-greater amounts of available energy from their hinterlands. The more energy they have dissipated today, the more ‘new’ energy they will be able to buy—and dissipate—tomorrow (Hornborg 2011, 5)”. Nevertheless, going further still, this same relation can be formulated in the opposite way: a commodity has a higher price as it accumulates more useful energy or is a dissipative structure (stock or fund element) providing goods and services, i.e., future negentropy. In this case, we have before us the possibility of coupling an economic and a physical assessment; or of facing an innovative connection between economy and thermodynamics, such as visualized by Georgescu-Roegen (1971). Both assumptions are complementary and allow us to look at the same phenomenon from two different angles: the relatively higher price of commodities results from the accumulation of order during its fabrication due to a lower dissipation of energy, matter, and information. Yet, it can also be viewed as a relation of exploitation whenever the surplus entropy is transferred to the environment or territory of another nation state. The high price obtained from selling commodities allows, in turn, to buy more energy to continue to generate order from more energy, materials, and information.

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A key to this unequal exchange lies in the investment of large amounts of energy and materials in fund elements—dissipative structures—and stocks by dominant countries through high-quality flows of processed information that create more order, and so on. In fact, the inequalities observed between high-income and low-income countries are directly related to the stocks and fund elements available in the former. As pointed out by Schaffartzik and Krausmann (2021, 56), Western industrialization has been—and still is—based on the massive accumulation of largely inflexible stocks and the concentration of decision-making power regarding resource flows. To this, we must add a loss of negentropy in low-income countries that cannot be invested in their subsistence. In sum, the market has been one way to extract economic surpluses, either as commodities (e.g., the energy contained in agrarian products) or as money: both flows guaranteeing future order. In organic metabolic societies in which the transfer of entropy to the environment or to other territories was limited by fuel scarcity, the economic surplus (or social exploitation) focused preferentially on the appropriation of human labor and animal work by dominant groups through legal or political coercion. However, in societies under industrial metabolism, the surplus is extracted mainly through mercantile mediation (including the labor market, considered by Marx as the foundation of capitalist exploitation) and, hence, through the exchange of manufactured goods and natural resources.

5.7 Negentropy and Institutions All species have developed phenotypic (endogenous) plasticity mechanisms that respond adaptively to environmental changes. The human species has gone much further: using exosomatic or technological mechanisms, it has succeeded at modifying its own environment and somewhat adapting it to its own interests to such an extent that the environment has become vulnerable. Yet the absence of genetic conditioning has turned these instruments into a potential source of inequality both between and within social groups (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, 382). A group’s territorial or social segmentation became a strategy to ensure survival in a resource-poor environment. Competition for scarce resources thus became an evolutionary strategy that required being minimally coordinated or organized to be successful. The latter owes to the fact that social reproduction, that is, the task of reversing entropy, is nonetheless a social or collective task for the human species. In this sense, a technological mechanism consists of creating systems that implement coordinated and intentional interactions: i.e., institutions. Paraphrasing Wright (2005), we could say that a society consists of vast numbers of people constantly interacting and huge numbers of degrees of individual freedom. Its behavior could be likened to that of randomizing machines that maximize entropy, subject to constraints. Entropy is here understood as a number that measures the randomness of a distribution. In this sense, the higher the entropy, the more random the distribution. Individual behavior randomizes the distribution of social energy in

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the system and increases its (social) entropy. But society builds social institutions (dissipative structures made of information fluxes) to prevent entropy maximization or to reduce it. As Wright argues, “at a micro level the system scrambles and randomises. Basically, anything can happen. But at the macro level there are global constraints that are always observed. So, there’s an interaction between forces that randomise, and forces that order…. There’s some kind of obstacle in the system that acts to reduce the randomness a little bit”. The latter occurs, for example, in completely unregulated markets: they tend to maximize the system’s entropy. According to Wright (2017), this fact could explain inequality: “So the anarchy of the market is the primary and essential cause of economic inequality… Since people are free to trade then entropy increases and the distribution of money becomes unequal”. Regulations thus add constraints to the system, reducing entropy, that is, reducing random (unequal) distribution. The role of institutions is therefore to lower the levels of random complexity (generated by competitive individual or group behavior) and to increase its degree of organization or coordination (Hidalgo 2015). In this sense, institutions are nothing more than structuring information flows (Trambouze 2006). Institutions can thus be defined as formal (explicit) or informal (implicit) rules (routines, procedures, codes, shared beliefs, practices) aimed at regulating the entropy arising from the coordination of the social interactions between individuals (Schotter 1981) and the interactions between individuals and their natural environment. This understanding has a twofold explanatory and regulatory dimension: entropy indicates both the evolutionary origin of the institutions and the teleological function they fulfill. Some level of entropy, disorder, and loss of work in the transformation process can be found across all types of interactions here. Yet, in the case of living systems, intentionality, whether reflexive or not, contributes to the interaction (Dennet 1996), increasing the complexity. In the case of human social systems, where mechanisms of natural cultural selection operate, entropy regulation becomes more sophisticated and is reflected in the flexible and contingent rules of institutions. Political institutions play a particularly important role as they represent the highest degree of complexity in social interaction regulation, and on a scale of equally high interaction density. In this line of thought, entropy would explain the causes, functions, and mechanisms that create and give meaning to the forms of power (regulation) from the micro level to the macro (state) level of political power. Family, community, State, are examples of negentropic structures and so is any efficient form of social regulation. Therefore, social institutions must be understood as socio-ecological relations tasked with regulating both social and physical entropies. This applies to institutions in the broadest sense of the word—i.e., any stable social practice or relation subjected to rules, although the latter may be informal—and also in the narrowest sense of state public institutions. In other terms, political power manages entropy by generating dissipative structures in the physical, political, and social realms.

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5.8 Conflict, Protest, and Metabolic Change With rare exceptions, attempts made to interpret historical transformation from a socio-ecological perspective have adopted a neutral political-ideological posture, i.e., a sort of aseptic approach that assigns change to the structural, systemic factors as the central and decisive protagonists. Seen like that, humans appear as mere objects devoid of will and moved by the invisible forces of the systemic mechanisms. A precise visualization of the perspective of these approaches is provided by the image of Charles Chaplin forcibly caught by gigantic machinery in his classical film Modern Times. In other words, the approaches we can call socio-cybernetic, the historical transformation processes, appear detached from the economic, social, political, and cultural conflicts, therefore appearing as independent or autonomous with respect to human decisions. This interpretation has two main flaws: it ignores first the evolutionary function of self-reflection (self-reference) in the adaptive changes of more complex species. Ideas, symbols, ideologies, beliefs, languages, i.e., information flows, are all instruments used for self-control and for the design of institutions and strategies directed towards organizing and adapting to the environment. It also overlooks the interests as being part of the reproductive drive of individuals or groups that originate complex power (socio-psychological) and control (physical) relations (Adams 1975). As we saw in Chap. 3, this structuralist or cybernetic nature with no margin for collective action is a weakness shared by most known conceptions of social metabolism. The uncoupling in these works—despite the good intentions of their authors—of the purely physical, metabolic dimension of societies and the essentially social dimension is what causes this bias. But this lack of integration also nullifies the interdisciplinarity, holistic approach that is supposed to be adopted in social metabolism studies. Our goal is to establish links between the physical and social dimensions, and thermodynamics seems to offer an appropriate framework for such an exploration. As set out in the previous section, the evolution of human societies has entailed the development of exosomatic instruments (technologies) and a progressive rise in complexity, moving social reproduction away from the individual sphere. The struggle for survival has thus become competition for negentropy in a context of growing entropy and increasing scarcity of resources. As Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen said, “the struggle for life which we observe over the entire biological domain is a natural consequence of the Entropy Law. It goes on between species as well as between the individuals of the same species, but only in the case of the human species has the struggle taken also the form of a social conflict” (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, 307). Inequality, the product of competition itself, establishes differences in access to free energy and forms the basis of social conflict. Indeed, the unequal distribution of resources in a broad sense, including material and immaterial resources, has historically been a permanent source of conflicts and social protest, and a powerful engine of the historical evolution of societies and their metabolic configuration. By stating the above, we are not seeking to give social conflict the role of history’s midwife.

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However, given the visible status of social inequity, we must recognize that many drivers of change in metabolic dynamics emerge from conflicts. Social protest rooted in conflict is an added driver of metabolic change. Based on historical circumstances, it has even become the most decisive of all. If we recognize the sometimes pivotal and always significant role of social protest, we have to reject unequivocally the cybernetic currents of social metabolism that deprive socio-ecological change of any human collective action. Because of this, our social metabolism proposal is based on the certainty that social and territorial conflicts are a potential source of socioecological change. Consequently, they must be taken into account when studying the evolutionary dynamics of social metabolism and the socio-ecological relations between different human groups. A minimal biophysical approach to the functionality of the conflict and its manifestations, especially the collective ones—from social protest to war—obliges us to focus on two aspects of the conflict: the metabolic impact of conflict, and the implicit or explicit motivations for change. The latter would be present in the metabolic status quo underlying what we call environmental protest. All social protests indeed have a contradictory impact on their environment in the form of entropy or negentropy: they may increase or decrease social and physical entropy. For example, the Persian Gulf War had a negative impact owing to the burning of oil wells, the pollution of oceans, etc., not to mention the effects on the civil population. Another example is the positive conservation effect—despite conservation not often being the explicit objective of protests—of the communal defense of forests which have been led by indigenous communities for a long time, removing forests from markets and avoiding their clearing. Yet another illustration is the struggle of peasant laborers in Spain and Italy during the mid-twentieth century: against the backdrop of an uncontested capitalistic market, their fight led to a rise in wages and therefore labor costs, which indirectly and unintentionally favored the mechanization of most agrarian tasks. This mechanization implied the use of massive amounts of fossil fuel in agriculture. In the same way, Mediterranean farmer protests during the late twentieth century that demanded more hydraulic infrastructures for irrigation caused an increase in energy, materials, and water expenditure, thereby accentuating unsustainability (increasing entropy). Collective action is a basic component of the autopoietic, and even neopoietic capabilities of social systems. It often stems from social conflicts and is frequently driven by the common objectives of the individuals participating in the conflict. Thus, from the intentionality standpoint, collective action can foster the construction of dissipative structures that decrease internal entropy and transfer it to the environment. The crucial factor is the nature of the dissipative structures (high or low physical entropy) built by the self-organization process promoted by collective action. Consequently, a protest rising from a social conflict and guided by an agenda of change of the dominant metabolic regime may initially lead to the gestation of dissipative—negentropic—structures that decrease internal disorder and, simultaneously, lower the consumption of energy and materials. This way, the transfer of entropy to the environment—i.e., external entropy—is minimized. Disorder through social protest (high quality, low entropy information) can generate a new, self-organized, and coherent emergent order. In that sense, as opposed to conflict, social protest as a

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collective action cannot be understood as a part of disorder itself, but as a generator of negentropy.

5.9 Environmental Protest and Its Metabolic Function Of particular relevance for the present work are the conflicts originating in the unequal distribution of negentropy (natural resources) or entropy (waste) in metabolic terms. We examined earlier the sources and mechanisms underlying this asymmetric distribution of negentropy and entropy, and which often give rise to environmental conflicts. A retrospective view reveals that indeed, these conflicts played a greater role than that usually attributed by history books, conditioning the relation between societies with their natural environment. In the social sciences, conflicts have been predominantly interpreted in terms of class or political confrontation, stripping them of their environmental or biophysical dimension. Environmental conflicts stem from the access, management, and distribution of natural resources and services that are perceived as essential for the reproduction of a human group (negentropy), or from the beneficial or harmful effects of these actions on human groups (entropy). Conflicts, as we have seen, result from the unequal distribution of flows of energy and materials, and the waste caused by their use. Unequal exchange not only between nations, regions, territories, but also between social groups (e.g., between farmers and agroindustry) is a typical example of the structural basis of metabolic conflict. This means that wars resulting from the expansion of a given empire, disputes about common lands, the battles of peasants and indigenous communities fought against colonial exploitation, etc., also have an environmental meaning. Conversely, classic environmental conflicts also often have class implications, as we will see below. Environmental conflict is thus permanent, structural, and inherent to the functioning and evolution of societies. Generally speaking, all conflicts can potentially lead to a shift in the configuration and dynamics of social metabolism. Specifically, environmental protests generate environmental effects that increase or decrease physical entropy. Usually, protest arising from an environmental conflict—especially green protests—help to internalize environmental costs. While they do not achieve an instantaneous shift in social metabolism, they improve the negative effects on the environment and widen the path towards metabolic transformation. The protests thus function as reducers of the system’s internal entropy, i.e., they lower the amount of entropic flow that is transferred to the physical-biological environment. In that sense, environmental protest can generate social actions, promoting a change in the structure and composition of a more sustainable social metabolism. Yet, they can also promote the appropriation and use of more energy and materials, raising entropy, as in the case of most modern armed conflicts between nation states or their coalitions. This contradictory result regarding environmental protests leads us to differentiate between its implicit or explicit objectives in order to determine whether they promote sustainability or the reverse. In that context, reproductive and distributive

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environmental protests must be distinguished based on whether the social metabolism configuration is compromised or not. Conflicts centered on resource disputes, the ways in which these are managed, or the externalities produced by their use must be considered as environmental conflicts, despite the fact that none of the social stakeholders involved manifest an explicit intention regarding sustainability, or even if the explicit goal largely differs from sustainability. In this line, North American specialized literature has introduced the term environmental justice (see Dorsey 1997; Faber 1988). Nonetheless, some of these environmental conflicts present an explicit intention to preserve resources, in which case they become environmentalist conflicts (Table 5.1). Environmentalist conflicts are a specific variety of environmental conflicts in which one of the parties has the intention of preserving resources sustainably. The latter expresses a conscious decision, despite using a different language from that used by today’s green movement. According to Guha and Martínez-Alier (1997), we can find both present and past green protests in communities that, independently of any explicit green ideology, consist of defending environmental conditions or an egalitarian access and distribution of the natural resources necessary to subsist. These authors have called these protests the environmentalism of the poor, as opposed to Inglehart’s (1977) interpretation, according to which environmentalism is proper to societies that have reached a certain degree of wellbeing and can thus afford to worry about post-materialistic values such as the environment. In that sense, the distinction made by Guha and Gadgil (1993) between intramodal and intermodal conflicts can be useful. It can be interpreted as a distinction between intrametabolic and intermetabolic conflicts, i.e., differentiating between the conflicts originating within a metabolic regime and those confronting different regimes, e.g., during transition processes. The peasant protest example clearly illustrates this distinction. When the organic metabolic regime enters into contact with the industrial metabolic regime, which is organized around highly different economic, ecological, and social principles—which they attempt to impose—intermodal conflicts arise between both regimes. Table 5.1 Typology of environmental conflicts Denomination

Type of conflict Social metabolism Logic/discourse

Environmental

Distributive

Intrametabolic

Not claiming sustainability/multiple languages

Environmentalist Reproductive

Intermetabolic

Claiming sustainability/multiple languages

Green

Intermetabolic

Claiming sustainability/explicit green discourse

Reproductive

Source Soto Fernández et al. (2007)

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Under these conditions, for example, the objective of peasant protest is to defend their mode of metabolic organization with nature, confronting subordination or transformation attempts promoted by the industrial mode of using nature. A typical example is the defense of communal resources, a vindication that played a major role in most peasant protests during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (González de Molina et al. 2009). Since what is questioned is how resources are used, these protests are essentially reproductive, regardless of any possible distribution dimension. Because of that, these protests are of an environmentalist nature. Contrariwise, when peasants and household farmers enter into a dispute with other social groups or among themselves for the allotment of natural resources, transformed goods, or services within the same metabolic regime, the protest can be understood to result from an intramodal conflict. A typical example are conflicts for the volume and distribution of water among irrigation farmer communities. These types of conflicts also include frictions among peasant communities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the assignation of a disputed communal territory, the establishment of boundaries, or the appropriation of quotas in common grassland. In these cases, the mode of use of resources is not the main question. In this tenor, many territorial conflicts among countries, regions, and even communities took place over past centuries. Translating the above into a thermodynamic rationale, environmental protests focus on the distribution of energy, material, and information flows—they are thus distributive protests. For example, disputes among social groups about access to natural resources (lords and serfs or peasants for communal appropriation), between communities (disputes regarding boundaries between villages), and between States (conflicts, including war among States to obtain access and the exploitation of one or more resources; or protests arising from so-called not in my backyard—nimby— conflicts caused by the social consequences of waste relocation). On the contrary, environmentalist protests are reproductive in so far as they question the configuration of dissipative structures that, as we saw, determine energy, material, and information flows, and lastly, the organization of social metabolism. The distinction between environmental and environmentalist protests is by no means rigid; it is purely an analytical distinction. Social protest is necessarily autopoietic, i.e., it can increase in social relevance or not, and even alter the arrangement of the components that drive metabolism as a whole, producing changes and generating evolutionary processes. It is not uncommon for a social conflict (apparently unrelated to environmental issues or of a low environmental significance) to spark an environmental or environmentalist protest, i.e., that an environmental protest ends up becoming an environmentalist protest, or vice versa.

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5.10 Environmental Conflicts as Social Conflicts Nevertheless, some believe that disputes between peasants and feudal lords for the appropriation of communal forests in Modern Age Europe represented merely an additional manifestation of a class struggle. Typifying these conflicts as environmental would simply be changing their name in the heat of a historiographical fad. However, the nature of environmental conflicts has been and continues to be different from class conflicts—although in certain circumstances and moments in the past many environmental and even environmentalist conflicts were indeed class conflicts as conventionally understood. Indeed, in some societies, conflicts for resources also become the main social conflict and the fundamental reason for confrontations between social groups. Social conflicts in agrarian societies are frequently expressed as disputes for resources or the environment in general (land, water, forests, hunting, etc.). The reason, among others, is that subsistence and the amount of surpluses are directly linked to the appropriation of natural resources. We can thus specify that class conflicts in organic metabolism societies are often environmental conflicts as well, to the extent that subsistence is linked to appropriation. Even the possibility of using human labor depends on access to natural resources. However, the sociological literature separates environmental conflicts from social conflicts in “modern” societies, especially “class” conflicts. In industrial metabolism societies, environmental conflicts have seemingly been separated from social or class conflicts owing to the development of money, private property, and the market (Naredo 2015). In other words, the supremacy of commodities (and money; we must remember that from a biophysical viewpoint, money received as a salary is actually an expression of future negentropy) has obscured the environmental conflict, highlighting the class conflict over income distribution (surplus value, wages). From this perspective, however, social conflicts centered on production or distribution relations, that is, on class conflicts, are inherently environmental in nature given their impact on social metabolism. This separation has become even more pronounced in postindustrial societies, especially in industrialized societies. The latter are witnessing today deep social fragmentation and a generalization of apparently post-materialist behaviors. Such a context has been favorable to environmental protests that have grown, and unfavorable to class conflicts that seem to be deflating. From a metabolic perspective, these environmental and class conflicts are actually two sides of the same coin. Conflict is nothing more than a mechanism to readjust the greatest imbalances in the social distribution of entropy. In line with the above, all social conflicts affect societies’ metabolic configurations. Therefore, they can be given an environmental reading even if the conflicts are not explicitly environmental because of the usual trade-off between social entropy and metabolic entropy—one compensating the other and vice versa. In organic metabolism societies, both types of entropy were tightly linked and even assimilated, since it was the fight for resources, that is, physical entropy, that generated social inequality and, therefore, social entropy. As argued above, social or class conflict and environmental conflict were one and the same. This is perhaps why these types

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of conflicts—in which subsistence is linked to sustainable resource exploitation— have been rightly considered as ecological (“environmentalism of the poor”). Indeed, they prevent natural resource degradation, giving rise to a type of environmentalism that differs considerably from the post-materialist environmentalism of developed countries (Martínez Alier 2005).

5.11 Political Institutions As we have already said, social entropy (social inequality and its effects) is reduced through the use of free energy, thus increasing physical entropy. This principle is the basis of the link between social entropy and physical entropy, which is one of the basic instruments of political institutions. Political institutions are dissipative structures that regulate social entropy (social inequality and its effects) as well as physical entropy and the trade-off between them. These political institutions, endowed with a high degree of complexity and self-reflexivity, work both at the micro (community, etc.) level and macro (State) level. This thermodynamic view of political power as an entropy regulator obliges us to jointly consider both common meanings of the term “politics”: “an art of domination” and “an art of integration”. The latter suggests the idea of “governability” (Foucault 1991), that is, the control and governance of a social group settled in a specific territory. From this perspective, the objective of politics is to provide public goods and services [in metabolic terms: building, maintaining, and feeding stocks and funds] through collective action (Colomer 2009). Considering that providing these public goods is a citizen’s individual reach, a coordinated effort is required, whether through voluntary or coercive means, through collective action, or public government institutions based on public policies. For example, sustainability is a public good that citizens cannot achieve individually. To attain sustainability, collective action, public policy, or a combination of both is required. The production of public goods, which in contemporary societies is dominated by nation states, is largely in the State’s hands (Giddens 1987) and led by public policies. This task could be understood, from a thermodynamic perspective, as the producing of dissipative structures that are both physical (funds or stocks that dissipate energy and materials) and social (norms, regulations that dissipate information flows). The political regulators’ mission is to synchronize both poles of metabolic exchange and render them stable. Indeed, social and physical entropy—i.e., the type of disorder they trigger— generate different effects. Physical entropy expresses itself as ecological problems and its effects are of a physical nature. Social entropy, however, manifests itself through social conflict and de-structuration (confrontations, inequity, and absence of cooperation, criminality, and poverty). Yet, there is a visible trade-off between social and physical entropies and, from our standpoint, this trade-off helps to explain the evolutionary dynamics of social systems. Thus, there is a bidirectional correlation between both types of entropy. For example, inequity produces situations that tend to increase social entropy, e.g., bringing a society or a social group closer to disorder

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or chaos, generating poverty, scarcity, or even starvation. Societies usually compensate such increment by dissipating a certain amount of energy and materials from the environment (or the environment of a foreign territory) to generate order. For example, rising exosomatic consumption could be the system’s answer to growing inequalities that threaten to increase social entropy up to unsustainable levels. This compensation has often taken place over the past two centuries in capitalist or market economies, especially in the most industrialized countries. The latter have compensated for the rise in social entropy by importing growing amounts of energy and materials from the environment to generate order, progressively increasing the metabolic profile of such countries. This is how Beck (1998) explains—referring to Western societies or risk societies—that inequality did not disappear with the post-war economic growth model but rose, instead, “to the top floor”. From this perspective, exosomatic consumption growth over the past two centuries may owe, in part, to the system’s response to rising inequalities (see Chap. 13). The latter have resulted from economic growth itself and capitalist accumulation which threaten to increase social entropy to unsustainable levels, in other words, to make high levels of social inequality socially tolerable. Based on this interpretation of social entropy, exosomatic consumption is an instrument that compensates for the maintenance of an unfair social system by establishing new, more costly, dissipative structures. The latter reduce internal entropy and at the same time increase external entropy—i.e., they transfer entropy to the environment. In fact, social inequality has tended to increase since the Industrial Revolution and seems to be a constitutive feature of the system itself (Milanovic 2010; Piketty 2014). This close link between social entropy and metabolic or biophysical entropy could not have existed without the possibilities offered by fossil fuels and associated technology: they have allowed exosomatic consumption to increase unceasingly. Yet, the environment of all societies, i.e., the natural part formed by the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, etc., is a closed system that receives energy only from the outside. The environment is not an open system exchanging energy and material with its surroundings. Therefore, the possibilities of compensating for social entropy through more and larger dissipative structures of energy and materials—i.e., by incrementing physical entropy—are evidently environmentally limited. In fact, today’s economic-financial crisis clearly illustrates the unfeasibility of this compensation model since the crisis is caused by the difficulties in maintaining economic growth in a context of increasingly limited natural resources. We will develop these arguments further in Chap. 13.

5.12 Political Entropy At the same time, the negentropic function of political power is exercised at the expense of generating its own regulatory entropy, in such a way that the balance between the negentropic function and the generated entropy marks the limits of its

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validity as an institution. Political power reduces entropy by fostering the coordination between different stakeholders (individuals and institutions) involved in social metabolism. In short, the task of political institutions is to control and minimize social and physical entropy through information flows, but also through the management of their own internal entropy (transaction costs, bureaucracy, etc.). Indeed, inefficient social allocation of resources generates tension (conflict) and the associated information generates negentropic structures (institutions), which are merely filters, sensors, or institutional programmers responsible for detecting and compensating social entropy by means of physical entropy—or vice versa. Therefore, political power, that is, the regulator and the producer of information and coordination, has a negentropic function. The paradox lies in the fact that this negentropic function generates its own entropy. The positive equilibrium between negentropy and entropy marks the limits of the validity and success of a determined form of political power. Political power reduces entropy by means of fostering the coordination between the different stakeholders (individuals and institutions) involved in social metabolism. Cooperation is in itself the least entropic form of coordination (Axelrod 1984). Democratic states and societies represent a form of cooperative coordination that can occur in societies that are highly complex in demographic and technological terms. The impossibility of further increasing physical entropy is the cause of the rising levels of social and political entropy, even in industrialized countries. Therefore, political power needs to manage political entropy (distribution of power and status), social entropy (distribution of resources), and physical entropy (exchange between society and nature), as well as the interactions between all three entropies. An entropic theory of regulatory institutions can be formulated that sets out an isomorphism between the dimensions of entropy (physical, political, and social; Fig. 5.1): more social entropy (inequity) corresponds to more physical entropy and vice versa. In sum, the function of political institutions is to control and minimize physical and social entropies through information flows as well as through the management of its own internal entropy. Political entropy manifests itself in the inefficiency or incapacity of its regulatory function, either owing to hyperregulation (centralized decisions, high costs of transactions, bureaucracy, etc.) or, on the contrary, to deregulation—that leads to a lack of market coordination and competition (ultraliberal regimes).

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Political Entropy

Social Entropy

Physical Entropy

Fig. 5.1 The triangle of entropy. See text

References Adams RN (1975) Energy and structure. A theory of social power. University of Texas Press, Austin Axelrod R (1984) The evolution of cooperation. Basic Books Axelrod R (2004) La complejidad de la cooperación: modelos de cooperación y colaboración basados en los agentes. Fondo de cultura económica Bailey HD (1985) Entropy measures of inequality. 55(2):200–211 Bailey KD (1990) Theory of social entropy. SUNNY Press Bailey KD (1997a) The autopoiesis of social systems: assessing Lymahnn’s theory of self reference. Syst Res Behav Sci 14:83–100 Bailey KD (1997b) System entropy analysis. Kybernetes 26(6/7):674–688 Bailey KD (2006a) Sociocybernetics and social entropy theory. Kybernetes 35(3/4):375–384 Bailey K (2006b) Living systems theory and social entropy theory. Syst Res Behav Sci 23:291–300 Beck U (1998) La sociedad del riesgo: hacia una nueva modernidad. Paidós, Barcelona Boltzmann L (1964) [1896] Lectures on gas theory. University of California Press, USA Boulding K (1978) Ecodynamics: a new theory of societal evolution. Sage, London Brillouin L (1953) Principio de Negentropía de la Información. J. de Física Aplicada 24(9):1152– 1163 Brissaud JB (2005) The meaning of entropy. Entropy 7(1):68–96 Colomer JM (2009) Ciencia de la política: Una introducción. Editorial Ariel, Barcelona Dennet D (1996) Contenido y conciencia. Gedisa, Barcelona Dinga E, Tanasescu C-R, Ionescu G-M (2020) Social entropy and normative network. Entropy 22:1051. https://doi.org/10.3390/e22091051 Dorsey MK (1997) El movimiento por la justicia ambiental en EEUU. Una breve historia. Ecología Política 14:23–32 Echevarria C (1998) A three-factor agricultural production function: the case of Canada. Int Econ J 2:63–76 Faber D (1988) The struggle for ecological democracy: environmental justice movements in the United States. Guilford Press, New York

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Flannery K, Marcus J (2012) The creation of inequality: how our prehistoric ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire. Harvard University Press, USA Foucault M (1991). La gubernamentalidad. En: Castel R, Donzelot J, Grignon C, De Gaudemar J-P, Muel F (eds) Espacios de poder. Ediciones de La Piqueta, Barcelona Georgescu-Roegen N (1971) The entropy law and the economic process. Harvard University Press, USA Giddens A (1987) The nation state and violence. Volume two of a contemporary critique of historical materialism. Polity Press, Cambridge González de Molina M, Herrera A, Ortega A, Soto D (2009) Peasant protest as environmental protest. Some cases from the 18th to the 20th century. Glob Environ 4:48–77 Guha R, Gadgil M (1993) Los hábitats en la historia de la humanidad. Ayer 43:49–110 Guha R, Martínez-Alier J (1997) Varieties of environmentalism: essays North and South. Earthscan, London Guzmán Casado G, González de Molina M, Sevilla Guzmán E (2001) Introducción a la agroecología como desarrollo rural sostenible. Mundiprensa, Madrid Hardin G (1968) The tragedy of the commons. Science 162(3859):1243–1248 Hidalgo C (2015) Thy information grows. The evolution of order, from atoms to economies. Basic Books, New York Hornborg A (2011) A lucid assessment of uneven development as a result of the unequal exchange of time and space. Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability Inglehart R (1977) The silent revolution. Changing values and political stiles among western publics. Princeton University Press, Princeton Luhmann N (1986) The autopoiesis of social systems. In: Geyer F, Zeuwen JV (eds) Sociocybernetic paradoxes: observation, control and evolution of self-steering systems. Sage, London, pp 172– 192 Luhmann N (1995) Social systems. Stanford University Press, Stanford Martínez Alier J (2005) El ecologismo de los pobres. Conflictos ambientales y lenguajes de valoración. Editorial Icaria, Barcelona Mavrofides T, Kameas A, Papageorgiou D, Los A (2011) On the entropy of social systems: a revision of the concepts of entropy and energy in the social context. Syst Res Behav Sci 28:353–368 Milanovic B (2010) The haves and the have-nots: a brief and idiosyncratic history of global inequality. Basic Books, New York Morin E (1977) El método, I: La naturaleza de la naturaleza. Cátedra, Madrid Naredo JM (2015) La economía y evolución: Historia y perspectivas de las categorías básicas del pensamiento económico. Siglo XXI, Madrid Ostrom E (2011) El gobierno de los bienes comunes. FCE, México Piketty T (2014) El capital en el siglo XXI. FCE, México Santa Marín JF, Toro Betancur A (2015) Tribología: pasado, presente y futuro. TecnoLógicas 18(35) Schaffartzik A, Krausmann F (2021) A socio-metabolic perspective on (material) growth and inequality. In: Laurent É, Zwickl K (eds) The Routledge handbook of the political economy of the environment. Routledge, London, pp 47–59 Schotter A (1981) The economic of social institutions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Sieferle RP (2001) Qué es la Historia Ecológica. En: González de Molina M, Martínez Alier J (eds) Naturaleza Transformada. Estudios de Historia Ambiental en España, Icaria, Barcelona Soto Fernández D, Herrera G, de Molina A, González de Molina M, Ortega Santos A (2007) La protesta campesina como protestaambiental, Siglos XVIII-XX. Historia Agraria 42:277–301 Swanson GA, Bailey KD, Miller JG (1997) Entropy, social entropy and money: a living systems theory perspective. Syst Res Behav Sci 14(1):45–65 Trambouze PJ (2006) Structuring information and entropy: catalyst as information carrier. Entropy 8(3):113–130 Trinn C (2018) Criticality, entropy and conflict. Syst Res Behav Sci 35:746–758

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Turchin P et al (2018) Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization. PNAS 115(2):E144–E151 Tyrtania L (2009) Evolución y sociedad. Termodinámica de la supervivencia para una sociedad a escala humana. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México Tyrtania L (2021) ¿Me da su hora, por favor? Es tiempo de ecopoiesis. En: Benítez M, Rivera-Núñez T, García-Barrios L (comps) Agroecología y sistemas complejos. Planteamientos epistémicos, casos de estudio y enfoques metodológicos. CopIt-arXives y SOCLA–México, México CDMX, pp 1–26 Wagensberg J (2002) Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿cuál era la pregunta? Tusquets, Barcelona Wright I (2005) The social architecture of capitalism. Physica A 346:589–620 Wright I (2017) The social architecture of capitalism things are getting worse. From here to there. Adventures in Marxist theory. Recuperado de

Chapter 6

The Basic Model

6.1 Introduction The first task is to generate a basic model of social metabolism. We present here our theoretical proposal though it is a work in progress and will be further developed in the future. No society, whatever its characteristics, features, and levels of complexity, exists in an ecological vacuum but affects and is affected by the dynamics, cycles, and pulses of nature. Nature is defined as “…that which exists and reproduces independently of human activity, but at the same time represents a superior order to that of matter (Rousset 1974)”. Human beings organized in a society not only respond to social phenomena and processes, but are also determined by natural phenomena. In the words of Kosik, “…man does not live in two different spheres: a part of it does not occupy a place in history and another one in nature. As a human being man is always and at the same time in nature and in history. As a historical, and hence social being, man humanizes nature, but also recognizes it as an absolute totality, as a self-sufficient causa sui, as condition and premise of humanization (Kosik 1967, 9)”. Therefore, human societies produce and reproduce their material conditions of existence through their exchanges with nature, a condition that is pre-social, natural, and eternal (Schmidt 1976). In other words… “the metabolism between man and nature is thus independent of any historical form because it can be traced back into pre-social natural-historical conditions… (Schmidt 1976: 136)”. Such a metabolism implies a diversity of processes through which human beings organized in society, independently of their situation in space (social formation) or time (historical moment), appropriate, circulate, transform, consume, and excrete materials and energy from the natural universe. Because “…the whole of nature is socially mediated and, inversely, society is mediated through nature as a component of total reality (Schmidt 1973, 79)”, human beings consummate two acts: on the one hand, they socialize parts of nature, and on the other, they naturalize society by producing and reproducing their links with

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_6

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the natural world. That general metabolic process generates a situation of reciprocal determination between Society and Nature, because the form in which human beings are organized in society will determine the way in which they affect, transform, and appropriate nature, which in turn conditions the configuration of societies. In consequence, a permanent reciprocity can be found between both realities, which some scholars consider to be of a dialectic (Schmidt 1973), or co-evolutionary (Noorgard 1994) nature. The result of this double mediation (ecological for society and social for nature) embodies a qualitatively higher-order view of nature owing to two facts. First, it rests on a proposition that transcends fragmented knowledge and today’s prevailing and customary separation between natural science, social science, and the humanities. Therefore, the approach leads us to the acknowledgment and adoption of complex thought (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993; Morin 2001; Leff 2000). And second, because it introduces this abstract view into the concrete dimension of space (planetary), i.e., it places each social and natural phenomenon in a context where position, scale, and temporality are also decisive. As complex systems, the totalities of Nature and Society intersect at two points: when appropriating or extracting resources (input), and when excreting or ejecting wastes (output), thus giving place to a new system (natural-social or social-natural) that presents a higher level of complexity. Nature and science constitute a twoway interrelation of material and energy exchange accompanied by a permanent dissipation of heat that generates entropy. We thus have before us a permanent, unidirectional flow of matter and energy. The flow begins with appropriation, it then follows several courses within society, and it ends with excretion. This double metabolic connection can be both individual or biological, and collective or social at the same time. Individually, human beings extract enough amounts of oxygen, water, and biomass from nature per unit of time to survive as organisms, and excrete heat, water, carbon dioxide, mineral as well as organic substances. Socially, the collectivity of individuals, interconnected through a wide range of links, organize themselves to guarantee their subsistence and reproduction. In doing so, they also extract matter and energy from nature by means of meta-individual structures or artifacts, excreting heat and a range of residues or wastes. Both levels, i.e., both individuals and social groups correspond to what Lotka (1956), Georgescu-Roegen (1975), and later Margalef (1993) called endosomatic energy and exosomatic energy. This distinction presents an axiomatic value for ecological economics (Martinez-Alier and Roca-Jusmet 2013). The two flows also represent biometabolic and socio-metabolic energy flows, respectively, which together make up the general process of nature-society metabolism. “The flow of endosomatic metabolism is fairly constant in time, and especially when considered per capita, and is directly related to population size. On the contrary, the exosomatic metabolism is highly variable and depends on the amount of technological capital present in society and its usually heterogeneous distribution across the various compartments distinguished within the society (Giampietro et al. 2012, 187)”. A detailed discussion of these concepts and their application can also be found in Giampietro (2004).

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The history of humanity is thus but the history of the expansion of sociometabolism beyond the addition of the bio-metabolisms of all its members. In other words, human societies have increased exosomatic energy over endosomatic energy diachronically. The exo/endo ratio can therefore be used as an indicator of societies’ degree of material complexity (Giampietro 2004). In early societies, endosomatic energy was almost the only class of energy reaped from nature—with only a minimal amount of energy transformed into instruments for domestic use, clothing, and housing materials. Today, however, in industrial societies, exosomatic energy is thirty or forty times greater than the overall energy used by the individuals that are part of them (Naredo 1999, 2000). Globally, the extraction of mineral resources (fossil fuels, metallic and non-metallic minerals) measured in tons, triples biomass extraction (photosynthetic products) obtained through agriculture, livestock-raising, fisheries, gathering, and extraction (Naredo 2000). With the notable exception of MuSIASEM, researchers in social metabolism have tended to limit their focus to the quantification of the materials and energy flows exchanged by a given society with its natural surroundings during the appropriation or extraction of resources and services (inputs), and during the recycling of residues or wastes (outputs). This version of social metabolism presents some utility, but it misses a wider vision, that is, two components: (a) society’s internal processes (the black box) that make up the internal part of the metabolic phenomenon; and (b) the immaterial or intangible processes occurring in all societies, and that interact through reciprocal mechanisms with the material processes in an invisible but effective way (as we shall see below). As we saw in Chap. 3, in recent years, new studies have opened this black box and attributed increasing value to the funds/stocks as well as to the services they provide. In this second edition of our work, these fresh contributions have been incorporated into our basic model, as we shall see below.

6.2 The Metabolic Processes Metabolism between nature and society begins when socially grouped human beings appropriate materials and energy from nature, and ends when they dispose of their wastes, emissions, or residues in natural spaces. Yet, other processes take place in the entrails of society between these two phenomena: appropriated materials and energy circulate, become transformed, and are eventually consumed (Fig. 6.1), either in the form of goods or services. Because of that, the general social metabolism process encompasses three types of material and energy flows: input flows, inner flows, and output flows. As explained in Chap. 4, according to the laws of thermodynamics, these flows are always unidirectional (Fig. 6.2). There are thus five different processes of metabolic exchange, and each represents a major stage in the energy and material flows of the social metabolism process: appropriation (Apr), transformation (Tr), circulation (Cir), consumption (Con), and excretion (Exc). Each one of these processes is composed of material structures that use materials and dissipate energy to perform their metabolic functions (see

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Fig. 6.1 General diagram showing the metabolic processes and the relation between society and nature

Fig. 6.2 Diagram showing the relations of the five main functions of social metabolism in rural, urban, and industrial sectors

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also Haberl et al. 2021). These metabolic processes are tasked with transforming energy and material flows into useful goods and services for society. All of them, together, constitute what has been called “provisioning system” or “social provisioning”. From a political economy perspective, they are organized and regulated by political-economic institutions, actors, and their power relations (Schaffartzik et al. 2021). Strictly speaking, the act of appropriation (Apr) is the primary mode of exchange between human societies and nature. It is through Apr that society is nourished by all those materials, energies, water, and services required to sustain and reproduce both human beings and their artifacts (endosomatically and exosomatically). The Apr process is always carried out by an appropriation unit, which can be a company (whether state-owned or privately owned), a cooperative, a family, a community, or a single individual (e.g., the collector of solar energy). The transformation (Tr) process implies that all changes induced in the resources extracted from nature, after being modified, are no longer consumed in their original form. In its simplest expressions, Tr includes elementary modalities of food preparation (e.g., cooking plants and animal parts using fire), and in its most elaborate, intricate transformation of materials (e.g., metallurgy, the nuclear industry, biotechnology, petrochemistry, nanotechnology, etc.). Tr activities have gradually gained in complexity over time, the process becoming less labor-intensive and more energyintensive. The process goes from craftsmanship to manufacturing, to the production of increasingly more elaborate commodities. The transformation chains or sequences often make the raw materials obtained from nature unrecognizable. The Circulation (Cir) process takes place when appropriated units stop consuming all they produce and stop producing all they consume. This is when the economic exchange phenomenon per se begins (Toledo 1981). From there on, elements extracted from nature begin to circulate—whether to be later transformed or not— and over time, circulated volumes become larger, while the distances travelled also increase. Historically, changes in territorial communication patterns have brought about by more efficient transportation means (human, animal, fluvial, maritime, aerial, etc.) and have amplified the range of distribution. Today circulation is unfolding ever more efficiently and fast. Cir magnitude has gone from noncommercial, non-monetary consignment (or trade), to financially mediated exchange, private property, and markets. The result is an intricate network of exchanges that is closely linked to transformations, in which the longstanding direct and almost immediate relationship between appropriation and consumption becomes blurred (Fig. 6.3). Society, as a whole, becomes involved in the metabolic process of consumption (Con), regardless of its place within the metabolic chain. This process can be understood based on the relation existing between human needs, which are socially and historically determined, and the good and services provided by means of the processes described above (Apr + Tr + Cir). Nevertheless, in many societies—mainly in societies with an organic energy base—consumption levels have determined the efforts of Apr, Tr, and Cir (agrarian societies), and especially so in today’s industrial

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Fig. 6.3 Diagram showing the appropriation act in current societies, which is performed by a series of appropriation units (P). The appropriated materials and energy are later circulated (Cir) via different routes, in some cases transformed (Tr), and finally consumed by industry and cities as goods and services. All these processes, in turn, generate a flow of wastes towards nature, or excretion (Exc). Along with domestic metabolic relations with nature (input and output), societies also import and export goods and services to and from other societies

metabolism. Consumption can become a powerful factor of demand that incentivizes and somehow subordinates all other metabolic processes. As stated above, two large classes of consumption can be distinguished: the endosomatic class, which concerns the biological needs of human beings, and the exosomatic class, which refers to all those artifacts (devices, apparatuses, machines, buildings) created by human beings and that resemble an external shell or envelope. Once again, society as a whole and all metabolic processes are involved during the excretion process—i.e., the actions by means of which societies dispose of materials and energy towards nature, including wastes, emissions, gases, substances, and heat. The two basic issues to consider here are: the quality of the excreted residues (if they are intrinsically recyclable or not), and their quantity (if above the natural recycling capacity). To these residues must be added the heat generated by all human activities, and that represents a physical response to all transformations or movements. Exc is perhaps the metabolic process that is the most dependent on other metabolic processes (Armiero 2021), but the emerging scenario refers to the volumes of generated waste. Indeed, Exc turns into a phenomenon that requires—for its treatment, final disposal, or storage—novel metabolic processes (capture, transformation, transportation, and storage of wastes), which in many cases end up conditioning Apr + Tr + Cir + Con. To summarize, it will be the modalities of each process, combined in many possible ways, that will give rise to multiple concrete configurations, thus revealing the existence of highly complex phenomena.

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6.3 The Flows-Fund/Stocks Nexus The metabolic processes described in the previous section fulfill their tasks thanks to the nexus between energy, material, and information flows. This vision of metabolic dynamics implies a change of SM perspective with respect to the first edition of this book. In addition to the quantification and analysis of energy and material flows, we are now also addressing the provision and functioning of each society’s dissipative structures, i.e., the stocks or funds created by human beings to satisfy their needs (Faber et al. 2005). The focus has therefore shifted from flows to stocks and/or funds and their necessary connection. The basic SM model must therefore include both the flows that society exchanges with its environment, and the flows that recirculate within it. These flows feed and maintain the dissipative structures (funds, stocks, or supply system) that keep society away from thermodynamic equilibrium thanks to their dissipation. Using a biomimetics simile, the essential factor is a society’s capacity to capture and store the energy and materials that circulate within it and to transfer them to its different components (Ho and Ulanowicz 2005, 41, 45), either in the form of goods or services. The latter will depend on the quality and quantity of the stocks or funds available and through which the energy and material flows circulate, as well as on whether such circuits are of high or low entropy. Thus, it is important to study the flow, fund, and stock nexus because the latter determines the magnitude of inflows/outflows and vice versa. Flows include energy and materials that are consumed or dissipated during the metabolic process, such as raw materials or fossil fuels. Flow rhythm is controlled on the one hand by external factors—relating to the accessibility of the environment resources in which metabolic activity takes place—and on the other, by internal factors—linked to the energy and material processing capacity, dependent in turn on the technology used and management knowledge. For their part, fund elements are dissipative structures that use input flows to transform them into goods, services, and waste, that is, into output flows, within a given time scale. They thus remain constant during the dissipative process (Scheidel and Sorman 2012). They process energy, materials, and information at a rate determined by their own structure and function. To do so, they need to be periodically renewed or reproduced. This means that a share of the inflows must be used to build, maintain, and reproduce the fund elements themselves, obviously limiting their own processing pace (Giampietro et al. 2008). The amounts of energy and materials invested to sustain and reproduce fund elements cannot therefore be employed for end uses. They can even be improved over time, allocating amounts of energy and materials to meet this latter objective.

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6.4 Funds or Stocks? As we saw in Chap. 3, the two main schools of socio-metabolic studies, the Vienna and MuSIASEM schools, use different names to refer to dissipative structures. The Vienna school uses the concept of stock, and MuSIASEM the concept of fund. The latter school has adopted the theoretical formulation introduced by GeorgescuRoegen (1971, 1975) for the joint analysis of economic and biophysical processes. According to the latter author, two fundamental elements must be distinguished when representing social-natural metabolic processes: funds and flows. Following Giampietro et al., “… funds refer to agents that are responsible for energy transformations and are able to preserve their identity over the duration of representation (time horizon of the analysis). They are the ones transforming input flows into output flows on the time scale of the representation (Giampietro et al. 2012, 184)”. On the other hand, “…flows refer to elements disappearing and/or appearing over the duration of representation, that enter but do not exit or that exit but without having entered… Hence, flows include matter and energy in situ, controlled matter and energy, and dissipated matter and energy (Giampietro et al. 2012, 184)”. In brief, a fund is “what the system is and what has to be sustained”, and a flow is “what the system does in its interaction with the context (Giampietro et al. 2012, 185)”. Restating the above in biological terms, these elements are analogous to society’s anatomy and physiology in relation to nature. The Flow/Funds nexus could be summarized as Flow (size) = Fund (size) × Metabolic Benchmarks (flow/fund ratio) This means that flows are only relevant in relation to the funds they are coupled with. This flow/fund ratio is expressed in benchmarks according to the identity of each fund, i.e., the rate at which the fund manages to perform its functions and maintain itself over time. For example, the size of a country’s required food flow should be equal to per capita food consumption multiplied by its number of inhabitants (population fund). Similarly, the size of the produced food flow should be equal to the number of hectares in the country available (land fund), multiplied by average land productivity (food/ha). If these two amounts do not coincide, the country must intensify production, increasing pressure on the agricultural environment, or import food, transferring the pressure to other countries. We cannot mix apples and oranges, however: petrol does not feed the population or the land. The nature (identity) and size of the flows are thus determined by the identity (quality) of the funds as well as their operation and reproduction requirements. MuSIASEM groups the funds into two broad identity categories: the funds located in the anthroposphere and controlled by society on the one hand; and those located in the ecosphere, beyond the control of humans on the other For its part, the Vienna school prefers to employ the term “in use-stock of materials”, or simply “material stocks”, defining it “as ordered and interrelated biophysical entities created and reproduced by the continuous flows of energy and materials

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Fig. 6.4 Material flow accounting scheme. Legend: RME = Raw material equivalent. Input and output balancing items: to have a closed material balance, so-called balancing items have to be introduced into the MFA framework on both the input and output sides (water vapor, air as entry into combustion processes, etc.) (Eurostat 2001). Source Eisenmenger (2016, 235).

that constitute society’s metabolism. According to conventions of socioeconomic metabolism studies, material stocks comprise humans, livestock, and artefacts (i.e., manufactured capital sensu)”. A stock is a variable measured at a specific point in time, whereas a flow is a variable measured over a period, i.e., per unit of time (…) In material flow analysis, a stock is measured in terms of its mass [kg], while a flow in terms of mass per unit of time [kg/year] (Haberl et al. 2017, 4). According to the Vienna school, material stocks constitute the physical infrastructure that makes the production and consumption of goods and services possible (the supply system, according to Schaffartzik et al. (2021)). They therefore embody the material basis of a society’s welfare (buildings, infrastructures, or machinery). Like the MuSIASEM school, the Vienna school gives stocks a crucial role in locking societies into specific patterns of resource usage (Schaffartzik et al. 2021, 1410), setting path dependencies for resource use patterns (e.g., cars require transport infrastructures and air-conditioned appliances need electricity). These authors consider that “The inflexibility of such large-scale assets of great durability constitutes an obstacle to sustainability transformations” (Schaffartzik et al. 2021, 1415). They are not the only ones. For example, Kullmann et al. (2021) argue that the energy system transition goes hand in hand with a change in material flows and stocks. For their part, Müller et al. (2014) highlight the usefulness of a dynamic stock/flow nexus approach to calculate an economy’s future demands in natural resources. Consequently, and according to the law of energy conservation, the nexus of flows and stocks is defined

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as follows: Material Input into The System = Material Output + Changes in Material Stocks (Kullmann et al. 2021, 2). Energy and material flows, which build and maintain stocks, are measured according to the EW-MEFA methodology (Eurostat 2001, 2012; OECD 2008). MFA measures solid, gaseous, and liquid materials—excluding air and water— based on physical units (metric tons). Energy flows are measured in joules. This methodology considers “all material inputs and outputs to the system”, but as Eisenmenger acknowledges (2016, 234), “it treats the socioeconomic system itself and any processes therein as a ‘black box’”. The Vienna school has precisely attempted to define its content by analyzing the flow/stock nexus (Fig. 6.4). Its work has shown that “the fraction of all materials extracted globally by humans that was used to build up stocks grew from just over 20% in 1900 to more than one-half in 2015” (Krausmann et al. 2017). In recent years, this school has explored the stock-flow-practice nexus to estimate societies’ material consumption levels and their degree of sustainability (Haberl et al. 2017, 2021) as well as to introduce social, economic, and even political-institutional variables into the biophysical analysis. Nevertheless, and as we already advanced in Chap. 3, we believe that funds and stocks should not be categorically differentiated and that both concepts can even be combined. Dissipation structures of biophysical origin, such as the human population, livestock, or territory, i.e., the environment that surrounds society, must always be considered as fund elements. Indeed, their degradation leads, in turn, to the deterioration of the quality and quantity of the social and environmental services they provide and that are decisive for society to function. They cannot be considered as mere stocks, that is, as an accumulation of individuals (in the case of population or livestock) or basic environmental functions (the land or the environment). In fact, the eco-social crisis reflects the deterioration of these ecosystem services. The degradation cannot be explained by a lower amount of available resources, but by the loss of species, climate alterations, soil erosion, etc. The dissipative structures built by human beings, which remain constant during the dissipative process, should also be regarded as fund elements. Some, however, consist of a material accumulation designed to provide certain services and can be regarded as stocks. This is the case of infrastructures, such as housing and public buildings, urban infrastructure, railway lines, airports, highways, etc. They represent accumulations of materials arranged in such a way that they can be used by other dissipation structures to perform their functions (city inhabitants, cars, trains, airplanes, etc.) (Schaffartzik et al. 2021, 1410).

6.5 Biophysical Funds Human societies are equipped with a wide range of stocks and/or funds to meet their needs. They can be grouped into four essential categories: (i) the natural environment, understood as natural resources and ecosystems services; (ii) the livestock population; (iii) human dissipative structures (funds and stocks); and (iv), the human

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population. In this sense, it is useful to distinguish biophysical stocks or fund elements from social ones as they are not reproduced in the same way. Indeed, all stocks or funds work with different flows and therefore use distinct metrics, depending on their biophysical or social nature. We agree here with Giampietro et al. (2014, 29) who stated that the flow characteristics are closely related to the fund that originates them. A territory or land is colonized or appropriated by a society to generate energy and material flows as well as to provide environmental services. It is usually measured in hectares and subdivided into different uses that produce plant biomass, metallic or non-metallic minerals, and fossil fuels, measured in tons or in energy. We will return to this issue in subsequent sections. In any event, ecosystems, including those in which society intervene (agroecosystems), generate flows of ecosystem services, and a share of the latter go towards their own renewal (De Groot et al. 2003; Ekins et al. 2003; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Folke et al. 2011). According to Schröter et al. (2014), each ecosystem has a specific capacity to provide these services, according to its edaphoclimatic conditions. Any adequate provision of services will depend on the agroecosystem’s health, that is, on the size and sustainability of its fund elements (Cornell 2010; Costanza 2012). Conversely, the degradation of an ecosystem’s fund elements can impoverish its provision of ecosystem services (Burkhard et al. 2011). As widely known, services are usually grouped into four categories: provision, regulation, support, and cultural services. Provision includes the extraction of goods (e.g., timber, firewood, food, and fiber). Regulatory services help to modulate the ecosystem processes (e.g., carbon sequestration, climate regulation, pest and disease control and waste recycling). Support services sustain the provision of all other categories (e.g., photosynthesis, soil formation, nutrient recycling). And lastly, cultural services contribute to spiritual wellbeing (e.g., recreational, religious, spiritual, and aesthetic well-being) (de Groot et al. 2010). Livestock originates flows destined both to society and to agroecosystems, providing useful animal biomass for society in the form of food (meat, milk, fats, etc.) or raw materials (wool, skins, etc.) and certain services, some of which are essential, such as manure to renew soil fertility. In societies with organic metabolic regimes, the herd was adapted to each territory’s soil and climate conditions and to the interests of the society on which it depended. With its functional biodiversity, livestock mediated different ecological agroecosystem processes. Its composition therefore had to be diverse to take advantage of the various food resources available (herbaceous pastures, trees, crop residues, feed, etc.), across very different environments (wetlands, steep slopes, etc.) and to generate a wide range of goods and services (food, work, fiber, etc.). Therefore, the livestock population had to present a certain degree of diversification and balance between the availability of land and resources and society’s needs. It could be neither too simplified nor too specialized. This explains the diversity of breeds, herd species, and the multiple functions of animals (traction, reproduction, food, and raw material production). This took place as long as no biomass flows were imported from third countries. Today, growing transport capacity and increasing cost differences in production have encouraged the widespread importation of large quantities of plant biomass to feed a livestock herd. In some cases, herds can no longer be maintained by native agroecosystems, owing

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to their size and nature (monogastric or granivorous). These imported biomass flows have allowed to sustain a huge livestock herd that is highly specialized in meat or milk production. The livestock is composed of a few breeds, is confined, and is destined to meet the growing meat and dairy consumption demands that have characterized the Western diet for several decades. Therefore, being the biophysical fund/stock that it is, the livestock herd can be reproduced, maintained, or increased only thanks to a continuous flow of mostly vegetal (but not only) biomass—i.e., internal flows or imports. Its size is usually measured in standard 500 kg livestock units (LU500). For their part, the generated flows are expressed in kg or t of animal biomass ha−1 or, if the flows are expressed in energy units, in LU or MJ ha−1 .

6.6 Social Funds: The Human Population The human population is a point of connection between society and nature, it is thus considered both a biophysical and social stock or fund. The human population generates human workflows, which are usually measured in work hours or days (hours or days/year−1 ). The funds and/or stocks process energy and materials to produce biomass thanks to human work. The latter also presents a peculiarity that makes it decisive: it incorporates an information flow. Regarding its maintenance and reproduction, the human population depends on the families or domestic groups in which work originates and on other dissipative social structures that provide services, e.g., health or education. The biophysical conception of human labor challenges the notion used in conventional economics, as the latter takes only paid work into account (Gómez-Baggethum and Naredo 2020). The only work that generates value and is therefore remunerated is the work involved in the production of goods and services. In other words, activities that are not monetized or monetizable cease to be considered work. As a result, activities that are not defined as productive—including domestic and care tasks— are left out. Market or capitalist economies have encouraged the social division of labor and have tended to separate production from the reproduction of labor power (Benería 2019). The reason for this decoupling was explained by Moore (2017). According to the latter, modern economic growth, i.e., the accumulation of capital that makes growth possible, has historically rested on the cheapening of the four basic economic inputs of the production and reproduction systems: energy, raw materials, food, and work. Work has been cheapened through the appropriation of a part of it, especially biological reproduction work and labor, and mainly domestic work. Paid labor has been at the heart of capitalist exploitation, as denounced by Marx using the concepts of absolute and relative surplus value. But the system has also appropriated domestic labor, externalizing the costs of social reproduction. Feminist economics have shed light on these reproductive jobs that are nonremunerated by the market and, in general, by the economic system (Salleh 1997; Barca 2020). In a classic work, Miess (1986) affirmed that the reproduction of the

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capitalist system was based on the unpaid work of women, nature, and colonies. For his part, Federici (2018, 13) has criticized the fact that, for conventional economics, salaries are sufficient to cover reproduction costs. She considers that homes and families also constitute production centers: they manufacture labor power. According to Carrasco (2011, 213), capitalist market production could not function if it had to pay real subsistence wages. Consequently, it transfers reproduction costs to the domestic sphere and remunerates the labor force well below its real costs. From a socio-metabolic viewpoint, social production cannot be separated from reproduction. Domestic work, for example, is essential for both biological reproduction and labor reproduction. The latter concept also includes the reproduction of knowledge associated with the workforce. As Benería (2019, 136–7) rightly points out, domestic chores require many hours of work to maintain the home and its provisioning, that is, all tasks related to meeting a family’s basic needs (clothing, hygiene, health, and food processing). In family farming, for example, domestic work also includes tasks that are directly productive and oriented towards family consumption or the maintenance of agroecosystem infrastructures (Guzmán et al. 2022). For social metabolism to function, both productive and reproductive tasks are necessary. They must therefore be taken into account and quantified, regardless of where they take place, whether in the context of economic activities or in the domestic sphere. The notion of work used in conventional economics is thus not useful for socio-metabolic analysis. If, in line with our proposal, we adopt a thermodynamic approach, we must consider and quantify all activities relating to the operation, construction, and reproduction of the funds and/or stocks that make up a society’s metabolism. We call this human work invested metabolic work, and it needs to be measured in energy units as well as information units. Metabolic work does not encompass all social exosomatic activities that involve free energy dissipation (e.g., the work of organizing a party or going to a religious rite, etc.), but only those that reverse the operation, construction, and reproduction of funds/stocks. Metabolic reproduction should not be confused with social reproduction. Metabolic reproduction refers to the hours (knowledge + energy) that are invested in the functioning and conservation of social metabolism. In contrast, social reproduction refers to activities invested in perpetuating the social system, including leisure activities, culture, etc., which do not need to have direct metabolic functions. Consequently, metabolic work (MW) could be formulated as the sum of paid and unpaid work. The latter includes reproductive tasks in the productive, domestic, and social spheres. For example, some tasks performed in agricultural reproduction are often not remunerated on the market, such as: seed conservation and exchange; agricultural infrastructure repairs; local knowledge conservation and transmission, etc. According to Smetschka et al. (2016) and Fischer-Kowlaski and Haas (2016), community work encompasses voluntary and honorary work, association activities, and political engagement. MW = ppw + upw (rw = dw + c + br + cw . . .) where

(6.1)

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paid productive work unpaid productive work reproductive work domestic work care biological reproduction community work.

In organic or agrarian metabolic regimes, peasant families performed the bulk of the metabolic work. The industrial metabolic regime progressively penetrated agricultural activity, leading it to be subordinated or subsumed by the market. Consequently, value was attributed only to the agricultural work directly invested in the agricultural production of cash crops, leaving out all other metabolic tasks (those that guaranteed the adequate provision of agroecosystem services). Some of this labor has been undertaken by the Welfare State throughout the twentieth century, though highly unevenly depending on the countries. As a result, tasks such as extinguishing forest fires, caring for the elderly, etc. have been partially remunerated. They have had to be paid for, however, through taxes, largely collected from worker salaries. Our metabolic work definition does not include the tasks performed by nature that guarantee the conditions for the reproduction of human beings. Such tasks are performed by other living beings and make the provision of basic ecosystem services possible. As denounced by ecological economists, these services are not remunerated by the market either (Costanza et al. 2014). María Mies (1986) considered that nature’s unpaid work, together with that of women’s, plays a key role in reproducing the capitalist system. Moore (2017, 9) argues that capitalism is sustained by: “laborpower, unpaid human work and the work of nature as a whole”: a “trialectic” of work. Nevertheless, we have considered here nature’s work as environmental services, some of which derive directly from agroecosystem management. They consist of work that is performed by nature and appropriated by human beings—as in the case of other natural resources—are thus included in the energy, material, and information that flows from the environment to society. Those tasks do not constitute human work and, therefore, are not considered part of the metabolic work category. The flows are generated from the territory or land fund element where the metabolic exchange takes place. To quantify human workflows and their reproduction costs, it is possible to use the Time Budget methodology that calculates the population Time Use at all times. Naturally, human work requires energy, mainly endosomatic energy, to maintain and reproduce itself. But, as human societies have become more complex, the cost of reproduction has also increased and now includes all the exosomatic energy embodied in this process (or its monetary equivalent). As the metabolic profile of contemporary societies has increased, the cultural consumption of energy and materials has grown and therefore so has its monetary cost.

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6.7 Other Social Funds/Stocks Finally, social (or man-made) funds or stocks are the set of artifacts capable of either of converting energy and material flows into flows of intermediate or consumer goods or services such as health, education, etc.—or capable of generating new stocks or funds. Social funds or stocks are usually measured, for example, in terms of installed capacity, expressed in kW of power or cv, and its flows in kW/h−1 or MJ ha−1 , etc. or productive capacity. The maintenance and conservation of these funds or stocks requires investing energy and materials. Whatever their identity, stocks/funds require an amount of energy and/or materials to enable both operating and producing goods and services, and to maintain them themselves. Stocks or funds must be fed and maintained, but with the flows that correspond to their nature. For example, the industrialization of agriculture has consisted of replacing the agroecosystems’ inherent biogeochemical circuits by working capital. The manufacturing and maintenance of this latter working capital depends on flows outside the agricultural sector, usually the market. This explains a fundamental difference in the metabolic functioning of traditional and industrialized agroecosystems. The reproduction of fund elements was possible through biomass flows in organic metabolic regimes, but in the industrial metabolic regime, it is external fossil energy flows that largely reproduce social funds. In addition, they can cause environmental deterioration when they attempt to reproduce biophysical funds, especially agroecosystem services. For example, only biomass can feed the trophic chains that sustain both the agroecosystem’s soil life and biodiversity in general. The deterioration of the colonized or appropriated territory cannot be compensated with energy and external materials of a different nature than plant biomass. In this way, agricultural industrialization can be interpreted as a process of replacement of biophysical dissipative structures—inherent to agroecosystems and maintained by peasants through their integrated management—with man-made dissipative structures or, in economic terms, with technical production means obtained through the market and, to a lesser extent, through state intervention.

6.8 Metabolic Flows: Energy, Emergy, and Exergy All natural processes and all human activities involve energy transformations. In general terms, civilizational evolution of human societies can be visualized as a continuous increase in the use of energy, expressed as larger volumes of foodstuffs, the mobilization of further sophisticated and complex artifacts, and more efficient transformation of materials, commodities, and people (Adams 1975; Smil 1994; Debeir et al. 1991). Because of this trend, the tangible or visible material flows from and towards nature are frequently expressed in energetic terms, and quantified by means of several indexes using energy units. Almost without exception, researchers

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using the concept of social metabolism commonly make their quantitative analyses by measuring material flows in terms of energy. The obsession with caloric or energetic assessments is not exclusive to metabolic studies. Such measurements existed before as a method to analyze societies (White 1959; Moran 1990; Pimentel and Pimentel 1979), a task predominantly assumed by scholars belonging to the field of cultural ecology. What is interesting is that the debate and theoretical reflection regarding the energetic analysis of societies that has taken place over the past three decades has led to new, more robust and precise theoretical frameworks, concepts, indexes, and measuring units. Energy concept is usually defined as the ability to work and is based on the physical principles of labor, requiring energy inputs and energy measurement in heat units (or molecular motion). In fact, theoretically, the energy concept can engender limited or even reductionist results when used to quantitatively analyze more complex work processes, such as nature-society exchanges. In other words, it is illogical to quantify a complex process such as the material flows transiting from nature to societies only in caloric terms: “…converting all energies of the biosphere to their heat equivalents reduces all work processes of the biosphere to heat engines. Human beings, then, become heat engines and the value of their services and information would be nothing more than a few thousand calories per day. Obviously not all the energies are the same… (Brown and Ulgiati 1999, 487)”. As a result, the human ecologist Odum (1971, 1996) developed the idea of emergy, or embodied energy analysis, which distinguishes between different kinds of energy proceeding from the natural environment (biosphere, geosphere, atmosphere). This new method of analysis uses the thermodynamic basis of all forms of energy and materials but converts them into equivalents of one form of energy: sunlight. Emergy is the amount of potential energy that is required to do something, and therefore it is in some sense the memory of energy. The approach known as Emergy Accounting has been frequently used over the past two decades in studies going from family farm scales (Souza and Ortega 2007) to national(Siche and Ortega 2007) and global-scale (Brown and Ugiati 1999) processes. Another theoretical innovation in the analysis of energy flows is the concept of exergy, defined as the maximum level of useful work that can be developed during the process of thermodynamic equilibration between one or more systems (Dincer and Rosen 2007). Exergy quantifies the ratio between the resources available to perform a thermodynamic task, and the resources that are actually consumed to accomplish such a task; i.e., it evaluates a system’s energy efficiency in terms of the energy that is actually used. Although less generalized than emergy as a conceptual framework, exergy has also been used to evaluate cases at different scales. Noticeable cases are China’s exergetic profile (Chen et al. 2006), and the detailed evaluation of an indigenous community in Mexico (Martínez-Negrete et al. 2013). As we have shown, the social metabolism model provides a specific funds and flows architecture. Therefore, the three evaluation methodologies of material flows— energy, emergy, and exergy—can be applied simultaneously to analyze concrete cases, even for comparative means, using the five above-described social-metabolic functions as referents.

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6.9 The Tangible and the Intangible. Information Flows Until today, the general process of metabolism has been approached as a merely material phenomenon (which explains why its main analysts have commonly been economists from the new field of ecological economics). But human beings grouped in societies do more than eating, drinking, sweating, growing, copulating, excreting, and dying. They do not either exclusively dedicate themselves to building structures or manufacturing instruments, weapons, mechanisms, or machines. They also dream, imagine, believe, know, invent signs, and languages for communicating— establish relations between them—conceive and establish regulations, norms and laws, design technologies, make transactions, and build institutions with different goals and at different scales. This other immaterial dimension of metabolism is a somewhat emergent property characterized not by matter or energy flows, but by information flows. The material dimension of the metabolic process even since the simplest societies, are embedded in social relations. The metabolic processes have always been conditioned by diverse forms of institutions, knowledge, cosmovisions, regulations, norms and agreements, technological know-hows, forms of property, and modes of communication and government. The five metabolic functions can be configured in specific and more or less permanent ways, allowing us to refer to precise forms of organization among humans and between humans and nature. It is these superstructures or institutions that—together with other equally intangible dimensions—express strictly determined social relations such as family, market, resource access rules, forms of property, political power, taxes, kinship, reciprocal aid, etc. that socially organize the metabolic processes. In other words, the matter and energy flows that embody the material or tangible part of the metabolism between nature and society, are always conditioned, regulated, and articulated by these intangible superstructures that exist and persist by means of information flows. Metabolic processes operate as the hardware of social metabolism: they embody the material and energetic crust, and the tangible part of human societies. For their part, the institutions and their corresponding symbolic systems—juridical, economic, and social regulations—are the immaterial, invisible parts organized by flows of information that function as social metabolism software. Social metabolism hardware and software have been reciprocally determined throughout history through processes that have remained obscure. They need to be studied, discovered, and analyzed. Therefore, each society organizes its metabolic processes in a specific way, ruled by a corresponding set of social relations that configure each function. These particular social relations tend towards reproducing and maintaining societies over time via a collective consensus on how to satisfy the basic needs of all sectors in the social group. Unlike visible or material processes that can be identified and analyzed, social relation processes are more complex and less conspicuous: they are almost impossible to characterize. We can provisionally distinguish eight groups of elements in

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society’s software, i.e., the combination of elements that condition metabolic functions: cosmovision—or ideology; knowledge; technology; juridical regulations— norms and implicit or explicit agreements; political rules; cultural rules; economic rules; and property rules. There is a caveat: all the latter elements must be contemplated as incommensurable, i.e., difficult to quantify, and their individual, relative weight must be determined in each case.

6.10 Socio-metabolic Relationships and the Institutional Framework Notable among this broad set of relations are what we could call, in line with Marx, socio-metabolic relations. Indeed, the relationships established by human beings among themselves and with nature determine the specific configuration of social metabolism at each moment in time and space. These relationships are determined by forms of social interaction directed towards survival. In biophysical terms, this means that the funds and stocks that make up a society’s dissipative structures, together with the natural resources and environmental services that make them work, are articulated in a specific way, through processed information flows. These flows not only contain the instructions on how to design, build, maintain, and operate such funds, but they also order the distribution of the goods, services, and waste they are producing and will produce in the future. Consequently, again following Marx, socio-metabolic relations could be described as the relationships established in the metabolic processes of appropriation, transformation, distribution, consumption, and excretion. The rules governing access to stocks and the distribution of goods, services, and waste constitute the core of these socio-metabolic relations. The rules establish the modalities of appropriation and stable possession of funds/stocks together with the flows that make them work, that is, the links between flows, funds, and stocks. As we saw in Chap. 5, the diversity of ownership modalities is an essential component of the institutional framework that guarantees and maintains the metabolic regime. At each moment in history, these relationships, established around the metabolic process, have been institutionalized through rules and norms that regulate the access and enjoyment of the goods and services they produce and whose validity is ensured by the State, that is, by political institutions. Since the emergence of liberal economies in the nineteenth century, this access has been controlled by two fundamental institutions. The first is private property, that is, a legal norm that enshrines direct or indirect appropriation through income (which is the value of future negentropy). The second is the market as an institution, that assigns the goods and services generated in the metabolic process to alternative uses. These are the institutions that are mainly responsible for social inequality and that are therefore perhaps the major source of physical and metabolic entropy, as we saw in Chap. 5.

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In short, metabolic relationships are essential to understand not only the specific configuration of metabolic regimes, but also to understand their dynamics. The information flows that circulate within societies are extremely complex and difficult to measure. Consequently, our basic model takes into account the information flows that act as drivers of metabolic dynamics. As an illustration, let us take the case of the agricultural sector in a highly monetized market and privately owned economies. In this scenario, decisions are directly influenced by input purchase prices and by the prices received in exchange for the harvest. In other words, farmers receive inflows in the form of prices received and paid that determine the remuneration they obtain for the harvest and that sustains the domestic group. Farmers themselves emit outflows that are embedded in agricultural work and agroecosystem management decisions. We will look at this in more detail in Chap. 13. Money constitutes a flow of information and from a metabolic perspective, this flow is synthetic and highly efficient. It reduces complexity and subsumes the multiplicity of different economic variables. The multipurpose characteristic of money creates close links between the biophysical and social components of social metabolism. As Swanson et al. (1997) suggest, money is a commodity, but it is also information. Even if understood as a measure of entropy, money can be evaluated according to its ability to decrease the future levels of a social system’s entropy. Money, expressed through relative prices, has transmitted information that has largely explained social agent behaviors, in this case farmers. And this applies especially to societies in which exchanges are monetized. This does not mean that markets, as they are organized today, have determined peasant behaviors through relative prices. Markets have not always been the main or sole mode of exchange of goods and services. Their dynamics therefore explain only production decisions in contexts of commodified economies. For example, in organic metabolism societies, stately rights imposed monetary levies on farmers based on feudal law and not on markets. Yet, ultimately, they represented monetary exactions that obliged peasants to sell part of the harvest to pay for them so the price of agricultural products, even in “imperfect” markets, forced their production decisions. The issue is more straightforward in market societies, in which relative prices are the most relevant indicator or source of information. The case is different when relative prices determine farmer behaviors, according, for example, to a cost–benefit calculation. The decisions taken by these agents—like those of other economic operators—are usually based on multiple and weighted criteria. Then there are also other non-monetary information flows that equally influence farmers’ decisions, such as public policies, the institutional framework, etc., or even the cultural values of the rural world throughout the twentieth century. Yet, monetary flows reflect all these cultural and institutional factors as well. The extreme complexity of our object of study would thus make it unfeasible to consider them all.

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6.11 The Basic Model We then achieve a model that allows us to identify more or less stable ways in which metabolic processes are shaped or coordinated. Of note, the model is not designed to reflect any ontology and we propose to call these patterns social stages or metabolic configurations. Such designations would never be more than merely descriptive characterizations referring to a concrete territory and time, and the categories are never prescriptive. Social metabolism as a model and conceptual framework therefore crystallizes into a polyhedral structure formed by two assembled parts that are indissoluble: one immaterial and one material (Fig. 6.5). This totality has, in turn, reciprocal, dynamic, and complex relations with the natural world and its processes (Fig. 6.6). In this model or structure, the material moiety operates as the content, and the immaterial or invisible part acts as the container. The first is characterized by visible, identifiable, and quantifiable processes while the second by essentially informational processes (cognitive, symbolic, institutional, juridical, technological, political, etc.). It will be the researchers’ role to unravel how these sets of highly complex determinants generate transformations over time and which rules operate during these transformations (see final chapters). This basic structure or model therefore integrates the unity-totality that becomes altered over time, but that also collapses or becomes disorganized, reconstructed or fossilized, stationary or unstable, changing or decadent.

6.12 The Structure of Nature: Ecosystems and Landscapes We have hitherto established and identified concepts and categories regarding the human or social component of social metabolism. The realms of natural systems or ecosystems now remain to be addressed. Metabolic processes begin by appropriating or colonizing nature to extract energy and materials from it. Indeed, humans appropriate two types of resources: commodities (renewable and exhaustible or not renewable), and services. The solar energy captured either directly (photosynthetically) or indirectly (through wind, currents, or tides) belong to renewable resources, except for some compounds (such as oxygen). Minerals (metallic and non-metallic), fossil water, and other materials (such as soils or materials) are exhaustible resources. In addition to energy, materials, and water, human beings also appropriate environmental or ecological services, which although intangible and immaterial, offer conditions for the production and reproduction of their existence (e.g., climate, atmospheric oxygen, ecological equilibriums, biodiversity per se, the aesthetic value of landscapes, etc.). Ecosystems provide human beings with environmental services such as an appropriate environment for the survival of the human species, temperature and humidity regulation mechanisms, atmospheric equilibriums through geochemical and physical balances, spaces for recreation, education or contemplation, and

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Fig. 6.5 Diagram of the metabolic structure appearing as two coupled polyhedral bodies (one inside the other): an external one formed by the metabolic processes (A through E), and an internal one formed by the intangible elements (1 through 8). The challenge is to determine the rules governing the synergies within and between both dimensions and their interactions with the natural universe

realms for nourishing spiritual or aesthetic values. While commodities are visible, tangible natural objects that are readily perceived by humans, services provided by nature are commonly useful processes of variable complexity, that operate at different space/time scales, and are difficult to recognize. Strictly speaking, commodities are flows of matter (including water) and energy, while services consist of invisible flows of individual and collective wellbeing. All commodities and services appropriated from nature by the human species satisfy people’s needs as individuals (endosomatic energy) and of their artifacts, such as clothing, buildings, instruments, machines, factories, devices, etc. (exosomatic energy). However, all these resources exist only as parts of the totality existing in nature, because in real terms, all natural spaces are an assembly of unities-totalities with architectural, compositional, and functional structures. Nature is a heterogeneous matrix formed by uncountable assemblies with a given structure and dynamics allowing reproduction or renovation through time. All these assemblies are unique arrays or combinations of biotic and abiotic elements with their own histories that differentiate them from all others.

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Fig. 6.6 General diagram showing the metabolism between society and nature and the main mega-environments (see text for explanation)

These unities-totalities have been defined as ecosystems that, once located in space, are concretely reflected in landscapes—landscape systems formed by landscape units. While the ecosystem concept is Ecology’s most significant theoretical contribution, landscape units derive from several fields of Ecogeography and Landscape Ecology (e.g., Tricart and Killian 1982; Zonneveld 1995; Turner 2005). Ecosystem and landscapes are two theoretical expressions of the same phenomenon leading to two different concepts: the heterogeneity of natural spaces. Ecosystems are non-spatial, abstract entities, while landscapes are concrete and are determined by location and scale. These concepts are the product of over a century of scientific research aimed at integrating biological, physicochemical, and geological processes. In that sense, both Ecology and Ecogeography undertook similar tasks, unveiling an integrated vision of the natural world. They crystalized diverse contributions from different sciences within a concept devoted to the study of phenomena within the Earth’s crust, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and living organisms. Further still, science has demonstrated that ecosystems are identifiable entities in which organisms, their interactions, matter and energy flows, and the biogeochemical cycles are in a dynamic equilibrium. They represent the mechanism by which nature constantly renovates itself. As a reminder, dynamic equilibrium refers to ecosystems’

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capacity of self-maintenance, self-regulation, and self-reproduction, independently of human beings and their societal groups, and following meta-social laws and principles. Recognizing ecosystem dynamics as the object of human appropriation and as the ultimate pool of excretion wastes is thus vital to maintain an appropriate social metabolism. Indeed, societies can only subsist if the reproduction of their material base remains unaffected. Through the created concept of ecosystem, Ecology uncovered nature’s internal structure by identifying unity within the complex and intricate diversity of natural landscapes. But not only. Ecology also shed light on the fact that so-called natural resources (air, water, soil, solar energy, minerals, and biological species) are reciprocally integrated elements forming units that are truly present throughout the various scales of space. These theoretical developments have immediate consequences for the study and analyses of society-nature metabolism. Indeed, societies are not appropriating isolated and disorganized elements, or stocks of resources, but systemic and holistic ensembles or totalities. We must thus acknowledge that to be effective, any natural resource management theory—ultimately, the analysis of appropriation and excretion—must consider the structures, dynamics, capacities, and thresholds of the ecosystems that constitute visible, recognizable, and appropriable landscape units based on their material production matrix, i.e., metabolism (Toledo 2006a, b; Holling 2001). The same applies to excretion, the second major interaction between society and nature after appropriation. Excretion is linked to society’s regulation of waste expulsion ensuring that the volume and composition of wastes excreted to ecosystems do not exceed their absorption and recycling capacity. Given that every ecosystem (terrestrial, aquatic, or oceanic) has a determined structure and a given assimilation capacity, the social excretion process must be regulated based on these ecosystem characteristics. Pollution events have not only multiplied, they have also been enhanced and scaled up by several orders of magnitude. At present, excretion phenomena in their different modalities are the main cause of the global disequilibrium afflicting Earth. At least three assumptions can be drawn from ecological theory that determine the patterns to follow to correctly appropriate natural resources. The first assumption regards the landscapes or environmental units making up the property, plot, area, or space—whether terrestrial or aquatic—that is to be appropriated. Certain factors (climate, geology, geomorphology, soils, vegetation) need to be identified for a given scale. This first step leads to a second stage that is consistent with the recognized ecological potential of each pre-determined unit. Ecological potential is deduced from each recognized unit’s features, and functions according to their diversity, flexibility, and resilience. In practice, an ecosystem’s potential is its capacity to regenerate and recycle these units in the course of their material relations with societies, i.e., its response to resource extraction and waste excretion. If we acknowledge that each particular ecosystem presents its own specific resistance to human usage—based on its structure, functioning, and history—then it is also crucial to identify its limitations, thresholds, and potentialities. The latter eventually leads to

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recognizing what geographers call the suitability of natural spaces. The final assumption also implies optimizing appropriation based on the previous assumptions, and thus obtaining maximum energy or material flow from the suitable ecosystem at a minimal effort. This needs to be done without threatening the ecosystem’s regeneration capacity (appropriation function), and by disposing a maximum quantity of wastes or residues at a minimal effort without affecting the ecosystem’s recycling capacity (excretion function). Based on all the above, we can conclude that any appropriation-excretion process that, for any reason, exceeds the ecosystem resilience capacity threshold would result in a certain degree of ecological restriction. This constraint implies a cost that ultimately translates into low productivity in the short, medium, or long terms. And the latter may occur whether direct or indirect mechanisms are applied to avoid the productivity drop, e.g., the use of agrochemicals to attenuate the natural decline in soil fertility. In both cases, these effects constitute a penalty imposed by nature for the producer’s wrong decisions. It is the accumulation of erroneous decisions over space and time that triggers the collapse of the social metabolism’s material basis, and eventually to the decay and even disappearance of social systems (i.e., peoples, states, civilizations). The magnitude of this cost will naturally depend on each concrete and particular situation. It is therefore theoretically possible to establish the thresholds or limits of ecosystems, and consequently, to enforce an adequate appropriation and excretion modality leading to self-regulation (adaptive management). In other words, we can adjust the magnitude, duration, and intensity of appropriation and excretion acts to the limits and capacities of ecosystems operating as the material basis of such activities (Holling 1978). In short, each portion of the natural space has an appropriation limit (which can be established in theory), beyond which its renewal and recycling capacity would become endangered, threatening its own durability. In sum, human society processes involve the appropriation of unities-totalities: ecosystems (on the non-spatial, non-temporal, invisible plane) and landscapes (on a pragmatic, visible, and immediate plane). We can thus classify goods and services provided by nature and appropriated by humans, and that derive from pre-existent or existent ecosystem functions independently of human presence (Daily 1997; de Groot et al. 2002). A total of 23 main goods and services can be identified. They all derive from four well-delimited ecosystem functions (regulation, habitat, production, and information) (de Groot et al. 2002), operating as the matrix of what society obtains from nature (Table 6.1).

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Table 6.1 Ecosystem functions, products, and services Functions

Processes and components of ecosystems

Regulatory functions Regulation of gases

Ecosystem role in biogeochemical cycles (e.g., CO2 /02 balance, ozone layer, etc.)

Climatic regulation

Influence of biological and abiotic processes on climate (e.g., production of dimethyl, sulfur or DMS)

Perturbation prevention

Influence of ecosystem’s structure on environmental perturbations

Hydrology regulation

Influence of ecosystem on water flow and discharge of water currents

Water supply

Filtration, retention, and storage of fresh water

Soil conservation

Influence of vegetation and soil fauna on soil retention

Soil formation

Weathering of rocks and accumulation of organic matter

Nutrient regulation

Role of biota in the storage and recycling of nutrients

Treatment of wastes

Role of flora and fauna in the removal or elimination of waste compounds

Pollination

Role of biota in movement of plant gametes

Biological control

Population control through food relations

Production functions Food

Conversion of solar energy into consumable plant and animal parts

Raw materials

Conversion of solar energy into biomass used for construction and other uses

Genetic resources

Genetic material and evolution of wild flora and fauna

Medicinal resources

Biochemical and mineral substances used for medicinal purposes

Ornamental resources

Flora and fauna with an ornamental potential

Information functions Aesthetic information

Attractive environmental features

Recreation

Landscapes with recreational potential

Cultural and artistic information

Natural environments with cultural and artistic value

Spiritual and historical information

Natural environments with spiritual and historical value

Science and education

Natural environments with scientific and educational value

Source Modified from de Groot et al. (2002)

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6.13 The Colonization of Nature Human appropriation unfolds through three basic kinds of interventions in natural spaces, each with a varying impact on the appropriated ecosystems and landscapes, and each ultimately giving rise to a territorial expression. The first kind of intervention is when appropriation occurs without causing any substantial modification to the structure, architecture, dynamics, and evolution of appropriated ecosystems and landscapes. This includes all known forms of hunting, fishing, gathering, and pastoralism, and some forms of extraction through foraging (across several original vegetation types). In the second kind, human beings disorganize ecosystems in the course of appropriation acts by introducing domesticated or incipiently domesticated species—or by activating processes of domestication of wild species, such as in all forms of agriculture, livestock-raising, plantations, and aquaculture. The main difference between these kinds of nature appropriations is that in the first kind, the intrinsic and natural faculties of ecosystems for self-maintenance, self-repair, and self-reproduction are scarcely lost. In the second, the loss of ecosystem capacities require a fortiori external energy (from human, animal, or fossil sources) to be maintained. In the absence of human actions, the latter ecosystems regenerate, they come back to their original forms, or adopt bizarre, atypical, and unpredictable forms. The first kind of appropriation corresponds to utilized nature, the second to domesticated nature. The third kind of appropriation was created by conservationist efforts to preserve or protect undisturbed or regenerating vegetation covers, in which the ecosystem’s species, patterns, and processes are protected following conservationist goals. Preservation is based on the utility of the services produced: conservation of genetic and biological diversity; local or global weather regulation; water capture; carbon sequestration; recreation; education; aesthetic contemplation; and scientific research. In this third kind of appropriation, what is practiced is a sort of human inactivity, suppressing all forms of commodity extraction to ultimately preserve the landscapes and the value of their services. So far, we have differentiated the ways in which land covers and their services are appropriated. In other words, we have restricted our analysis to the appropriation of products of photosynthetic net primary productivity. But other forms of appropriation have also taken place—even more so in recent times—in which the subsoil is exploited, such as minerals (soils, rocks, ore) water (groundwater, fossil water), or energy (carbon, oil and gas). In the first case, organic matter is appropriated, and in the second, abiotic materials from the Earth’s crust. In the specific case of subsoil materials, these extractions would belong to the first kind of appropriation if the nature of the material extracted, and the size of the extraction do not have negative effects on the ecosystem structure and functioning (e.g., low-impact, artisanal extraction of water via unelaborate means, or low-intensity soil removal). Conversely, when subsoil commodity extraction has an impact on the ecosystem or modifies it, the activity must be categorized as the second kind of appropriation. The latter case includes large, typically industrial mining and oil operations, in which

6.15 Who Appropriates Nature?

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appropriation immediately transforms nature. These activities come at the expense of large amounts of supplied energy, and commonly generate polluting wastes (e.g., extraction of copper from pyrites). We classified Earth crust material extraction either in the first or second kind of appropriation based on the extent of the negative impact. The categorization, however, almost always depends on whether the appropriation takes place via industrial or other means. Industrial civilization was essentially born and supported by the increasingly intense utilization of energy, water, and materials extracted from the Earth’s crust. It represents an unprecedented event in the history of the human species. Naredo describes this in the following way: “…using iron and carbon for building and feeding steam machines that applied their mechanical force for extracting, transporting, and processing more iron and carbon with which to build and feed more steam machines, proclaimed the spiral of explosive growth characteristic of present civilization by accelerating with the energy and materials derived from these extractions, not only the industrial processes, but all other exploitation processes… (Naredo 1999, 71)”.

6.14 Nature in Space: The Three Mega-Environments These three modalities of ecosystem appropriation allow us to distinguish three large types of environments or mega-landscapes on the planet, together with their corresponding transitional or intermediate formations: the utilized environment (UEN), the transformed environment (TEN), and the conserved environment (CEN). These three landscape expressions together with anthropic rural, urban, and industrial areas—forming villages, towns, cities, and eventually megalopolis—have configured Earth’s present topology. It is in these six spaces (industrial, urban, rural, UEN, TEN, and CEN) that the metabolism between human societies and nature globally takes place (Fig. 6.6).

6.15 Who Appropriates Nature? In early human societies, all individuals participated in one way or another in nature appropriation activities. In contemporary society, only a fraction of the human population is involved in the appropriation of nature in a strict sense, and generally, that share is mostly considered to be the rural social sector. Rural can be defined as the social space made of the units that appropriate resources from terrestrial and aquatic—continental and oceanic waters—ecosystems, or agrarian and fishery production systems if you will. According to FAO’s statistics, by 2010, a total of 2619 million human beings formed the agrarian and fishing portion of the human species. In other words, approximately 40% of the global population subsists thanks to agriculture, livestock-raising silviculture, hunting, extraction, gathering, and fishing (Fig. 6.7). Data of the last few

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Fig. 6.7 Total and agrarian populations over the years 1950, 1970, 1980, 1990, 1991–2001, 2004 and 2010. Source www.fao.org

decades show that the Earth’s rural sector predominated until 1970, and despite its relative shrinkage, the population in charge of appropriating resources from nature has almost duplicated—reflecting the amount of pressure exerted by human society over natural systems. In terms of distribution per world region, the appropriating population is distributed mostly across countries forming the so-called the Global South: China, India, Indonesia, and a good number of countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In total, 95% of the nature-extracting population lives in agrarian countries and only 5% in industrialized countries. Such numbers can be explained by the past century’s technological transformation process materialized as advances in industrializing agriculture, livestock-raising, fisheries, and other forms of appropriation. These figures once more exclude the population involved in the industrialized extraction of non-living commodities from the Earth’s crust, which would only slightly modify the trends—despite the fact that the appropriated volume of rocks, mineral ores, fossil fuel and water largely exceeds the volume of extracted biomass— because the share of people involved in the former largely surpasses that in the latter (Naredo and Valero 1999).

6.16 Excretion: What is Excreted to Nature by Human Societies?

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6.16 Excretion: What is Excreted to Nature by Human Societies? As the impacts of nature appropriation gradually expanded—without reaching a given threshold of magnitude—the extraction process caused few major problems as long as the endosomatic metabolism was kept below the exosomatic metabolism. However, accelerated human population growth, its concentration in urban centers, and especially the onset of the industrial era over the past one hundred years, have all turned excretion into an increasingly harmful, dangerous, and incontrollable process. Excretion has become the planet’s number one factor of ecosystem disequilibrium. What started as simple organic residues rejected by households, cultivated fields, and livestock-raising, fishing or hunting activities, turned into ever less tolerable wastes that were increasingly toxic for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. New industrial appropriation, transformation, and circulation technologies have also caused excretion products to penetrate beyond the ground surface zone. Wastes now reach the deep layers of the subsoil, bodies of water and oceans as well as the atmosphere, troposphere, and even the stratosphere (Fig. 6.8). The appearance of new, non-natural products, such as plastics, created new forms of pollution because of nature’s incapacity to recycle them. The emissions of organic solids and liquids, chemical substances, gases, sprays, plastics, and radioactive wastes are reaching levels that not only pose a threat to human life and the biota, but are also modifying biogeochemical cycles globally—such as that linked to water, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous—and even climate patterns. Excretion has been transformed into an ecologically perturbing force owing for example, to groundwater contamination, defined as the detrimental alteration of the naturally occurring physical, thermal, chemical, or biological quality of groundwater. Such contamination has many origins, including past and present oil and gas production and related practices, agricultural activities, industrial and manufacturing processes, commercial and business endeavors, and domestic activities. The overuse of pesticides in agricultural areas has resulted in the widespread presence of toxic substances in agricultural runoff water and in shallow groundwater. Mining wastes include residues generated during the procedures of extraction, beneficiation, and processing of minerals. The extraction of ore from the Earth’s crust is the first step in hard rock mining. This step is followed by beneficiation, typically achieved by means of crushing, grinding, and froth flotation techniques in order to release and concentrate the valued mineral from the extracted ore. Mineral processing operations generally follow the beneficiation step, which often includes techniques for changing the ore or mineral’s chemical composition, such as smelting, electrolytic refining, and acid attack. The old and new pollutants produced by metabolic excretion from human societies generate complex, interacting, and cascading effects through the Earth system. The cascading effects of human activities interact in multidimensional ways, with local- and regional-scale modifications. For example, because living organisms, the

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Fig. 6.8 Sources and paths followed by anthropogenic pollutants

carbon cycle, greenhouse effect gas emissions, and earth surface temperature are all interrelated, it is impossible to predict the global effects of the metabolic excretion process. In summary, excretion influences the functioning of the Earth’s ecosystem significantly and in many different ways. And excretion is threatening the survival of human beings (Table 6.2). Anthropogenic changes are clearly identifiable beyond their natural variability and their extent and impact are equal to some of the great forces of nature. The modifications are so profound that we are already entering a new geological age, the Anthropocene (see Chap. 1).

6.17 The Analysis of Social Metabolism: Space and Time

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Table 6.2 Ten facts about pollution 1. Pollution is one of the biggest global killers, affecting over 100 million people. That’s comparable to global diseases like malaria and HIV 2. Over 1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water. Some 5000 people die each day due to dirty drinking water 3. 14 billion pounds of garbage are dumped into the ocean every year. Most of it is plastic 4. Over 1 million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals are killed by pollution every year 5. People who live in places with high levels of air pollutants have a 20% higher risk of death from lung cancer than people who live in less-polluted areas 6. The Mississippi River carries an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of nitrogen pollution into the Gulf of Mexico each year, creating a “dead zone” in the Gulf each summer about the size of New Jersey 7. Approximately 46% of the lakes in America are too polluted for fishing, aquatic life, or swimming 8. Americans make up an estimated 5% of the world’s population. However, the US produces an estimated 30% of the world’s waste and uses 25% of the world’s resources 9. Each year 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, storm water, and industrial waste are dumped into U.S. water 10. While children only make up 10% of the world’s population, over 40% of the global burden of disease falls on them. More than 3 million children under age five die annually from environmental factors Sources Blacksmith Institute, EPA, Random History. See: http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandto ols/11-facts-about-pollution#

6.17 The Analysis of Social Metabolism: Space and Time The social metabolism model proposed in the previous sections provides a conceptual framework for the comprehensive analysis of natural (ecological or biophysical), and social processes. In this section, we set out a number of principles and methodological procedures to follow to analyze social metabolism. As defined above, the social metabolism model is an idealized, abstract, and general representation of the totality of human society and nature. It is, however, undefined in time and space so a dimension and space/time location needs to be specified. Once the abstract social metabolism model is expressed in concrete terms, analyses can be conducted either of its entirety as a process, or of its parts, dimensions, or scales. For example, the model can adopt a totalizing dimension, or on the contrary, focus on specific sections of the general process. In that regard, we must bear in mind that how a problem is defined often delimits its possible solution—so one’s chosen problem definition usually also indicates one’s preferred solution. Because social metabolism models a complex system, it can be approached from multiple angles, depending on how the observer dissects reality. Such a dissection is framed within a minimum of three axes. First, the spatial dimension represented by the global territory, which in its most elementary version includes the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and sociosphere. Second, the time

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Fig. 6.9 Matrix of the relations between the three main types (rows) of the general social metabolism process, and the five metabolic processes (columns)

dimension, spanning almost 300,000 years since the emergence of Homo sapiens. And third, the axis of the analyzed metabolic process, provided that in some cases the focus is on one or more of the described processes (Fig. 6.9). Thus, all social metabolisms occur within a spatiotemporal dimension, i.e., they are enclosed within the planet’s boundaries and the duration of the planet history since the origin of the species. Given its spatial dimension, social metabolism can be generally analyzed at several scales. The spatial scope of the approach determined by the analyst reveals the multiscale nature of the study of social metabolism. Broadly speaking, up to six-scale categories can be identified: appropriation or production unit, community, microregion (e.g., municipalities or counties), and national, international, or planetary scales. Similarly, when a historical perspective is adopted, social metabolism can be approached at different time scales according to the time periods under study. In this case, different temporal extensions, or time scales can be determined: years, decades, centuries, and millennia. After all, social metabolism has existed since the rise of the human species, i.e., for nearly 300,000 years. This procedure leads to a matrix with three variables that span the whole analysis of social metabolism: dimension, scale (spatial extension), and time (temporal extension) (Fig. 6.10). The tridimensional framework also reflects the narrow link between dimension, scale, and time as three, continually reciprocal factors. For example, a totalizing or whole analysis will necessarily have to skip a finer resolution. It will have to be limited to a gross spatial scale and a shallow historical horizon. In the same way, a local analysis—say of appropriation or excretion—will be more fine-grained and suited to more detailed historical analyses. The adoption of a given scale or time will depend not only on the analyst’s skills, but also on the availability of evidence, data, and information sources.

6.18 Social Metabolism and the Hierarchical Order

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Fig. 6.10 Social metabolism becomes tridimensional because researchers may approach it from any defined spatial scale, temporality, or dimension (one or more of the metabolic processes that can be analyzed). The figure illustrates five hypothetical examples, each one in a different position relative to the three factors mentioned above. See text for explanation

6.18 Social Metabolism and the Hierarchical Order Although most hybrid disciplines have obsessively pursued socio-ecological models (see Chap. 2), the greatest advance has occurred in the field of ecosystem—or natural resource—management. Such theoretical developments are based on an epistemological reaction to ecological and biological destruction processes that have been on the rise since the mid-twentieth century. During the 1990s, an intense debate took place around ecosystemic management models, generating new theoretical and methodological proposals fallowing Albert Einstein’s famous aphorism: “We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them”. Ludwig published an article under the challenging title of The Era of Management is Over, stating that: “The ideologies of our time (economism, scientism and technocracy) support the progressive view that experts, using scientific methods, can manage the World problems by objective and efficient means. These include the notion of an objective and value-free natural science and the idea that economics can be separated from ideology (Ludwig 2001, 758)”. The recognition of socio-ecological complexity led Funtowicz and Ravetz (1991) to postulate a “post-normal science” in which facts are normally uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions are urgent. Notable among the myriad of new theoretical proposals about human ecosystem management are those invoking the multi-scalar analysis of socio-ecological systems. Such a dimensioning of the analysis originated in General Systems Theory, particularly in A. Koestler’s (1967, 1969) seminal formulation in the 1970s surrounding the Holon concept: “Organisms and societies are multi-leveled hierarchies of semiautonomous sub-wholes branching into sub-wholes of lower order and so on. The term holon has been introduced to refer to these intermediary entities which, relative

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to their sub-ordinates in the hierarchy, function as self-contained wholes; relative to their superordinates as dependent parts. This dichotomy of wholeness and partness, of autonomy and dependence, is inherent in the concept of hierarchy order” (Koestler 1967, 58). Because of this, it is necessary to explore this new category of analysis. Indeed, this quality has gained ground in complex system approaches, a quality of reality that had been either forgotten or relegated: the hierarchical structure of organization, be it biological, mental, or social. Two trends of thought have made substantial advances in multi-scale analyses: one is the Multi-Scale Integrated Assessment of Society and Ecosystem Metabolism (MUSIASEM), led by M. Giampietro and collaborators, and a second that has developed into the Panarchy Theory. Giampietro’s (2003) theoretical and methodological contributions over the past decade have merged into a robust proposal. As already mentioned in Chap. 3, this proposal has been repeatedly applied to numerous cases in different geographical and economic contexts, and from household to nationwide scales (see The Metabolic Pattern of Societies, Giampietro et al. 2012). The epistemological foundations of this Multi-Scale integrated analysis are based on complexity theory and are interlaced with the new sustainability paradigm (Giampietro and Ramos-Martin 2005). The Panarchy Theory was the outcome of an international and interdisciplinary research project known as the Resilience Project, that generated numerous papers and books (Berkes and Folke 1998; Berkes 1999). Among the latter, the book entitled Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Gunderson and Holling 2001) founded a new theory based on the integration of concepts such as resilience, hierarchies, adaptive management, and sustainability: “Panarchy is the term we use to describe a concept that explains the evolving nature of complex adaptive systems. Panarchy is the hierarchical structure in which systems of nature and humans, as well as combined human-nature systems and socio-ecological systems are interlinked in never ending adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring and renewal. Thus, the idea of panarchy combines the concept of space/time hierarchies with a concept of adaptive cycles (Holling 2001, 392)”. In this regard, Varey stated: “A panarchy study seeks to transform static definitional hierarchies into a dynamic set of discernable levels of observably nested complexity… It draws from ecological hierarchy theory in recognizing that complex systems are ordered in discernable levels of functions… (Varey 2010, 11)”. In summary, based on all the above, the metabolic process can be spatiotemporally analyzed across scales and between scales. Because of cross-scale interactions, a system will maintain itself at a particular focal scale depending on the influences of different states and dynamics unfolding at scales both above and below.

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Martinez-Alier J, Roca-Jusmet J (2013) Economía Ecológica y Política Ambiental. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México Martínez-Negrete M, Martínez R, Joaquín R, Scheinbaum C, Masera O (2013) Is modernization making villages more energy efficient? A long term comparative end-use analysis of Cheranatzicurin, Mexico. Energy Sustain Dev. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esd.2013.05.004 Mies M (1986) Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale. Zed Books, Londres Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and human well-being: synthesis. Island Press, Washington, DC Moore (2017) The Capitalocene Part II: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy. J Peasant Stud. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1272587 Moran E (ed) (1990) The concept of ecosystem in anthropology. The University of Michigan Morin E (2001) Introducción al Pensamiento Complejo. GEDISA Editores, España Müller E, Hilty LM, Widmer R, Schluep M, Faulstich M (2014) Modeling metal stocks and flows: a review of dynamic material flow analysis methods. Environ Sci Technol 48:2102–2113. https:// doi.org/10.1021/es403506a Naredo JM (1999) El enfoque eco-integrador y su sistema de razonamiento. In: Naredo JM, Valero A (eds) Desarrollo Económico y Deterioro Ecológico. Visor y Fundación Argentaria, Madrid, pp 47–56 Naredo JM, Valero A (eds) (1999) Desarrollo Económico y Deterioro ecológico. Visor/Argentaria, Madrid Naredo JM (2000) El metabolismo de la sociedad industrial y su incidencia planetaria. In: Naredo JM, Parra F (eds) Economía, Ecología y Sostenibilidad en la Sociedad Actual. Siglo XXI Editores, España, pp 193–229 Noorgard RB (1994) Development betrayed. Routledge OECD (2008) Measuring material flows and resource productivity. Volume I. The OECD guide. OECD, Paris Odum HT (1971) Environment, power and society. Wiley, New York Odum HT (1996) Environmental accounting: emergy and environmental decision making. Wiley Pimentel D, Pimentel M (1979) Food, energy and society. Ed-ward Arnold, London Rousset C (1974) La Anti-Naturaleza: elementos para una filosofía trágica. Taurus, Spain Salleh A (1997) Ecofeminism as politics: nature, marx and the postmodern. Zed Books, Londres y Nueva York Schaffartzik A, Pichler M, Pineault E, Wiedenhofer D, Gross R, Haberl H (2021) The transformation of provisioning systems from an integrated perspective of social metabolism and political economy: a conceptual framework. Sustain Sci 16:1405–1421. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625021-00952-9 Scheidel A, Sorman A (2012) Energy transitions and the global land rush: ultimate drivers and persistent consequences. Glob Environ Change 22 (3):588–595 Schröter M, Barton DN, Remme RP, Hein L (2014) Accounting for capacity and flow of ecosystem services: a conceptual model and a case study for Telemark, Norway. Ecol Ind 36:539–551 Schmidt A (1973) El Concepto de Naturaleza en Marx. Siglo XXI Editores, México Siche R, Ortega E (2007) Emergy-based sustainability of the Peruvian economy. In: Emergy synthesis. Proceedings from the 4th biennial emergy conference, Gainesville, Florida, pp 111–123 Smetschka B, Gaube V, Lutz J (2016) Time use, gender and sustainable agriculture in Austria. In: Haberl H, Fischer-Kowalski M, Krausmann F, Winiwarter V (eds) Social ecology. Societynature relations across time and space. Springer International Publishing, AG Switzerland, pp 504–518 Smil V (1994) Energy in world history. Westview Press, Denver Souza A, Ortega E (2007) Emergy analysis for small farmers. In: Emergy synthesis. Proceedings from the 4th Biennial Emergy Conference, Gainesville, Florida, pp 325–330 Swanson GA, Bailey KD, Miller JG (1997) Entropy, social entropy and money: a living systems theory perspective. Syst Res Behav Sci 14(1):45–65

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Toledo VM (1981) Intercambio ecológico e intercambio económico. In: Leff E (ed) Biosociología y Articulación de las Ciencias. UNAM, México Toledo VM (2006a) Ecología, Espiritualidad, Conocimiento: de la sociedad del riesgo a la sociedad sustentable. Editorial Jitanjáfora, México Toledo VM (2006b) Ecología, sustentabilidad y manejo de recursos natura-les: la investigación científica a debate. In: Oyama K, Castillo A (eds) Manejo, Conservación y Restauración de Recursos Naturales en México. UNAM/Siglo XXI Editores, México, pp 27–42 Tricart J, Kilian J (1982) La Eco-geografía y la Ordenación del Medio Natural. Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona Turner MG (2005) Landscape ecology: what is the state of the science? Annu Rev Ecol Evol Syst 36:319–344 Varey W (2010) Psychological panarchy: steps to an ecology of thought. Proceedings of the 54th meeting of the international society for the systems sciences ISSS (17–23 July 2010), Waterloo, Ontario White LA (1959) The evolution of culture. McGraw Hill Zonneveld IS (1995) Land ecology. Academic Publishing, Amsterdam

Chapter 7

Social Metabolism at the Local Scale

7.1 Introduction This and the following chapters demonstrate the versatility of Social Metabolism and how SM makes it possible to address a range of issues at different scales. We begin with the local scale and the study of two local communities. The first is situated in Punta Laguna, in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. The approach is characteristic of rural metabolism, linked to studies by Víctor Toledo and his collaborators. As we saw in Chap. 3, this approach has been applied to peasant and indigenous or original (native) communities where metabolic exchanges with the environment are based on a re-elaboration of Marx’s conceptions of work and appropriation of nature. The second community is located in Santa Fe, in the province of Granada in southern Spain. The case focuses on agrarian (agricultural) (social) metabolism, a theoreticalmethodological proposal developed by Manuel González de Molina and his collaborators at the Agroecosystems History Lab at the Pablo de Olavide University. The methodological proposals of the Vienna School (MEFA) and the MuSIASEM school are combined and applied, but with an agroecological perspective, where social and economic variables play a central role. A more detailed explanation of this proposal is given in Chap. 14. These two local-scale approaches attest to two different slices of reality under the same theoretical platform, confirming the great flexibility of the concept of social metabolism.

7.2 Punta Laguna Case Study of Rural Metabolism The best way to fully appreciate the complexity and theoretical potential of social metabolism is to understand the labor process (human work). Labor is indeed the starting point, trigger, key axis, and primeval unit of the historical development and evolution of human society as an emergent phenomenon in the universe. Of all the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_7

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great nineteenth-century thinkers who set in motion the following century’s scientific effusion, Karl Marx was the only one to have understood the full significance of the twofold human-biological and social phenomenon. He embraced this duality in his detailed and profound analysis of labor. Marx laid the foundations of a future socioecological theory, which, given the severity of the present crisis, has become an urgent need and a major scientific challenge: “Labor is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces, which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature (Marx 1976, 283)”. All metabolic processes are triggered and deployed the very moment the most elementary, ancient, and primordial labor process takes place: the act of appropriating nature, that leads to the production of all goods needed to reproduce life. This is why, unlike all other current social metabolism approaches (see Chap. 3), labor needs to be understood and placed at the heart of ecological and social processes as an integrated totality.

7.3 The Dual Nature of Labor As stated by Marx, human beings, as a biological animal species, need nature for their material sustenance and reproduction. They achieve the latter that by means of labor: “Man can only proceed in his production in the same way as nature itself, that is he can only alter the forms of the material (Marx 1965, 43)”. It is an act of production and, at the same time, an act of appropriation. However, given that any form of production is always “…the appropriation of nature by the individual within, and through, the mediation of a definite form of society (Marx 1913, 273)”, the act of appropriation/production is also a social phenomenon. Thus, the dual character of labor reflects the status of human beings as both a member of an animal species, and a part of a given societal configuration. This labor duality plays an essential role in a concrete analysis of social metabolism—i.e., an analysis that is localized in space and time—because it allows uncoupling natural and social dimensions. In addition, it enables us to differentiate the two major types of material exchanges or flows: ecological flows and economic flows (Toledo 1981). To confirm the former statement, we will now engage in an analysis of metabolism based on the finest scale: the nature appropriation units, i.e., the smallest cell in which metabolism begins.

7.5 The Basic Appropriation Unit: P

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7.4 The Appropriation of Nature The act of appropriation that initiates all society-nature metabolism can be defined as “…the process through which all members of a society appropriate and transform ecosystems for satisfying their needs and desires (Cook 1973)”, an act corresponding to the specific moment in which humans materially connect to and organize nature through labor. It is useful at this point to distinguish between a material and intangible appropriation of nature—the latter referring to actions via which humans to relate to the natural world through beliefs, knowledge, perception, aesthetics, imagination, or intuition. Hence, appropriation qualifies the act whereby a social subject becomes the owner of a material thing, and in this case it applies to the action allowing humans to extract a fragment of nature and to turn it into a social component. Appropriation is the act by which human beings make a certain amount of matter or energy to realize a transfer from the natural domain to the social space. In that sense, nature appropriation is an act of internalization or assimilation of natural elements by the social organism. This action determines and is determined by the natural forces. But at the same time, the act determines and is determined by the remaining processes making up the overall metabolism: circulation, transformation, consumption, and excretion. Owing to the above, we will use here the term appropriation of nature differently from other authors, in particular those endorsing structural Marxism such as Terray (1972), who used the term to differentiate technological forms of nature use, or Godelier (1978), who uses it to refer to legal forms of property and access to resources. Thus, our definition is closer to that of Ingold (1987), who considers it a key concept to differentiate humans from animals. Vitousek et al. (1986), and other Englishspeaking authors use the term in an ampler sense, usually limited to the extraction of the so-called photosynthesis products (Carpintero 2007).

7.5 The Basic Appropriation Unit: P Human beings realize the appropriation act through social productive units of different nature, scales, and potencies. Examples of productive units are bands, communities, cooperatives, families, companies, or public corporations, or finally, any private owner who buys labor force, i.e., a private entrepreneur hiring workers. Such units are in charge of performing activities to appropriate elements from the biosphere (living organisms, water, air) and from the geosphere (Earth crust materials). All appropriation units (P) are real and metaphorically located at the intersection between the Natural and the Social, occupying the outer portion of a given social totality. That fraction of the society is what is conventionally known as the primary sector. Considering the statements made in the previous sections, all unit of appropriation P is organized into four environmental dominions, each with a representation in

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space and time, and each being materially related: the three environments previously defined in Chap. 6 (TEN, UEN, and CEN) and the social environment (SEN), the latter defined as any part of society other than P with which P materially interacts (i.e., it exchanges materials and energy). The first three types of environments are concrete natural spaces integrated by special units (ecosystems or landscapes), and correspond to the natural world, i.e., they are located outside the social totality. In contrast, the fourth kind of space corresponds to the social world, given that it is located inside the social totality, and delimits a social space containing all social instances that exchange with P.

7.6 A Flow Model In order to approach appropriation from an economic and ecological inclusive perspective, we need to elaborate the topology of the process (Godelier 1978, 764). Appropriation is both a theoretical and practical category, the process can thus be empirically reduced to flows of goods, labor, money, services, and information (Cook 1973; Grünbühel 2002). Therefore, an adequate way to understand and explain appropriation is to describe how these flows are structured and become integrated into a concrete reality. Such a spatial representation of appropriation must meet at least three prerequisites: (i) it must present a minimal level of coherence or conceptual robustness; (ii) it must reduce its arbitrariness as much as possible by delimiting the portions of reality it tries to represent; and (iii) it must be explicit regarding the categories, parameters, and variables used in the model, all of which must be identifiable, obtainable, and quantifiable. As seen above, P performs exchanges with the three main landscape units, and with society. The utilized environment, UEN, is represented by a series of units (generally identified with vegetation types, relief, soils, and other factors in cases of aquatic environments), which, as properties of P, operate as working objects, i.e., the part of nature that is appropriated without disrupting the ecosystemic structure of the appropriated environmental units. The transformed environment, TEN, is formed by areas that, being a property of P, are used for agriculture, livestock-raising, forest plantations, aquaculture, etc., i.e., the artificial ecosystems representing the fruit of labor, or nature transformed by human actions. The conserved environment, CEN, includes all the areas consciously and deliberately maintained as natural reserves, as untouched areas offering only a selection of services. Finally, the social environment, SEN, is made up of all the sectors of the social totality that, being beyond the limits of P, exchange with the appropriation unit P. These social sectors will be defined in each concrete case by the nature of the exchanges realized by P, which can go from those occurring at a local or regional level (e.g., exchanges between similar communities or in a regional market), to those occurring at the national and international levels, where the unit receives or produces import and export materials—as is currently the case.

7.7 The Material Flows

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7.7 The Material Flows A flow model was created by connecting these four landscape units (UEN, TEN, CEN, and SEN) with unit P by means of several kinds of material exchanges, which— despite their different natures—flow between the latter five dominions, turning them into parts of a totality, or a system (Fig. 7.1). Flow F0 represents the total force exerted by the total unit P in order to realize the appropriation, overcoming the intrinsic resistance of ecosystems, and appropriating the potential resources remaining in the landscape units. In that regard, we must recognize that in every particular situation, there will be different ecosystemic resistances to that same action, which will be determined by the specific physicochemical, biological, and geological conditions of what is being appropriated. At this point, a fundamental rule emerges: the greater the impact of the appropriation on the ecosystems, the greater the effort of P to appropriate them. This latter assumption can also be formulated differently considering the need to create humanized or useful ecological systems, with a structure and dynamics that are as similar as possible to those in the original, modified, or removed ecosystem. Activation of F0 initiates the appropriation process, the latter being a planned human action directed towards obtaining a return flow (goods or useful services). Because of that, the F0 flow unfolds into three sub-flows, F0a, F0b, and F0c, depending on whether it is directed towards appropriating components or processes of the TEN, UEN, or CEN, respectively. Of all the identified flows, this is the most problematic because it is not easily defined. According to Giampietro (2004, 213– 217), the human action triggering the appropriation process can be identified as energy, work, or force, each one being somewhat ambiguous in terms of physical

Fig. 7.1 Graphic representation of the flow model synthetizing the exchanges of P with nature and with the rest of society (see text for explanation)

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categories. Even the fact of adopting energy as a parameter to quantify F0 entails a number of contradictions and ambiguities (see Giampietro and Pimentel 1990; Giampietro et al. 1992, 1993). A central assumption is that P’s appropriation effort—be it defined either as energy, work, or force—must consider the portion of effort required to build and maintain the structure that allows applying that same effort (Giampietro 2004). This additional effort required by the production structure is inseparable from the type of energy deployed by P in flow F0. Therefore, it is one thing to activate the appropriation using only human power (muscular energy), and another to add animal power, or to use solar energy—either directly (photocells and accumulators, solar heaters), or indirect power (wind, water, or combustion of biomass), or fossil fuels (machines powered by coal, oil derivatives, or gas) or nuclear energy. Beyond its particular nature, flow F0 can be evaluated as a function of the time invested to perform an action with the expectation of a return flow, and the resulting parameter seems to be sufficient to quantitatively assess the whole system. Three return flows, named F1, F2, and F3, come from TEN, UEN, and CEN, respectively. The flows from TEN and UEN can be flows of goods (materials, energies, water), services (as defined in the former chapter), or both, while those from CEN are only service flows provided by the untouched spaces whose mere presence is considered valuable. Each return flow is itself divided into two sub-flows, one satisfying the needs of P (F1a, F2a, and F3a) and the other circulating through social spheres (SEN) other than P (F1b, F2b, and F3b). Finally, flow F4 goes from SEN to P. Flow F4 is usually, though not exclusively, a flow of return of what P provided (the three sub-flows F1b, F2b, and F3b). Flow F4 can also appear spontaneously, for instance, in the form of subsidies, donations from public, social, or private institutions—banks, philanthropic institutions, government agencies, other P—either in commodities, money, or supportive aid. Flow F4 is exceptional in that it introduces a new element: the goods needed but not produced by P, and in a second instance, the goods transformed in merchandise (commodities), i.e., goods and services that end up being given monetary significance and valued by markets. F4 is the flow that introduces the system’s monetization. As a result, flow F5 occurs when P uses the acquired money to buy other necessary commodities, prompting the rise of a new range of mercantile exchange between SEN and P. The latter is measured, mediated, and determined by the economic value of what is traded. The flow model is completed by two last components: workforce flows (labor power) from P to and from SEN (Wa and Wb, respectively), and the P (t) transformation capacity. Wa indicates the work force sold to SEN by P, and Wb the work force acquired by P from SEN. In both cases, the flow takes the form of work converted into a commodity or merchandise, i.e., valued by a specific labor market, and is the result of an anomaly occurring in P that forces the appropriation—and reproduction—unit to receive income from a metabolic sphere different from that of appropriation, or to request aid from social actors that are external to P.

7.8 Ecological and Economic Exchanges

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This latter aspect implies P’s capacity to transform the goods it extracted from either TEN or UEN—e.g., fruit converted to preserves, cured meat or fish preparations, lumber transformed into utensils or furniture, etc.—into commodities—indicated by t. Strictly speaking, these transformed products derive from the application of an effort from P that does not strictly correspond to flow F0, an effort that is not a part of the appropriation act, but belongs to the metabolic transformation process. It is worth noting that the flow model shown in Fig. 7.1 excludes the generation and emission of wastes because the latter are regarded as negligible. These flows, however, can also be incorporated into the model as counter flows of the return flows whenever deemed necessary. The latter need is particularly relevant in cases of industrial appropriation. Thus, a particular appropriation model is achieved, enabling us to visualize the various, crucial processes allowing to gain a deeper insight into the whole metabolic process.

7.8 Ecological and Economic Exchanges From a theoretical standpoint, the flow model reveals the existence of a dynamic equilibrium that sustains the appropriation process over time. It also enables us to distinguish the forces operating as variables, and as stabilizing or disruptive, positive or negative factors of such equilibrium. But above all, the flow model reveals the existence of two different, yet coupled, material exchanges. The two shaded areas intersecting around P depicted in Fig. 7.2 the occurrence of two ranges, spheres, or gravitational fields in which P exists and reproduces itself. Thus, P behaves as one more biological species in that it consumes directly all that it produces itself. In such a case, the permanence of P depends on its ability to obtain the amount and quality of commodities and services required by P members from the environment without depleting these commodities and services. The exchange can be expressed as F0/ F1a + F2a + F3a and will depend on the work force’s (F0) efficiency at obtaining sufficient and constant flows of commodities and services from TEN (F1a), UEN (F2a), and CEN (F3a): a condition that depends, in turn, on preserving the dynamic processes allowing for a continued renovation of the ecosystems being appropriated. We are thus witnessing a form of ecological exchange. Conversely, as soon as P circulates its appropriated products beyond the sphere of its own consumption, P becomes a social species. Its permanence and reproduction therefore become more dependent on the processes and dynamics of the spheres in which its products circulate. This is because P’s consumption no longer solely depends on what is exchanged with nature (TEN, UEN, and CEN), but also on what is exchanged with SEN. In such cases, the products obtained from the TEN, UEN, and CEN landscape units (F1a, F2a, and F3a, respectively) that are either of no use to P, or have a use value for SEN, begin to circulate and are transformed or consumed by individuals who do not belong to P but to SEN. In the latter instance, P’s efficiency is determined by its ability to obtain a sufficient amount of commodities and service

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Fig. 7.2 Diagram showing how the flow model allows ordering the exchanges sustained by the rural community of Tzintzuntzan (located in the lacustrine region of Pátzcuaro, Mexico) with the three environments (TEN, UEN, and CEN) and with the rest of the local society (SEN). Each activity is situated within the whole set of activities making up the appropriation. In the case shown here, the types of vegetation cover (pine forest: PF; oak forest, OF; and sub-tropical scrubland, STS), and the lake (L) determine the UEN landscape units. The soil units determine the TEN landscapes units (Acrisol and Luvisol: Ac + L; Histosol HI; Leptosol and Luvisol: Le + L; Vertic Luvisol and Chromic Vertisol: Lv + Vc; Chromic Luvisol and Histic Histosol: Lc + Hh; Vertic Luvisol: Lv; Histo-sol and Vertic Luvisol; Histic Histosol and Leptosol: Hh + Lc; Ferric Leptosol: Le(f); and Chromic Leptosol: Lc). Of note, the community of Tzintzuntzan lacks CEN. The community scale model corresponds to the sum of the exchanges of all households. Own elaboration based on data from Toledo and Barrera-Bassols (1984)

flows from SEN, which is itself dependent on the type of market with which P interacts. We are now witnessing the phenomenon of economic exchange. The overlap, connection, or coordination of these two types of exchanges— ecological and economic—is not only obvious, it is also a prevailing and unavoidable feature of social metabolism. Indeed, it reflects the transit of material flows through two different spheres: the natural or ecological sphere, and the social sphere. Such a juxtaposition implies recognizing the existence of two separate processes within appropriation which, despite their dissociation, actually remain indissoluble parts of one same totality: the Holon. Therefore, the phenomenon of appropriation/production obeys simultaneously two different spheres or levels, which represent two irreducible though inseparable aspects of the same process. The above fact places all P units between two forces—to variable degrees of tension—that determine or oblige them to act in different ways.

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In societies that produce only what they consume—i.e., when human beings grouped as a society are but one more biological species—the productive process is fundamentally expressed as a natural process. Through the historical evolution of societies, and once economic exchange appears owing to the circulation of products appropriated by P, the productive process gains an emergent attribute that overlaps its natural character, but does not suppress it. As stated by Schmidt: “The metabolism between man and nature—a special case of the general interaction of natural things— was placed by Marx in the category of exchange and, inversely, he had recourse to the concept of metabolism when characterizing the process of exchange. In the direct labor-process, i.e. the metabolism between man and nature, the material side triumphs over the historically determined form; in the process of exchange, which depends of the labor-process, the historically determined form triumphs over the material side (Schmidt 1976, 92)”. If we acknowledge that in relatively simple, past, or extant human societies, such as the band or the domestic community, appropriation can only be analyzed in purely ecological terms, then we have to recognize that in the realm of material production and reproduction, such human groups continue to behave as a biological species, despite the fact that populations are grouped into societies and possess means of communication in the form of language, as well as generate cultural expressions in the form of knowledge, art, beliefs, or ideology. The significance of this recognition is that, from a historical perspective, social, cultural, and economic phenomena do not appear in synchrony, and that the latter phenomenon emerged long after the two former ones, i.e., economic processes are more recent than commonly believed. Thus, the social being is apparently separate from the biological being regarding the features and dimensions that can be considered as ethereal, before those of a material nature. In other words, societies first generate supra-structural secretions— metaphorically resembling non-biological pearls (dreams and fantasies, ideas, myths, art, knowledge, and interpersonal relations)—and only after do they generate new structures of material production and reproduction. In this way, we attain a novel visualization of the human phenomenon. History began with a long, pre-economic period in which people were organized merely through natural nexuses (the ecological exchange), or through natural relations of production (as a consequence of their solely ecological productive processes). It is only once economic exchanges arose—i.e., when material commodities circulated beyond the unit that produces them (P)—that human history fully entered its purely economic phase. Yet, economic exchanges did not appear instantaneously but after a lengthy process of gestation and maturation that can be traced back to the first known societies (Meillassoux 1972). Forms of material exchange took place as early as in bands and domestic communities—that are not closed or autarchic societies in a strict sense. The latter cannot be qualified as economic exchanges, despite the fact that they occur between different production units. The donation of goods for friendship or kinship purposes, or dowries in marriage transactions, cannot be considered as true economic exchanges, because in neither of these “is it possible to confront what is produced and to measure objects against one another. No exchange value can appear in such

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conditions (Meillassoux 1960, 64)”. Thus, from a theoretical perspective, it can be rightly assumed that economic exchange is directed towards coupling complementary economies, i.e., towards satisfying needs that cannot be covered solely through ecological exchange. As long as the ecosystems in the three types of landscapes (MEN, UEN, and CEN) provide P with all or nearly all the materials it requires for its reproduction, that appropriation unit will not be forced to engage in exchanges with other similar units. But whenever the ecosystems’ intrinsic conditions make it impossible to provide more than a share of its means of subsistence, or when the appropriation cost becomes too high, the exchange between appropriation units will be favored and stimulated. In its simplest, primeval version, economic exchange emerges in the form of trading of equivalent and complementary materials between two homologous production units (P and P). Thereon, as soon as each unit’s productive processes appear to mutually condition each other, a quantitatively new plethora of elements begin to repeatedly influence those processes. Production and consumption start responding to factors that no longer belong to the range of ecological exchanges. On the one hand, a part of the production must be excluded from self-consumption, and on the other, a part of the consumption starts to depend on what is externally traded. The progressive development of this metabolism gradually changes the nature of the productive process, slowly immersing it into a new logic. In Marx’s terms: “Constant trading reiteration turns it into a consistent social process. Over time, at least one part of the fruits of labor need to be intended for trade. From that moment onwards, the excision between the utility of things to fulfil immediate needs, and their trade utility is reaffirmed. Their use value becomes disjointed from their exchange value. And on the other hand, traded quantities become dependent on production itself (Marx 1975, 107–108)”. Trade expansion promoted and generated labor division, private property, new institutions, and new relations (social, juridical, cultural) between human beings. With the appearance of money, commerce became consolidated and fully recognized. Trade went from simple exchanges between neighboring productive units, to regional, national, and international market exchanges. All that resulted from innovations in transport that activated and accelerated product circulation. Finally, trading became universal, peaked under capitalism and gave rise to the modern world. In that way, the appropriation/production process began showing features that went beyond merely ecological laws, prompting new interpretations and interpretation methods. Economic analysis became consolidated. Two highly relevant conclusions can be drawn. First, prior to the development of the economic phenomenon, appropriation was essentially ecological, i.e., the economic phenomenon did not appear in a vacuum, nor was it born spontaneously. Rather, it was the same metamorphosed productive process that previously obeyed a different logic and laws. Second, the economic phenomenon adds on to the ecological phenomenon, overlapping it. The ecological phenomenon is not suppressed, so any contemporary analysis of production must, a fortiori, take both types of phenomena into account.

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7.9 Use Value and Exchange Value The distinction presented in the previous section was originally recognized by Marx (1975, 51) in his reflection on the dual or bimodal nature of labor contained in a commodity, allowing to differentiate two attributes in the material flows generated: their use value and their exchange value: “In the process of Ex-change, the use value, which is a product of the direct exchange between man and nature, takes on an ‘existence as an exchange-value or general equivalent, cut loose from any connection with its natural existence.’ Subsequently, through the mediation of this social metabolism, the exchange-value returns to its former immediacy, and becomes use-value again. The transition from circulation to consumption extinguishes the commodity’s social determination, replacing it with its natural determination, since its use-value is independent of the amount of time required for its manufacturing (Schmidt 1976, 93)”. Or as stated by Marx: “…the use value of things is realized by people without exchange, that is, in the direct relation between the thing and people, while its [ex-change] value, on the contrary, only in exchange, or within the social process… To the extent that the process of trade transfers commodities from hands in which they are not use value, to hands in which they are use value, we are witnessing social metabolism (Marx 1975, 102 and 127)”. It is essential to distinguish use value and exchange value because they represent two ranges or dimensions within a same process. Moreover, they reveal that the appropriation dynamics belong to two different, though closely related domains that consequently require different categories and analyses, despite being permanently coupled. In other words, all material goods and service flows are flows of energy, matter, or water. The latter, after being transformed or circulated, become flows of commodities, and eventually of money, traveling through a circuit that can be slow or quick, simple or complex, and that culminates in the consumption of what is appropriated from nature. This intermittent yet constant flow from the ecological to the social is determined by two different force fields. Consequently, any quantification attempt must be based on a method that integrates these two fields in a coherent way.

7.10 Commodities As a consolidated phenomenon, economic exchange is centered on commodities. “A commodity is something that is bought and sold, or exchanged in a market, any good or service produced by human labor and offered as a product for general sale. Some other priced goods are also treated as commodities, e.g. human labor-power (not all of the work as we saw in the previous chapter), works of art, services offered by nature, even though they may not be produced specifically for the market, or may be nonreproducible goods. A commodity has a use value, an exchange value, and a price. It has a use value because, owing to its intrinsic characteristics, it can satisfy some human need or desire, whether physical or ideal. By nature, this is a social use value,

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i.e., the object is useful not just to the producer but to others generally. It also has an exchange value, in the sense that a commodity can be traded for other commodities, thus giving its owner the benefit of the labor of others (the labor accomplished to produce the purchased commodity). Finally, price is then the monetary expression of exchange-value, although exchange value could also be expressed as a direct trading ratio between two commodities without using money, and goods could be priced using different valuations or criteria. According to the labor theory of value, product-values in an open market are regulated by the average socially necessary labor time required to produce them, and the relative prices of products are ultimately governed by the law of value. In general terms, exchange values can also be measured as quantities of average labor-hours. Commodities that contain the same amount of socially necessary labor have the same exchange value. By contrast, prices are normally measured in money-units. For practical purposes, prices are, however, usually preferable to laborhours, as units of account [Commodity [WWW Document], n.d. Wikipedia. URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity]”.

7.11 Exchange of Equivalents and Unequal Exchanges The balance of material exchanges, both ecological and economic, are quantified or measured by some method, and involve reciprocal actions or to-and-from flows, expressing either equivalences or inequalities that will have effects on the total process. In this regard, it is useful to examine the consequences of the balance on the exchanges between P and nature (TEN, UEN, and CEN), and between P and society (SEN). Exchanges between P and the three realms of the natural space TEN, UEN, and CEN become unequal whenever P threatens the regeneration capacity of ecosystems under appropriation, i.e., when it endangers the material basis of the appropriation. Conversely, when P sustains constant return flows against constant effort (F0), equality is manifested as a sign of exchange system health, indicating that P is realizing an adequate appropriation. As stated above, three assumptions coming from ecological theory set the patterns that must be followed for appropriation to be adequate—or equivalent. First, the environmental or landscape units that integrate the property, plot, or productive space (terrestrial or aquatic) must be taken into account. This first assumption allows establishing the second: recognizing the production potential of each of those previously characterized units. It is then possible to identify what geographers call the suitability of the natural units. The final assumption consists of adopting an adequate appropriation strategy that enables obtaining the maximum return flow from the ecosystem/landscape without compromising its capacity for renewal, i.e., sustainably over time. The unequal exchange between P and SEN, that is, the economic exchange of non-equivalents, generally corresponds to a mechanism of social exploitation, in which case one of the two exchange actors extracts a higher value (including the

7.12 The Rural Metabolism of Punta Laguna

185

labor force) from the exchanged commodity. Such surplus value reaped via multiple means is generally obtained during the exchange of raw matter generated by P and the acquired commodities derived from manufacturing or industry processes. Nevertheless, P can establish equivalence relations, for example through bartering or via traditional markets that producers use to complement their supply of subsistence goods and services, e.g., markets in peasant locations or indigenous regions. Unequal exchanges culminate in the course of the economic transactions between P and SEN embodied by monopolies or corporations that centralize merchandise—in the form of commodities, services, money, or work—within a system of concentration and accumulation of capital. The unequal exchange in the economic sphere (flows F4, F5, and W0)—characterized by the rural sector being subordinated to the urban-industrial sector, or the periphery to the center—commonly transfers value from P to SEN by means of the sub-valuation of the goods and services derived from TEN, UEN, and CEN, from the labor force of members of P (flow W0), or from the over-valuation of the goods and services that SEN sells to P. This phenomenon has become particularly widespread in the exchanges between rural producers in the South and city or industrial consumers in the North. Several authors, notably Palerm (1980: Chap. 8), have added a further component as they disclose a veiled form of exploitation: that in which P appropriates under traditional or peasant subsistence rationales, but sells products or labor force as commodities in capitalist markets. In the latter cases, the market neither recognizes nor pays what P invests in self-supply (flows F1a, F2a, and F3a). The latter is equivalent to failing to pay part of a worker’s salary, and it explains the incredibly low, or even free cost of some goods and services of P—e.g., carbon sequestration, conservation of biodiversity, or maintenance of water flows—in national and global markets. We can thus recognize two types of unequal exchanges organized within the general appropriation process: ecological and economic exchanges, that are essentially different, though connected forms of exploitation. The latter distinction provides the basis for a theory of ecological-economic exploitation and provides insights into both the deterioration and collapse of appropriation, as well as the different types of conflicts present in rural zones (Martínez-Alier 2002). This theoretical consideration implies understanding how exploitation between social sectors prompts the exploitation of nature, and vice versa, through synergies that have received little recognition and analysis from scholars. Indeed, the studies on the subject tend to embrace only one half of the story: economic analysts overlook unequal ecological exchanges, and ecologists ignore unequal economic exchanges.

7.12 The Rural Metabolism of Punta Laguna García-Frapolli and collaborators (2007, 2008) conducted a series of studies on the metabolism of a contemporary Mayan rural community in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. They illustrate an application of the social metabolism flow model at a

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community scale. The community is composed of three settlements with 44 families including 235 inhabitants, who appropriate a surface area of nearly 5400 ha by means of 13 productive activities listed in Table 5.1. Although the flows can be assessed using several indicators (energy, labor, volumes, or monetary value), the authors preferred to perform a monetary analysis. The application of the flow model above (Fig. 7.1) at a community scale allows ordering the different activities performed by families coherently, measuring exchange flows, obtaining mean values, and revealing aspects of interest such as: (i) the annual distribution of effort (measured as workdays) invested by producers in each productive activity; (ii) the proportion of goods and services directed towards both self-subsistence and the market; (iii) the monetary value of each productive practice; and (iv) the productive efficiency calculated as the ratio of invested work to the monetary value of the return flow. The model thus generates a metabolic profile that allows conducting a comprehensive and integrated analysis of the different resources appropriated by the community. It is possible to determine which resources the community consumes, transforms and sells as commodities, the services they offer (ecotourism and field support for scientific research programs), and the labor force they temporarily sell outside the community. García-Frapolli and collaborators (2007, 2008) found that on average, the community invests nearly half of its efforts (46.5% of the invested labor per year) into generating self-subsistence goods, and the remaining efforts (53.5%) to producing goods and services for the market (Table 7.1). Of the 13 activities performed by the community, five concentrate 80% of the invested labor. The two activities entirely directed towards the community’s selfsubsistence together account for almost half of the total efforts, and nearly all the labor invested for self-subsistence: the milpa—plots of maize, bean, squash, and other species—accounting for 25% of the total annual effort, and the home garden representing 20% of that same effort. On the other hand, three of these five main activities are directed towards the market and absorb nearly 40% of the invested labor: production of crafts, production of charcoal, and sale of labor (Fig. 7.2). If we calculate the return flows in terms of the economic value of produced goods and services, five activities (milpa, sale of labor, ecotourism, apiculture, and crafts) generate 70% of the total produced value. Once again, the milpa generates 30% of the return flow and apiculture, crafts, ecotourism, and sale of labor together generate 40% (Fig. 7.3)—underscoring once again the key role of these former activities. The flow model allows conducting an ordered analysis of metabolism at a community scale, while the transformation of material flows of goods and services into their monetary values facilitates the input/output, or supply/product analysis. The analysis, however, only considers material or tangible exchanges and does not take into account intangible exchanges, which, as we have pointed out, are the other dimension of a complete study of social metabolism.

7.13 Santa Fe: The Agroecosystem Metabolism Transformation

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Table 7.1 Calculation of invested effort (in workdays per year) and of the goods and services (in monetary value in Mexican pesos per year) involved in the 13 activities performed by the productive members of the community of Punta Laguna, Quintana Roo, Mexico Workdays invested

Monetary value Total

Activity Workdays %

MX$

%

Income/

Self-subsistence

Market

MX$

MX$

%

Workdays invested %

Ratio

Milpa

122.8

22.7

9,167

29.0 9,167

62.3

0

0.0

74.6

Home garden

98.8

18.3

1,737

5.5

11.8

0

0.0

17.6

1.737

Apiculture

17.3

3.2

2,750

8.7

0

0.0

2,750

16.2 159.0

Firewood extraction

22.3

4.1

2,284

7.2

2,284

15.5

0

0.0

102.4

Hunting

6.3

1.2

341

1.1

279

1.9

62

0.4

54.1

Goat raising

9.2

1.7

164

0.5

164

1.1

0

0.0

17.8

Production of charcoal

55.7

10.3

2,083

6.6

0

0.0

2,083

12.3

37.4

Building lumber extraction

5.3

1.0

1,058

3.3

1,058

7.2

0

0.0

199.6

Temporary labor

50.9

9.4

4,212

13.3 0

0.0

4,212

24.9

82.8

Crafts

99.5

18.4

2,364

7.5

0.0

2,364

14.0

23.8

0

Ecotourism

26.8

5.0

3,435

10.9 0

0.0

3,435

20.3 128.2

Field support for science

24.5

4.5

2,018

6.4

0

0.0

2,018

11.9

82.4

0.6

0.1

28

0.1

28

0.2

0

0.0

46.7

540.0

100

31,641 100

14,717

100

16,924 100

78.9

100%

46.5%

Fishing Total Relative percent

53.5%

See García-Frapolli et al. (2007) for methodological details

7.13 Santa Fe: The Agroecosystem Metabolism Transformation Analyzing the traditional agrarian systems can provide us with useful lessons for designing sustainable agroecosystems. But when such traditional systems have disappeared—as in the case of rural areas in the industrialized countries (European countries, US, and Canada)—historical analysis acquires a considerable value. Such analysis, however, depends on the availability and reliability of extant historical statistical

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Fig. 7.3 Flow model of the community of Punta Laguna, Yucatán, Mexico. The community’s strategy of multiple uses includes milpa agriculture, home garden, hunting, gathering, apiculture, production of charcoal, goat-raising, ecotourism services and field support for scientific research. The model quantifies human effort in number of workdays per year (F0) invested in the appropriation of resources from three landscapes (input). The obtained products are converted into Mexican pesos (F1, F2, F3 y F4), as well as the work sold outside the community (W2). For methodological details, see García-Frapolli et al. (2008)

data. The study of the metabolic transformation occurring at the community scale (village level) provides understanding with a certain level of precision the social and ecological changes in a comprehensive way, a potential revealed by the scarce but valuable studies made (e.g., Krausmann 2004; Cussó et al. 2006). We have applied the SAM (see González de Molina et al. 2020) methodology to an agroecosystem representative of the Mediterranean agri-environmental conditions whose evolution over the last 250 years has been studied in depth: The Santa Fe agroecosystem. Anyone interested in a more detailed account is recommended to peruse the original papers (González de Molina and Guzmán-Casado 2006; Guzmán and González de Molina 2007, 2015; Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2008, 2017) from which this brief account was extracted. Its soil and climate conditions are representative of the Dry Spain, with crops that are also typical of the Mediterranean (cereals, olives, horticultural products, etc.), where there is both dry and irrigation farming; among all of the different types of agricultural landholding, there are large, medium and small farms; a place that from very early times has been connected to the markets; a place whose problems today are similar to those facing European agriculture as a whole. The changes that have occurred in the ecosystem under study are, then, paradigms of Mediterranean agriculture.

7.13 Santa Fe: The Agroecosystem Metabolism Transformation

Poplars Irrigated lands Forest lands Irrigation canals Natural water courses

189

Rainfed lands Urban areas

Fig. 7.4 Location of Santa Fe case-study and land uses at the end of twentieth Century

The study area is located in the municipality of Santa Fe, in the center of the region of La Vega de Granada, some 12 km west of the city of Granada (Fig. 7.4) in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula. This area has great agricultural potential, being an agroecosystem with a high response to Green Revolution technologies. Some 85.59% of the municipality’s land has a slope of less than 3% (AMA 1991), deep soils with potentially high production. These mainly fall into the category of Xerofluvents, except for those in the extreme south in sloped areas, which belong to the Great Group Xerochrepts. However, this potential is only fulfilled when access to water is guaranteed through irrigation; this is key given that annual rainfall is only around 390 mm. Months with excess of water are non-existent, causing a strong deficit during the summer and early autumn (González de Molina and Guzmán Casado 2006). Different synchronic sections were selected to characterize the evolution of the different farming methods that have been applied in Mediterranean agriculture since pre-industrial times. In each chronological section, we have tried to characterize the structure and functioning of the agroecosystem, which reflects the methods used by farmers. The different moments of analysis were chosen to combine the availability of detailed sources of information with key moments which accurately capture the transformations in the agroecosystem. As a starting point, we took the mid-eighteenth century, specifically 1752, the date of the Cadaster of the Marquis of Ensenada. There were two reasons for this choice. At that time, the technological changes that would later transform European agriculture had still not begun. The next moment studied is 1904, to capture the consequences of the so-called Fin de Siècle Crisis at the turn of the century, where historians pinpoint the beginnings of the “modernization” of Spanish agriculture and the appearance of the first chemical fertilizers. For this period, as well as other sources, we have a detailed report made by the Town Council on the state of agriculture in Santa Fe. The next milestone is 1934, the year in which the decline of beet and the expansion of new crops on the La Vega area of Granada began, a

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time when organic agriculture had practically peaked and neither mechanization nor the Green Revolution had yet appeared. The last point in time studied is 1997, the most recent date for which we have homogeneous data. The information for 1997 was obtained from secondary sources and complemented with primary information obtained from interviews. A painstaking process of reviewing historic files was required to obtain the necessary information. This information has allowed us to determine the organization of the agricultural ecosystem in Santa Fe, the structure of the landscape, livestock numbers, distribution of crops, production, goods consumed, human labor required for the tasks, etc. in 1752, 1904, and 1934. For a detailed description of the historical and current sources used, see Guzmán Casado and González de Molina (2017).

7.14 An Agroecosystem in Territorial Equilibrium In the mid-eighteenth century, the agroecosystem was largely geared towards crop production. A certain level of specialization could already be seen and some crops were destined for outside markets. Alongside wheat for human consumption and barley for animal feed, flax, and (to a lesser extent) hemp for the making sails and rigging for the Royal Navy constituted the major part of irrigated cultivation. The main source of energy was solar, which meant that through the management of biological converters, all the fuel, foodstuffs, and fibers, along with the feed needed to maintain draft animals and revenue livestock, had to be obtained from the land. In general, the best land was given over to the production of quality foodstuffs for humans, while livestock or forestry production took place on less suitable land. In this way, there was less competition between the different land uses and virtually all the land could be put to good use. However, the edaphic and climatic conditions of the area and more generally in the Southern Iberian Peninsula (González de Molina 2002), did not make multiple uses of the same plot of land feasible, obliging people instead to dedicate extensive areas to the production of timber and firewood, pasture for livestock, or human foodstuffs. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of Santa Fe had adapted well to these limitations, striving to make the best possible use of the agroecosystem. Their organization tended towards a balance between the diverse agricultural uses of the land: each portion of territory was devoted to a particular use and could satisfy the needs generated by the others (Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2009). This relative equilibrium in the mid-eighteenth century can be demonstrated with a simple appraisal of the agroecosystem’s capacity to replace nutrients exported from each harvest. Annual manure production from livestock in 1752 (see Table 7.3) was sufficient to satisfy the demands of the lands under constant irrigation (these were regularly fertilized). On lands which were watered on an occasional basis (referred to henceforth as semi-irrigated), olives and grapevines were grown in association, and above all, wheat and barley, on a one-year sown/one-year fallow regime (these were not fertilized) (Table 7.2).

7.14 An Agroecosystem in Territorial Equilibrium

191

Table 7.2 Land uses, population, productivity, and farm size in Santa Fe, 1752–1997 1752

1904

1934

1997

Constantly irrigated lands (ha)

288

1333

1153

2134

Semi-irrigated lands (ha)

1281

466

496

0

Rain feed lands (ha)

1128

1239

1379

785

Poplar groves (ha)

3

53

223

440

Pinar (ha)

0

0

0

210

Dehesa/pastures (ha)

366

93

93

0

Wet pastureland (ha)

700

600

0

0

Total (A + B + C)

3763

3784

3344

3569

Population [nº of inhabitants]

2384

7228

9344

12,387

Farms [nº]

314

633

768

(*) 405

Active Agrarian population [nº]

550

1675

2123

600

Population density [inhab per km2 ]

61.7

187.2

242.0

338.2

Average size of farms [arable ha]

8.6

4.9

4.2

8.8

Land available per inhabitant (ha)

1.28

0.53

0.41

0.29

Arable land available per inhabitant (ha)

1.13

0.43

0.35

0.27

Final Agricultural Production [pesetas of 1904]

700,018

1,667,166

2,291,288

5,771,681

FAP per active worker [pesetas of 1904]

1276

1296

2231

12,749

FAP ha−1 [pesetas of 1904]

228

524

685

1617

FAP per inhabitant [pesetas of 1904]

294

231

245

466

Data Cropland (A)

Forestland (B)

Pastureland (C)

Productivity in pesetas in 1904

Source Guzmán Casado and González de Molina (2017), (*) Agrarian Census 1999

It is worth considering, however, whether it would have been possible to increase the numbers of livestock, especially the draft animals, which had a greater capacity for producing organic fertilizer. In fact, the number of heads per hectare was very low in comparison with the north of the Peninsula and with other European countries (Wrigley 1993, 55–56). The type of plants grown required a lot of manual labor and relatively little in terms of traction, but even so, the available livestock barely covered needs in the months of September, October, and November during harvest, soil preparation, and sowing. Livestock could have been brought in from elsewhere, but there was an iron law of transport in this era where communications networks were severely restricted: it was not worth investing more energy in the haulage of a product than the energetic content of the product itself (Sieferle 2001). Under these circumstances, an increase in livestock would have forced inhabitants to devote more land to the production of animal feeds and forage, reducing the area dedicated to the production of human foodstuffs and raw materials. Table 7.3 shows the precarious

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Table 7.3 Physical data for agricultural production in Santa Fe, 1754–1997 Concept

1754 1904

1934

Net agricultural production (Mg)

1737 26,524

16,374 32,444

1997

Net livestock production (Mg)

346

567

2881

Human foodstuffs (Mg)

1253 10,654

7427

17,505

Industrial crops (Mg)

68

4716

1200

164 (2) 14,106

Animal feed (Mg) (1)

385

1291

2263

4828

Forestry production (Mg) (3)

30

472

1968

8910

Heads of cattle

2609 3050

3591

4220

Traction requirements (heads)

77

113

108

(4) 4156

Draft livestock (heads)

122

225

158

(5) 8780

Feed demand (Mg) (1)

388

770

1147

– 20,935

Production of useful manure (Mg) (6)

2593 3552

5162

Net demand (Mg of manure) (7)

1667 22,751

16,949 79,991

Deficit

–

11,787 (8) 59,056

19,199

Labour demand (UALs—unit of agricultural labor) 548

1286

1027

453

Active agrarian population (UALs)

550

1675

2123

600

Water (irrigation) (hm3 year−1 )

0.48

3.82

4.53

13.03

Source Guzmán Casado and González de Molina (2017) (1) Only grain for draft livestock has been taken into consideration; the total cereal byproducts produced by the agroecosystem is enough to satisfy the requirements of this type of livestock (2) Includes sugar beet (crop destined for sugar factories) (3) Refers to the cultivation of poplars for timber (4) Represents the equivalent horsepower required for tasks involving tractors, cultivators, or combine harvesters (5) Power installed in equivalent horsepower (6) Excluding, except for 1997, manure from sheep and goats due to difficulties in collecting this from animals not kept in stables (7) The calculation for demand was performed via a balance of nutrients (crop extractions–inputs) to standardize the calculations, and to avoid the variations and approximations of historical sources (8) Manure is no longer used for fertilization, meaning that the real deficit is equal to the demand

equilibrium reached between the nutritional requirements of the livestock and the production of hay and most importantly, grains, the mainstay of their diet. The maintenance of draft livestock obliged farmers to devote most of their non-irrigated lands to barley, and even to sow it on irrigated land and include forage plants or cerealsfodder such as broad beans, millet, and maize in their rotations. The area dedicated to producing wheat for bread-making or plants for use in industry, all of which were more marketable and profitable, was restricted. In the aftermath of the epidemic crises and the price crashes of the first third of the nineteenth century, a new expansion in agricultural activity began which would

7.15 The Disequilibrium of an “Advanced Organic Economy”

193

permanently upset the established equilibrium. The institutional reforms of Liberalism stimulated a significant expansion of cultivated land. Population and market growth in the city of Granada meant growing demand for wheat, wine grapes, oil, and to a lesser degree pulses and vegetables. The agroecosystem specialized even more intensively in the production of cereals. The cultivated land increased including some sections recovered from the river Genil and some resulting from the drying out of part of the marshlands. A large part of the dehesa was also ploughed. The biggest crop growth seen in the central decades of the nineteenth century was that of the potato. Between 1851 and 1867 its production quadrupled, driven by the population increase in Granada and its surrounding towns and villages. As could be foreseen, the demand for labor grew significantly and the population grew along with it. The population almost doubled in just over a hundred years from 1752 to 1856, mainly due to immigration. More and better irrigated farming land multiplied traction and transport requirements, forcing farmers to increase their draft herd by approximately 50%. This was done at the cost of livestock for meat, milk and wool, whose numbers fell to coincide with the loss of grazing land in the dehesa and floodplains. Bovine stock, most commonly used for drawing vehicles in the past, diminished in favor of horses. Competition between the production of human foodstuffs and animal feed continued, limiting the size of the draft herd and fertilization capacity. Draft livestock was sufficient to meet traction demands, but not fertilizer requirements, generating a high deficit in manure, which had to be brought in from surrounding villages. The progression of cultivated land and the destruction of the agrosilvopastoral equilibrium which had previously characterized agricultural production in the mid-eighteenth century, revealed by an almost complete predominance of the agricultural landscape, can only be explained by the importation of large quantities of nutrients from nearby agroecosystems, transferring to these the territorial footprint of their agricultural metabolism.

7.15 The Disequilibrium of an “Advanced Organic Economy” The fin-de-siècle crisis paved the way for the introduction of sugar beet during the 1880s. Despite its peaks and troughs, it would be the predominant crop for the next forty years. Within a new rotation which included wheat and, in some cases, potatoes, its cultivation spread until it occupied no less than 86% of the irrigated area, giving rise to a heretofore unseen level of productive specialization. Traditional crops for personal consumption went into considerable and almost permanent decline. Therefore, the inhabitants of Santa Fe increasingly had to import foodstuffs for themselves and feed for their animals from other areas. At the same time, the capacity of the agroecosystem to feed the livestock diminished as the farming became more intensive.

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The sugar beet crop represented an increase in nutrient requirements. Three-year rotation (broad beans–sugar beet–wheat or potato) shortened the previous rotation by a half and moreover increased the doses of manure used. The annual dose would have been between 13,000 and 15,600 kg/ha/year. To cover these requirements solely with manure, supplies would need to be doubled, rendering it impossible to take on the consequent increase in economic costs. In fact, this expense was already 24% of total costs; if the dose was doubled then the expense would also double, making it half of the total costs of cultivation and reducing profits from 21 to 1.7%. All in all, specializing in sugar beet increased the nutrient deficit. From 1750 to 1885, the price of wheat became 2.5 times higher, whilst the price of manure became five times higher and its transport costs doubled. Under these circumstances, substitution with chemical fertilizers was becoming advisable not only from an agricultural perspective, but also from a financial one. In fact, the spread of sugar beet was made possible by this non-organic input, allowing farmers to reduce “territorial costs” in the agroecosystem. From the outset, the introduction of chemical fertilizers was accompanied by a new intensification of agricultural use of the land. The constantly irrigated area increased by 10% at the cost of semi-irrigated land. In this way, intensive production had now come to represent more than a third of the total municipal territory. Since the agricultural intensification broke the balance between different land uses, such a notable increase in production and yield would not have been possible without recourse to chemical fertilizers, whose active ingredients came from outside Granada and even outside the country (Algeria and the United States, according to the 1921 report of the Junta Consultiva Agronómica [lit. Agronomic Consultancy Board]). The deepening disequilibrium of the advanced organic economy, still limited by the availability of land, made the search for soil or nutrient substitutes ever more pressing. The spread of plants for industry and wheat led to soil importation in the form of manure and barley in the first instance and later of nutrients and fossil fuels from relatively distant ecosystems. Santa Fe’s agroecosystem was now unable to maintain this intensity of biomass production without the support of non-local input.

7.16 1934: The Beet Crisis and the Diversification of Crops In the late 1920s, the crop area devoted to beet had fallen considerably in Santa Fe. The crop was becoming less profitable, yield fell, probably due to plant health problems, and farmers began to seek alternatives. They once again took up the traditional crops: potatoes, vegetables, alfalfa, etc. Then, given its agronomic qualities, tobacco appeared as an alternative to beet. The useful crop area again rose (5%) at the expense of apparently unused land. However, the distribution of land use showed significant extensification of production in comparison with the early years of the century. Per capita agricultural production fell from 11.78 GJ/person per year in 1904 to 9.14 GJ/

7.16 1934: The Beet Crisis and the Diversification of Crops

195

person per year in 1934. The combined effect of the beet crisis, rising wages, and the Great Depression of 1929 explain the phenomenon of extensification. Nevertheless, the market orientation of production had become consolidated by this stage of the twentieth century, conditioning the organization of the agroecosystem. This can be seen from the livestock farming component that, until 1904, formed part of the system as a whole, supplying basic materials for human and animal feed and for the fertilization of the land, as well as a labor force to undertake the heaviest work in the fields. In line with the extensification seen in agricultural crops, the number of working animals fell. The crop area of cereals no longer bore any relation to livestock, greatly exceeding its needs. The abundance of food explains the proliferation of pig rearing, in which numbers multiplied by five with respect to 1904, and the appearance for the first time of a considerable number of head of cattle which were not used as draft animals. In the same way, the expansion of poplar trees would explain the relative substitution of sheep by goats that is recorded in the sources. The 33% increase in the live weight of livestock was paralleled by an increase in the availability of manure. This increase produced only a relative reduction in the chronic nutrient deficit in the agroecosystem. While in 1907, the livestock provided one-sixth of the nutrient needs of the crops that were fertilized, in 1934 this had risen to one-third, but the deficit persisted (Table 7.3). This was no longer so important. The use of chemical fertilizers, often combined with organic fertilizers, had become generalized. According to our calculations, almost 694 Gg of chemical fertilizer of all types were used during that year. Net marketable production per capita fell by half, agricultural employment fell by 260 persons with respect to 1904, causing an unemployment rate of over 50% among the active agrarian population or, in some cases, a substantial reduction in the number of day’s labor worked per year. The system required a further increase in external energy inputs. In order to function, rising to 11,940.1 GJ, and for the first-time incorporating animal labor from neighboring towns in the month of November, when demand for draft animals peaked. However, the acquisition of these inputs from outside the municipality increased the loss of autonomy in the functioning of the agroecosystem. The incorporation of fossil energy was still restricted to chemical fertilizers, which by now came to 6291GJ. Human labor was provided mainly by the population of Santa Fe, with only 18.8 GJ coming from outside the municipality. The restocking of livestock (4222 GJ) completed the imports. In short, the agrarian metabolism in 1934 had suffered a progressive loss in the autonomy of the system, evident in the significant increase in energy imports with respect to the energy extracted from the system. In the same way, energy exports were consolidated, despite the fall in sugar beet, its place being taken by the poplar. The internal destructuring of energy flows and the dependence of the agroecosystem on external energy sources from the markets, where the exported energy also had its uncertain destination, had received its definitive impulse.

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7.17 Agricultural Production Partially Dissociated from Its Territory The industrialization of Spanish agriculture began to take root in the 1950s and even more so in the 1960s (see next chapter). Cultivated land increased by 8.7% from 1904 to 1997. But the most significant transformation was the disappearance of lands classified as semi-irrigated and the increase of constantly irrigated land to 60%. Water shortfalls in the summer were compensated by water drawn from a reservoir (Los Bermejales) and by wells drilled by private individuals and irrigation communities. The expansion of non-irrigated land, which had not stopped since the eighteenth century, aided by population growth and the demands of local livestock and the national cereal market, came to a permanent halt, reducing its surface area to 63% of that of 1904. The part of this surface at lowest altitude was reconverted into irrigated land and the rest, now freed of any pecuniary or nutritional obligations, was repopulated with pine forest. The mechanization of many agricultural tasks and an end to restrictions on the use of chemical fertilizers allowed farmers to devote the remaining part of dry land to alternative uses. The self-sufficiency which agriculture in Santa Fe had within its own territory and which was characteristic of agriculture based on organic energy had disintegrated once and for all. The structure of production radically changed direction, now focusing on commercial crops which could be sown on irrigated land. Cereals, tobacco, garlic and onions, among the other vegetables and fruit trees, were crops which played a leading role in the industrialization of agriculture in Santa Fe. Crops for local consumption such as wine grapes disappeared, or completely changed their commercial focus, as is the case with olive groves over recent decades. There was no longer a place for legumes either, which by 1997 had stopped being grown in combination with cereals, an irrefutable sign of the abandonment of traditional rotation techniques. The number of draft animals continued to dwindle and stabled meat livestock began to consume compound feeds supplied in part from outside the agroecosystem. The depletion of livestock, particularly draft animals, favored in turn the abandonment of manure and the exclusive use of chemical fertilizers, a decisive phenomenon in the dynamics of the agroecosystem. But with time, the farmers of Santa Fe had to face up to the progressive loss of profitability because of the sustained increase in intermediate inputs and the progressive fall in perceived prices. Loss of income was a constant problem which has become more acute in recent decades, attenuated only by substantial subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy. This has led to two important changes: the slow but steady increase in building land and the devotion of a considerable portion of the best farming land to poplar plantations. The construction of housing and commercial premises on flat terrain surrounding the metropolitan area of Granada and land demands for industry and services have offered far more substantial profits in the short term than agricultural activities. The loss of prestige in farming, and farmers growing old or changing profession, have converted the sale of their land as building plots into a type of “compensation” for the cessation of their activities. What is more,

7.18 Biomass Production and External Inputs

197

the pressure for building land has now eased off, forcing the price of farming land higher due to market speculation and greatly hindering the incorporation of new farmers into the system.

7.18 Biomass Production and External Inputs 7.18.1 Net Primary Productivity The agroecosystem actual Net Primary Productivity (NPPact) by ha−1 (Fig. 7.6) has multiplied by 4.1 over the period studied, rising from 62 GJ h−1 in 1752 to 251 GJ h−1 in 1997. The NPPact ha−1 of cropland increased spectacularly between 1752 and 1904. Over this period, it multiplied by 1.55 because of the expansion of irrigation and the use of chemical fertilizers which allowed the intensification of rotation in irrigation farming. Between 1904 and 1934, the NPPact ha−1 of cropland increased by 16%. However, progress in this period was due to the intensification of dry farming. The addition of fertilizers with mineral phosphorus made it possible to move from a three-field rotation system to the more intensive cereal-legume rotation. On irrigated land, it fell slightly due to the partial substitution of beet (a crop, which generated a large amount of biomass) by tobacco. However, from 1934 to 1997, the NPPact ha−1 of cropland fell to levels even slightly lower than in 1904. This reduction was seen on both irrigated and dry farming land. It occurred despite the dramatic increase in chemical fertilizers and pesticides (Fig. 7.5) and the dosage of irrigation water, which rose from 287 to 615 mm. On irrigated farmland, this fall can be partially explained by the fact that crops which generate abundant biomass (sugar beet and wheat) were totally or partially substituted by horticultural products (garlic, asparagus, etc.) whose production of dry matter is lower. The cultivation of sugar beet disappeared, while the crop area of wheat was reduced by half. As a result, although the NPPact increased for the same crop (e.g., for wheat, it rose from 212 GJ ha−1 in 1934 to 335 GJ ha−1 in 1997), overall, it fell from 222 GJ ha−1 to 216 GJ ha−1 . Secondly, the use of herbicides reduced weed biomass from 30.7 GJ ha−1 to 15.4 GJ ha−1 . Thirdly, the reductions arouse the suspicion that there could be serious degradation processes affecting the fund elements of the agroecosystem, which became more visible in dry farming areas (NPPact fell from 108 to 60 GJ ha−1 ). On this land, the lack of water made it impossible to disguise the environmental deterioration by the addition of growing amounts of inputs of fossil origin. On pastureland, the fall in productivity in 1997 with respect to previous years was due to the disappearance of the most productive pastureland, flooded riverbank pastureland which was wet for most of the year. Furthermore, dehesa was converted to pine forest, where production of pasture is insignificant. The reduction in these spaces was more than compensated for by the increase in forest land, due to the

198

7 Social Metabolism at the Local Scale

Fig. 7.5 Evolution of land use in Santa Fe from 1752 to 1997

100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% 1752

1904

Year

1934

1997

Socialized Vegetal Biomass

Reused Biomass

Aboveground Un-harvested Biomass

Belowground Un-harvested Biomass

Accumulated Biomass

Fig. 7.6 Evolution of total NPPact (MJ) by its use in relative terms

poplar coming to be considered a crop in the second half of the twentieth century. The old cultivars were replaced by hybrids, and fertilizers and herbicides were used. Figure 7.6 breaks down the NPPact by its use in relative terms. The SVB rose from 1752 to 1904, paralleled by a fall in RuB, which reached a minimum in 1904. This is the result of the expansion of agricultural usage (agriculturalization) of the territory which progressively reduced livestock farming, due to the privatization of common land promoted by the liberal laws, thereby hindering the feeding of the livestock, especially for small farmers (González de Molina and Guzmán 2006). This allowed an increase in the area devoted to crops for human use (wheat, sugar beet), and at the same time increased the average yield of crops thanks to increased irrigation

7.18 Biomass Production and External Inputs

199

and the use of chemical fertilizers. The expulsion of livestock farming considerably increased the AUhB, which became available for other heterotrophic species. In 1904, however, there was a fall in relative terms in BUhB brought about by the cultivation of sugar beet and potato, whose harvesting involved the extraction of the root from the soil. The AB grew slightly between 1752 and 1904 due to the increased crop area of poplar, although its cultivation was no more intensive. Between 1904 and 1934, the changes in the destinations of the biomass were less dramatic and were due to the substitution of some crops by others of different characteristics. It was due, fundamentally, to the increase in the crop area of poplar, which multiplied by 4, although its cultivation was no more intensive, increasing the % of accumulated biomass in the agroecosystem from 2 to 8% (Fig. 7.6). It was also due to the partial substitution of beet by tobacco, two very different crops as regards the harvested part. This made it possible to increase the belowground unharvested biomass but reduced that which was left on the surface. Between 1934 and 1997, SVB multiplied by 3.1 in absolute terms (Table 7.4) and almost doubled in relative terms (Fig. 7.6). The case of wheat is paradigmatic. For this crop, to the increase in NPPact were added the highest Harvest Index of the modern varieties and the chemical control of weeds. In all, this meant that the population went from socializing 13.4% of the NPPact of a hectare of wheat to socializing 31.3%. However, the crop that most contributed to the increase in SVB was the poplar. In 1997, 61.5% of the SVB was timber and firewood, compared with 32.3% in 1934. The RuB was multiplied by 1.9 in absolute terms and by 1.2 in relative terms. This increase was not due to an increase in livestock farming with respect to 1934. In fact, the percentage of RuB devoted to animal feed fell from 93.8% to 57.6%. In 1997, animal feed for livestock (mainly intensive dairy farming) was partially imported, representing 13.5% of EI. This increase in the RuB was due to the generalization of the burning of waste (straw, thin pruning waste, etc.) in the fields. Lastly, the AB grew spectacularly thanks to the poplar. Overall, the relative increase in these uses of NPPact in 1997 was possible partly as a result of the sharp fall in UhB which became available to sustain wild food chains in the soil and in the air. Wildlife has been practically expelled from the municipality.

7.18.2 External Inputs La Fig. 7.7 shows the evolution of the external inputs (EI). In 1752, imported energy was 100% renewable and consisted of human labor and restocking of draft animals, which were bred in neighboring, more mountainous townships. In 1904, these items were supplemented by the addition of synthetic fertilizers. Superphosphates (204.5 t), potassium chloride (222.7 t), and ammonium sulfate (192.3 t) were the fertilizers most used. For the first time, non-renewable energy was incorporated into the agroecosystem. Overall, this was almost a fourfold increase in EI compared to 1752, with 50% coming from non-renewable sources. In 1934, the addition of fertilizers

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7 Social Metabolism at the Local Scale

Table 7.4 Biomass production (GJ) and external inputs (GJ) in Santa Fe (1752–1997); basic data 1752

1904

1934

1997

NPPact (a + c + d + e)

233,116

521,624

555,846

896,508

Socialized vegetal biomass (SVB) (a)

16,131

94,230

85,265

265,437

Socialized animal biomass (SAB) (b)

6400

7227

7836

Socialized biomass (SB) (a + b)

22,531

101,457

93,101

276,624

Reused biomass (RuB) (c)

69,048

81,505

104,699

201,401

Un-harvested biomass (UhB) (d)

146,750

335,494

323,552

234,484

Aboveground un-harvested Biomass (AUhB)

50,149

193,227

150,992

59,519

Belowground un-harvested Biomass (BUhB)

96,600

142,266

172,560

174,964

Recycling biomass (RcB) (c + d)

215,798

416,999

428,251

435,885

Accumulated biomass (AB) (e)

1186

10,395

42,329

195,187

External input (EI) (f)

2391

9215

11,940

126,914

426,214

440,192

562,799

Total inputs consumed (TIC) 218,188 (c + d + f)

11,187

Source Own calculation

continued to increase, as fertilization was extended to the drylands. An unprecedented item also appeared, “imported animal work”, which corroborated the loss of the Santa Fe agroecosystem’s capacity to generate its own energy and material flows. The loss of autonomy was already complete in 1997, when the industrialization of Spanish agriculture was consummated.

7.19 The EROIs from an Economic Point of View The agroecosystem of Santa Fe as a whole has undergone a process of simplification of the landscape or agriculturalization since the mid-eighteenth century. The territory has ceased to provide the nutrient and energy flows necessary for the functioning of the agroecosystem, and they have been replaced by chemical fertilizers and machinery powered by fossil fuels. It is only partially able to feed livestock. In parallel, the agroecosystem has been reforested. The area of timber species rose from 3.4 ha (poplar) in 1752 to 53 ha in 1904 (poplar), 223 ha in 1934 (poplar), and 650 ha in 1997 (440 ha poplar-210 pine). The existence of these processes and their

7.19 The EROIs from an Economic Point of View

201

External Inputs (GJ)

Irrigation Pesticides Machinery

Fig. 7.7 Evolution of external inputs (MJ)

consequences for the sustainability of the agroecosystem should be reflected in the raft of economic and agroecological EROIs we propose. The economic EROIs tell us about the return on the energy investment made by society in agroecosystems. Socialized Biomass (SB) is a net supply of energy carriers able to be consumed by the local population or for use in other socio-economic systems. The Final EROI can be broken down into two different EROIs: External Final EROI and Internal Final EROI (Tello et al. 2015). The External Final EROI relates EI to the final output crossing the agroecosystem boundaries (Carpintero and Naredo 2006; Pracha and Volk 2011). In the academic literature, it has frequently been called “net efficiency”, and it is one of the indicators most used to evaluate agriculture from the energy perspective (Guzmán and Alonso 2008). This ratio links the agrarian sector with the rest of the energy system of a society—and thus assesses to what extent the agroecosystem analyzed becomes a net provider or rather a net consumer of energy. On the other hand, the Internal Final EROI tells us about the efficiency with which the biomass that is intentionally returned to the agroecosystem is transformed into a product that is useful to society. The strategy followed by industrialized agriculture in the twentieth century has been to reduce the inputs invested per unit of production, relying on external inputs and savings of internal inputs. The results obtained in 1904 appear to show that this strategy is appropriate in the beginning of the process in zones with a high potential response, such as Santa Fe. The import of chemical fertilizers appeared to very successfully replace the high investment made by society in livestock-based biomass to replenish the fertility of the soil. In other words, the introduction of superphosphate and others chemical fertilizers made a process of agriculturalization possible, which produced an increase in energy return. The synergy established between both types of input was possibly based on the high quality of the fund elements of the agroecosystem, such as the soil, water, and biodiversity in the early twentieth century. In effect, organic agriculture in Santa Fe had previously provided large quantities of energy in the form of RuB and BUhB for the functioning of edaphic food chains

202

7 Social Metabolism at the Local Scale

and the maintenance of organic material in the soil. Furthermore, the territorial equilibrium necessary to generate sufficient RuB, while also providing AUhB and the absence of biocides, maintained high levels of aerial biodiversity (Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2009). In this context, the addition of phosphorus, an essential nutrient for the symbiotic fixing of nitrogen by legumes included in the rotation, could have had a synergic effect. This synergy does not appear to exist today when external inputs are partially replaced by internal inputs in the conversion to Organic Farming of very intensive agroecosystems. And so, Ponisio et al. (2015) report an average fall in yield of 19.2% in Organic Farming, based on a meta-analysis of 115 studies. This is almost certainly because the situation is the opposite. The degradation of fund elements requires an energy investment over years for its improvement before it can once again see increasing returns in SB. The distance between the pathways of degradation and restoration is known as the hysteresis of land rehabilitation (Tittonell et al. 2012). However, the increasing application of this strategy throughout the twentieth century has revealed its limitations. Between 1904 and 1934, there was a fall of 29% in these EROIs, which was due above all to the partial substitution of beet by tobacco, which brought about a fall in the socialized biomass (see Table 7.5), and at the same time caused an increase in the use of EI, as synthetic fertilization expanded to dry farming land and RuB increased due to the increase in livestock farming mentioned in previous sections. Viewed in perspective, during the twentieth century the process of agriculturalization continued, though less vigorously. In fact, the consumption of biomass by livestock with respect to NPPact fell from 14.5% (1904) to 12.9% (1997). Nevertheless, Final EROI fell by 25%, due to the low return on external inputs invested, whose EROI fell by 80% (see Table 7.5). The massive substitution of RuB flows by EI hardly managed to raise Internal Final EROI in 1997. The fall in Final EROI in the twentieth century reflects the inability of inorganic inputs to replace biomass flows in the maintenance of fund elements. Proof of this was the early appearance of edaphic phyto-pathological problems in sugar beet. On irrigated land in Santa Fe, the use of chemical fertilizers and the removal of roots reduced RcB to a minimum. The reduction in the energy available to sustain complex food chains encouraged plant health problems which caused significant falls in productivity in this crop in the 1920s and, later, its substitution by other crops. Table 7.5 EROIs from an economic point of view (Santa Fe, 1752–1997) 1752

1904

1934

1997

Final EROI (FEROI)

0.32

1.12

0.80

0.84

External final EROI (EFEROI)

9.42

11.01

7.80

2.18

Internal final EROI (IFEROI)

0.33

1.24

0.89

1.37

Source Guzmán Casado and González de Molina (2017)

7.20 The EROIs from an Agroecological Point of View

203

7.20 The EROIs from an Agroecological Point of View The agroecological EROIs inform us of the real productivity of the agroecosystem, taking into account the ability to reproduce the fund elements, that is, in the structure of the agroecosystem (e.g., biodiversity, spatial heterogeneity, and the complexity of agroforest landscapes or soil quality) and the provision of the basic ecosystem services. We have proposed (Guzmán and González de Molina 2015) four EROIs. The NPPact EROI (= NPPact/Total Inputs Consumed, being TIC = RcB + EI) tells us the real productive capacity of the agroecosystem, whatever the origin of the energy it receives (solar for the biomass or fossil for an important portion of the external inputs). This indicator measures the degradation of productive capacity of agroecosystems, affecting natural resources such as soil salinization or erosion, genetic erosion, etc. In order to compensate this loss, an increasing amount of energy should be devoted to palliate the loss of productive capacity. In energy terms, the return of TIC, considering total productivity of the agroecosystem (NPPact EROI), grew by 49% between 1752 and 1997 and only by 30% during the twentieth century (Table 7.6). This growth accompanied the expansion of irrigation which, in semi-arid climates such as the Mediterranean, is essential in order to achieve a response to the use of EI, such as chemical fertilizers (Lacasta and Meco 2011). It is, in truth, difficult to know to what extent the exponential growth in the amount of water consumed (Table 7.3) masks problems of the degradation of fund elements which could be deteriorating productive capacity. However, we have seen that the modernization of the agroecosystem was not uniform but occurred in waves. The first, in 1904, was focused on irrigated cropland, which expanded progressively. The second, in 1934, centered on rainfed cropland, later becoming consolidated. Lastly, the third wave affected the poplar, which went from being a riverbank tree to being just another crop, in 1997. Figure 7.6 shows similar waves in the fall of NPPact per hectare, in parallel to the progressive modernization of the agroecosystem. Thus, in 1997, the NPPact EROI was sustained by the poplar, a crop for which the NPPact EROI reached 4.6, compensating the fall to 1.1 in the rest of the territory. Table 7.6 EROIs from an agroecological point of view (Santa Fe, 1752–1997) 1752

1904

1934

1997

NPPact EROI

1.07

1.22

1.26

1.59

Agroecological Final EROI

0.10

0.24

0.21

0.49

Biodiversity EROI

0.67

0.79

0.74

0.42

Woodening EROI

0.01

0.02

0.10

0.35

Source Guzmán Casado and González de Molina (2017)

204

7 Social Metabolism at the Local Scale

On the other hand, this agroecosystem is paradigmatic due to its high response to the technology of the Green Revolution in Mediterranean areas with access to irrigation. To this are added changes in soil use based on crops with high biomass production such as sugar beet and poplar. From this perspective, the increase in NPPactEROI can be considered the maximum that can be achieved with this technological package. The Agroecological Final EROI (= SB / TIC) shows the real amount of energy investment required to obtain the biomass intended to society. From an ecological point of view, the return that society receives from agroecosystems is not only result of the energy expressly invested by society, but also that which is really recycled without human intervention. This indicator grew more than NPPactEROI, multiplying by 4.8 in the period 1752–1997 because of the sharp increase in the portion of biomass socialized with respect to that produced. The Biodiversity EROI measures the relationship between Agroecological Final EROI and Final EROI (Biodiversity EROI = 1 − AFE/FE = UhB/RuB + EI + UhB). A sustainable management of agroecosystems should leave biomass available for other species allowing the generation of complex food chains in order to guarantee ecosystem services. But doing this at the expense of RuB might also entail reducing the need for an integrated land use management. Thus, getting rid of RuB per unit of TIC might lead to a decrease of the spatial heterogeneity and complexity of agroforest landscapes, and a reduction in the species richness they can shelter (Gliessman 1998; Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2009; Perfecto and Vandermeer 2010). Furthermore, a drastic reduction in RuB would lead to an increase in the use of EI for the functioning of the agroecosystems. The industrialization of agriculture has been accompanied by structural and functional changes which are evidenced by this agroecological EROI (see Table 7.6). The premise that the industrialization of agriculture has led to land sparing appears to apply, in this case, 210 ha of pine forest, which has been protected from agricultural activities to the benefit of wild biodiversity. However, the agroecological EROIs question this benefit. The Biodiversity EROI falls to 0.42 in 1997 and this alerts us to the fact that society has massively appropriated the flows of biomass generated. The UhB collapsed, mainly the aboveground UhB, expelling many wild heterotrophic species from the agroecosystem. From this perspective, land sparing is not so important as the liberation of biomass, whose flows are, in the final analysis, what sustain the food chains. This liberation of biomass for use by wildlife does not necessarily need to be linked to land sparing. Our case study shows that traditional agriculture combined productive activity with conservation in the same territory (land sharing), since it was able to free biomass for heterotrophic species at the same time as it generated a complex, heterogeneous spatial matrix (Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2009), which facilitated the movement of organisms between fragments of natural habitats. The Woodening EROI shows that in the period studied the transformation into accumulated biomass of the energy invested strongly increased, in line with the process of specialization in poplar. For this reason, this indicator has risen from 0.01 to 0.35. In 1997, more energy was accumulated annually in the form of biomass than that input in the form of EI, transforming fossil energy (75% of EI) into bioenergy.

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The maintenance of this EROI values, however, it is linked to a high consumption of irrigation water (880 mm). Mediterranean region is one of the so-called climate change hot spots. Climate models have forecast a rise in temperature and a fall in precipitation that will affect the quality, quantity, and management of water resources (García-Ruiz et al. 2011). Even if this conversion is positive from an energy point of view, it is not sustainable from a water point of view.

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Vitousek P, Mooney HA, Lubchenko J, Melillo JM (1986) Human appropriation of products of photosynthesis. Science 277:494–499 Wrigley EA (1993) Continuidad, cambio y azar. Carácter de la revolución industrial en Inglaterra. Crítica, Barcelona

Chapter 8

Social Metabolism at the Regional Scale

8.1 Introduction To satisfy its needs, P has two options, that go from one extreme to the other: obtaining all that is required either from ecological exchange, i.e., from TEN, MEN, and CEN, or from economic exchange, i.e., from SEN. The former alternative requires diversifying its activities throughout the year, as this would be the only possible strategy to obtain all subsistence materials, energy, water, and services from the landscape. The latter choice necessarily requires specializing in a single, economically valuable product of its metabolism with nature, thus monetizing P and accumulating the necessary capital to acquire all its subsistence needs on the market (Fig. 8.1). These two opposite strategies make P totally dependent either on nature or on the market, with all that this implies. In real life, such a dilemma is possible but rather rare in the former case (autarky) and rather frequent in the latter. Indeed, economic development based on capital accumulation induces the specialization of P and its dependence on commerce. However, there is a whole spectrum of situations between autarky and dependence, according to concrete cases and depending on multiple factors. They cause unceasing changes in conditions over time. The preference for a diversified, heterogeneous, or specialized use of nature carries various risks for the P unit and has varying ecological and economic consequences. At one extreme, the diversified use of nature endows P with a greater capacity to resist natural uncertainties and surprises, providing more flexibility and adaptability in the face of economic risks. At the other extreme, the specialized use of nature results in higher ecological and economic risks, because it induces a lack of flexibility and diminishes P’s resilience (i.e., its capacity to adapt to unexpected perturbations). The diversified use of nature is more adequate from ecological and geographic perspectives because it acknowledges, rests on, and takes advantage of the natural variability of landscapes, vegetation covers, climates, soils, topography, and species that are intrinsic to the ecosystems being appropriated. On the contrary, a specialized strategy suppresses all natural variation of landscapes, vegetation covers, climates,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_8

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8 Social Metabolism at the Regional Scale

Fig. 8.1 The regional analysis goes beyond the single P unit (III) scale when we include the economic exchanges between two units (I), between several units—either among them or via a common market—(II), and between several units integrated in a common market (IV)

soils, topography and species, transforming the natural space into a factory floor. This unleashes processes that sooner or later will revert back against the P unit, requiring remediation mechanisms that increase production costs. The most obvious effect of specialization is what is known as territorial efficiency. Given that any landscape maintains a certain composition and structure, providing it with territorial equilibrium, productive specialization immediately acts against this balance (an example is given in Marull et al. 2006). In consequence, any strategy to diversify the use of nature has a conservationist value, because a landscape mosaic maintains or even increases biodiversity, as has been repeatedly demonstrated (e.g., Toledo 2005; Cordón and Toledo 2008). However, a diversified strategy obstructs the efficiency of an economy dominated by capital, because it hampers the massive production of commodities and scale advantages regarding production inputs, instruments, and labor. We are thus before an intrinsic contradiction between specialization and flexibility, resilience, and ultimately, permanence. The above statements shed light on the portentous resistance and adaptability of peasant economies—both past and present—that have kept the sector in constant growth. At the global scale, over the past three decades, the number of small, household or community-structured producers has doubled (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols 2008). Any peasant P unit subsists thanks to a multiple-appropriation strategy integrating and combining small-scale agriculture, livestock, forestry, and fishing activities; their strategy also includes a share of products or services to exchange on the market (Toledo 1990). This is how the peasantry can still resist, subsist, and reinvent itself in this early twenty-first century characterized by urban and industrial proliferation (Pérez-Vitoria 2005, 2008).

8.3 The Regional Scale

211

8.2 Beyond P Appropriation takes place within a multi-scale territorial or space matrix, and organizes processes of interest in a hierarchy. Thus, appropriation can be analyzed at different scales, each being determined by and determining the other scales. The scales at which appropriation can be analyzed range from a single P unit—delimited by the P property size—to all of Earth’s P units, i.e., from a local to a global scale. In practice, and according to Zonneveld (1995), three main levels can be detected in the range of spatial scales, each reflecting spatial heterogeneities. The first is the topological heterogeneity identifiable from within a few square meters to several square kilometers (maps with scales up to 1:25,000). They essentially reveal vertical heterogeneity including vegetation strata, soils, etc. This scale is preferred by scholars who study ecosystems. A second level, named chorological, reveals the horizontal heterogeneity resulting from the analysis of a series of patches or mosaics of topological units, involving maps with scales from 1:100,000 to 1,000,000, and equivalent to regional or hydrological catchment levels. Finally, the geosphere scale refers to global processes and is expressed in maps with scales up to several tens of millions.

8.3 The Regional Scale The flow model we have defined and described allows analyzing appropriation at the first- and second-scale levels, a range determined by property size, including the ecosystems/landscapes under appropriation. They can be gradually expanded by adding new P units to the analysis. Connecting several P units from a given territory, for instance various rural community households, leads up to the next level. Next, economic exchange connections between several rural communities within a municipality or region scales up to a regional analysis (Fig. 8.2). In practice, as analysts move along the different scales—or different P unit aggregations—distinct P-SEN metabolism configurations emerge in concrete lands, revealing a variety of ecological and economic interactions and synergies. Also uncovered are the two-way causes and effects of the different scale processes: towards larger scales, and towards smaller scales. Each scale allows elaborating a visual map of the appropriation process, and this representation can also incorporate a historical perspective using a diachronic expression of space (see examples in González de Molina and Guzmán 2006; Olarieta et al. 2006; Marull et al. 2006). Overall, the flow model proposed at a given scale is amplified and enriched as the researcher broadens the scope of analysis across the territory and its dynamics over time. The above involves expanding the spatial—geographic—and social ranges of the analysis of social metabolism, its connections, and its synergies. Notable in this regard are the studies of Eric Tello and his interdisciplinary group. Indeed, their perspective combines the analysis of energy and material flows (social metabolism) with the study of land cover and land

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8 Social Metabolism at the Regional Scale

Fig. 8.2 Theoretical example of a multi-scalar analysis in which the economic exchanges of several P units (households) within the communities they belong to (C1 to C4), of a cooperative nature or destined to regional, national, and global markets

use changes, environmentally evaluated using the metrics and indices of landscape ecology. From a landscape ecology perspective, landscapes are a territorial expression of a determined social metabolism and, in consequence, territorial efficiency results from the synergy established between the energy and material flows, as well as the landscape’s ecological dynamics (Tello 2013).

8.4 Regions: The Study of the Metabolic Interlock Expanding the scale—say to a region encompassing rural communities, urban nuclei, and industrial centers—not only allows to broaden the appropriation analysis spatially, but also reveals the metabolic network, which implies conducting a comprehensive study of the whole metabolic chain within a delimited territory (such as a basin or an economic region). The integrated and regional-scale study of rural, urban, and industrial metabolism is determined by one or several criteria (Baccini and Brunner 2012). The study of social metabolism at the regional scale allows us to understand the synergies and dynamics existing among specific appropriation, circulation, transformation, consumption, and excretion processes. The analysis implies identifying not only the P units, but also the units responsible for circulating and transforming what is appropriated or produced by P, as well as the nuclei of rural, urban, and industrial consumers of what is produced, circulated, and transformed. Finally, the analysis can also detect the flows ultimately excreted towards nature during the above-mentioned processes in the form of residues, wastes, compounds, and emissions.

8.5 Bosawás: Metabolic Analysis of an Indigenous Region

213

The metabolic network analysis thus involves identifying material flows throughout the complete metabolic chain, and exploring the dynamics generated between the units that hold such flows. Unsurprisingly, the regional scale’s complexity is a challenge for researchers. This intricacy requires a greater number of highly qualified researchers, across a wide range of disciplines, or else limiting the analysis to only one or a small number of products of the total flow—e.g., water, compounds, fuels, foodstuffs, raw materials, etc. A regional-scale metabolic network is a hugely valuable unit of analysis: the aggregation provides an understanding of territorial metabolic dynamics occurring at different scales. It also allows to deconstruct macro or multiregional synergies that are difficult to understand or are beyond research efforts due to their complexity. The concatenation of regional metabolism will in turn reveal new phenomena that is subsequently delimited by national borders.

8.5 Bosawás: Metabolic Analysis of an Indigenous Region Let us now turn to a case in the Biosphere Reserve of Bosawás (BRB) in Nicaragua. It covers nearly 8000 km2 and is populated by nearly 30,000 inhabitants belonging to indigenous nuclei—from the Miskita and Magyanga nations extending through a large part of the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and Honduras—and to mestizo colonizer households (Stocks et al. 2007). Six indigenous territories surround the BRB (Fig. 8.4), and a metabolic flow study was conducted in one of them, called Kipla Sait Tasbaika (KST)—meaning “land of the rapids” (Cordón and Toledo 2008; Cordón 2011). The KST territory includes fourteen indigenous communities, twelve of which are Miskita, and two are Magyanga (Fig. 8.3). The study used data from enquiries made with household members in the KST territory. Two surveys were conducted, one in April 2003, and another in August 2004. In both, data on the use of natural resources were gathered from the visited households. A total of 606 households with a total population of 3928 people were visited in 2003, and 390 households with 2733 inhabitants were visited in 2004, corresponding to 83.6% and 58.2% of the total KST population, respectively. To obtain profiles of the micro-region’s metabolic flows, average values of all the communities in the studied territory were recorded (for further details, see Cordón and Toledo 2008). The collected data were organized according to the flow model developed here (Fig. 8.4). The model allowed identifying six activities related to the MEN (hunting, fishing, gathering of firewood, lumber and other products, and gold extraction), six activities related to the TEN (three types of agriculture, grasslands, livestock raising, and fruit gathering in home gardens), and two activities related to the CEN (assistance to researchers, and reserve vigilance), as well as economic exchange flows with the SEN (Fig. 8.4). The value analysis of each activity—measured in terms of the percentage of households that practiced them—revealed the overall adopted strategy. Although the

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8 Social Metabolism at the Regional Scale

Fig. 8.3 Distribution of indigenous settlements in the Biosphere Reserve of Bosawás, situated in the region bordering Nicaragua and Honduras

Fig. 8.4 Flows of goods and services in the communities of the Kipla Sait Tasbaika (KST) region in Bosawás, Nicaragua

References

215

material and energy flow data were qualitative, patterns of combined activities were detected. Four activities made up the basis of most households and communities: 94% of households practiced agriculture, extracted firewood, and gathered fruit in the home garden, and 86% also raised livestock. Added to these food and energy platforms were hunting and fishing (nearly 71%) or only fishing (64%). All other activities were of a minor significance because they focused more on commercial trade: some households extracted gold, and others practiced hunting or gathering. The emerging pattern of natural resource management was that of a typical subsistence economy. Evaluating this strategy in terms of resource use spatial patterns revealed interesting correlations. Of the six indigenous territories surrounding the reserve, the KST communities had the lowest deforestation impact (Stock et al. 2007), with a deforestation rate of 0.09 hectares per capita. This figure contrasts with that of the remaining indigenous communities, and in particular with mestizo settlements, who present much higher deforestation rates.

References Baccini P, Brunner PH (2012) Metabolism of the anthroposphere. The MIT Press, Massachusetts Cordón MR (2011) Estrategias indígenas, conservación y desarrollo rural sostenible en la reserva de la biosfera de Bosawas, Nicaragua. PhD. dissertation. Universidad Internacional de Andalucía, Spain Cordón MR, Toledo VM (2008) La importancia conservacionista de las comunidades indígenas de la reserva de Bosawás, Nicaragua: un modelo de flujos. Revista Iberoamericana de Economía Ecológica 7:43–60 González de Molina M, Guzmán-Casado G (2006) Tras los Pasos de la Insustentabilidad. Agricultura y medio ambiente en perspectiva histórica. Icaria, Barcelona Marull J, Pino J, Tello E, Mallarach JM (2006) Análisis estructural y funcional de la transformación del paisaje agrario en el Vallés durante los últimos 150 años. Áreas (Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales) 2:105–126 Olarieta JR, Rodríguez-Valle FL, Tello E (2006) Conservando y destruyendo suelos, transformando paisajes (el Vallés, Cataluña, 1853–2004). Áreas (Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales) 25:39–66 Pérez-Vitoria S (2005) Les Paysans son de Retour. Actes Sud Pérez-Vitoria S (2008) La Riposte des Paysans. Actes Sud Stock A, McMahan B, Taber P (2007) Indigenous, colonist, and government impacts on Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve. Conserv Biol 21(6):1495–1505 Stocks AB, McMaStocks AB, McMahan YP, Taber (2007) Indigenous, colonist, and government impacts on nicaragua´s bosawas reserve, Conserv Biol 21(6), 1495–1505 Tello E (2013) La transformació històrica del paisatge entre l’economia, l’ecologia i la història: podem posar a prova la hipòtesi de Margalef? Treballs De La Societat Catalana De Geografia 75:195–221 Toledo VM (1990) The ecological rationality of peasant production. In: Altieri M, Hecht S (eds) Agroecology and small farm production. CRC Press Toledo VM (2005) La ecología rural. Ciencia y Desarrollo 174:36–43 Toledo VM, Barrera-Bassols N (2008) La Memoria Biocultural. La importancia agroecológica de las sabidurías tradicionales. Icaria, Barcelona Zonneveld IS (1995) Land ecology. SPB, Academic Publishing, Amsterdam

Chapter 9

Social Metabolism at the National Scale

9.1 Introduction Regarding material exchanges and flows, every nation state (N) ultimately functions in the same way as a unit of appropriation/production (P). This means that N reproduces the same operational processes as P, but at an exponentially higher scale. At the national scale, within the territory of each N unit, material (biomass, fossil fuels, metallic, and non-metallic minerals), and energy (hydropower, nuclear heat, oil and natural gas, coal, biomass, renewables and biofuels, etc.), inputs are obtained from domestic resources extraction, whose flow can be divided into the following three classes of environment: Utilized Environment (UET), Transformed Environment (TET), and Conserved Environment (CET). N’s input flow is the sum of all the input needed to build, operate, and maintain the stocks and/or funds that make up the economy. The study of social metabolism at a national scale represents a whole, new, larger flow. Indeed, inside a country’s entrails, goods and service flows—deriving from the appropriation of a set of P units within the national territory—circulate, become transformed in multiple ways, and are consumed away from their original location by a huge number of individuals or by industries. This represents a process that remained unidentifiable at a P metabolic level—or that was reduced to its minimum expression, i.e., excretion. The fact is that the metabolic network generates a flow of wastes at each segment that ends up circulating in the natural universe. This flow eventually becomes part of a general metabolic circuit between society and nature through the excretion of water, materials, and energies, which must be assimilated, i.e., recycled, by ecosystems. The three types of environments (UET, TET, and CET) receive the totality of the excretion flows occurring within N, thus constituting its output. In theory, it should be possible to define excretion units (E). This task, however, seems impossible given the enormous variety of waste-emitting sources.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_9

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9 Social Metabolism at the National Scale

Fig. 9.1 Diagram representing a nation state’s metabolism, which depends on exchanges of resources within its own territories (inputs and outputs) and exchanges with other nation states (imports and exports). Abbreviations: UEN, utilized environment; CEN, conserved environment; TE, transformed environment; IMP, imports; EXP, exports

Since no country continues to reproduce its metabolism without some sort of exchange beyond its borders, we must add the flows between other nation states to the P and N flows. Indeed, every nation (N) receives commodities and services through commercial exchanges with other countries of the world, which in turn exchange commodities and services generated within their own territories (imports and exports; Fig. 9.1).

9.2 Metabolic Profiles at the National Scale There are fifty indicators of the material and energy exchanges between countries that can be easily accessed from recognized data and statistics sources (Table 9.1). It is therefore possible to obtain figures for the four main exchange flows between natural areas (ecosystems) occurring within the territories of any nation (input and output), and between any of the remaining countries in the world (imports and exports). We can add information about surface areas and UE, TE, and CE characteristics, in both terrestrial and marine national territories, to these data, together with essential demographic data: national, rural, urban, agroindustrial, and traditional population figures, among others. Based on the above data, it is possible to draft basic metabolic profiles for a given country (see the example of China in Fig. 9.2). The material functioning of

9.2 Metabolic Profiles at the National Scale

219

Table 9.1 Indicators of the material and energy exchanges between countries Unit

Sources

Table and column

1. Gross domestic product (GDP)

MUSD

WRI

5-1

2. Per capita GDP

MUSD

WRI

5-3

MUSD

WRI

5-4

4. Industrial GDP

MUSD

WRI

5-5

5. Services GDP

MUSD

WRI

5-6

9. Agricultural economically active population Numbers

FAO

Variable

10. Agricultural GDP (men)

Numbers

FAO

Variable

11. Agricultural GDP (women)

Numbers

FAO

Variable

12. Total GDP

Numbers

FAO

Variable

13. Total population

Numbers

SYB

Table A-1

14. Percentage of urban population

%

FAO

Variable

Indicators Social (economic)

Social (demographic)

15. Urban population

FAO

16. Rural population

Numbers

FAO

Variable

17. Rural population in organic production

Pop

IFOAM

Variable

18. Rural agroindustrial population

Pop

SYB

Holdings < 10 has

SYB

Holdings > 10 has

Pop

WRI

9-14

19. Rural traditional population 20. Number of fishers Input (appropriation) 21. Total agricultural production

TMT

FAO

A-3

22. Total meat production

TMT

FAO

B-2

23. Cereal production

TMT

FAO

B-1

24. Fruit and vegetable production

TMT

FAO

B-3

25. Total energy production

MTOE

IEA

1-1

26. Per capita consumption of water

m3 /ha/year

WRI

9-2

27. Food energy consumption

TMT

FAO

D-1

28. Total annual extraction of water

km3

WRI

9-3

29. Per capita annual extraction of water

m3

WRI

9-4

30. Annual water extraction for agriculture

m3 /ha/year WRI

9-5

31. Annual extraction of water for industry

%

9-6

32. Annual extraction of water for households

WRI WRI

TMT

WRI

9-9

34.Total fished product from aquaculture

TMT

WRI

9-11

35. Total primary energy supply (TPES)

MTOE

IEA

1-11

MMT

WRI

8-13

Output (excretion) 36. Total production of gases

(continued)

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9 Social Metabolism at the National Scale

Table 9.1 (continued) Indicators

Unit

Sources

Table and column

37. Production of CO2

MMT

WRI

8-1

38. Production of methane

MMT

WRI

8-10

39. Production of nitrous oxide

MMT

WRI

8-11

40. Production of fluorinated gases

MMT

WRI

8-12

41. Per capita production of CO2

MMT

WRI

8-3

42. Fishery products

MUSD

WRI

9-12

43. Energy

MTOE

IEA

1-11

44. Food*

%

SYB

C-6, Vol. 1

45. Value of agricultural imports

MUSD

SYB

Vol. 1

46. Fuels and derivatives

MUSD

WTO

Several

47. Manufacturing industry

MUSD

WTO

Several

Imports

Exports 48. Fishery products

MUSD

WRI

9-13

49. Energy (thousands of metric tons)

MTOE

IEA

1-11

50. Food

%

SYB

Vol. 1/Col. 6

51. Value of agricultural exports

MUSD

SYB

Vol. 1

52. Fuels and derivatives

MUSD

WTO

Several

53. Manufacturing industry

MUSD

WTO

Several

54. Total surface

Km2

CIAWF

Per country

55. Total surface of natural protected areas

Km2

WRI/WDPA

10-1

56. Total surface of natural protected areas

%

WRI/WDPA

10-2

57. Arable land under permanent cultivation

%

WRI/ WDPA 11-6

58. Grassland surface

%

WRI/WDPA

Ecological

11-8

MUSD millions of dollars; Pop population; % percentage; TMT thousands of metric tons; MTO millions of metric tons oil equivalent; Km2 square kilometer; Km3 cubic kilometer; Km2 square meter; MMT millions of metric tons. Sources FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization: www. fao.org); WRI (World Resources Institute: multimedia.wri.org); WDPA (World Database on Protected Areas: www.unep-wcmc.org/wdpa/; SYB (Statistical Yearbook); World Census of Agriculture. FAO. Statistical Development Series No. 9. Par II. (www.fao.org); IEA (International Energy Agency: www.iea.org); IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements www. ifoam.org; CIAWF (The CIA World Factbook: www.cia.gov); WTO (World Trade Organization http://stat.wto.org)

the country’s economy can then be analyzed and compared with other countries. These four exchange flows (input, output, imports, exports) thus provide an initial overview of each country situation regarding both its natural base (the ecosystems providing materials, energies, and services, and assimilating wastes) and its commercial exchanges with the rest of the world. A key phenomenon is the accelerated

9.2 Metabolic Profiles at the National Scale

221

growth of world trade over these past decades (that has even exceeded production growth levels), especially between countries in Europe, North America, China, South America, and southern Asia—led by Japan. A study of global metabolism—i.e., of the international orchestration—must therefore begin with an analysis of the main four exchange flows, locating each country within the world-system (Fig. 9.3). The latter actually implies locating each country within the geo-eco-political sphere of the central, semi-peripheral, and peripheral geometry—that, given today’s ecological or natural phenomena, is now acquiring a new dimension (Jorgenson and Pick 2003; Frank 2007). Therefore, it is necessary to identify not only the parameters, patterns, and exchange processes, but also the realms of both the metabolic processes and their defining dimension, such as demography and its dynamics, the relations between rural and urban populations, self-sufficiency and food dependence, commercial exchange flows, flows of water, CO2 and other gases, energy, and wastes, materials, etc., both per capita and nationally. Four national value indicators are: gross domestic product (GDP), disaggregated by economic items or sectors, the energies and materials used, and the volumes of emitted gases. The metabolic profile allows sorting and interpreting the numerous national statistics currently available based on a different perspective. The task of elaborating national indexes that reflect precise exchange processes both between

Fig. 9.2 A schematic metabolic profile of China based on the statistics from sources included in Table 9.1. See text

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Fig. 9.3 Visualizing a global network: countries as units that exchange with nature and with each other. The planet resembles a seething mass

domestic nature and resources, and between other countries, is yet to be accomplished. These national analyses should in turn be interpreted and compared with other indexes such as, among other indicators: the Ecological Footprint Index, UNESCO’s Human Wellbeing Index, and the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) (or of the products of photosynthesis).

9.3 The Material Bases of Economic Development in Spain (1860–2016) In the following sections, the MEFA methodology was applied to a national or nation state case study. The work summarized below offers the first historical estimate of Spain’s Material Flow Accounting (MFA). It corresponds to a study we took part in and whose results have recently been published in Spanish Infante-Amate et al. (2021). Previous works on the subject provided data only for limited periods of time (Carpintero 2005 , 2015) or for specific points in time, without differentiating all foreign trade and consumption product groups (Infante-Amate et al. 2015). The INE [the Spanish National Statistical Institute] has been publishing MFA estimates since 1995, following practically the same methodology (INE 2020). An annual retrospective series of the Eurostat and INE series up to 1860 is therefore described. Long-term series of over a century only exist for England (Schandl and Schulz 2002), Austria (Krausmann et al. 2008), Czechoslovakia (Kuskova et al. 2008), Japan

9.4 Methodological Note

223

(Krausmann et al. 2011), the United States (Gierlinger and Krausmann 2012), France (Magalhaes et al. 2019), and Russia (Krausmann et al. 2016). This research (i) quantifies the material extraction by type of resource allowed tracing the evolution and typology of environmental impacts, explaining a large number of Spain’s socioenvironmental conflicts; (ii) calculates international trade in physical terms, enabling us to analyze the evolution of material relations with other countries, the physical trade balance, external dependence, and the dynamics of “unequal ecological exchange”; (iii) estimates the historical material consumption changes and explored their evolution; (iv) calculates the material intensity of the Spanish economy, that is, the relationship between economic growth and material consumption. This in turn led us to estimate the economy’s dematerialization. Through a descomposition analysis, (v) the determinants of material use change are assessed, distinguishing population, wealth, and technological change (IPAT analysis). And finally, this research (vi) provides a long-term, comparative vision of Spain’s “socio-metabolic transition”: we address the transition from the organic to the industrial metabolic regime, together with its implications regarding economic growth and environmental impacts.

9.4 Methodological Note The MFA differentiates three broad groups of indicators. The first is domestic material extraction (DE), that is, the total amount of materials appropriated within the territorial borders of the country analyzed. All materials entering the economic system are considered, whether they have market value or not. The indirect appropriation of some resources is also considered (e.g., in the case of minerals, the “raw ore” removed is counted, not only the metal finally used). The second is the Physical Trade Balance (PTB), that is, physical imports minus physical exports. A positive balance implies that the country is a net importer and vice versa. Finally, the DE plus PTB results in the Domestic Consumption of Materials (CMD), that is, the materials effectively consumed in a country. These variables, associated with population or GDP data, generate other auxiliary indicators such as domestic consumption per inhabitant or material intensity, which is measured in terms of tons consumed per generated GDP unit. Each analyzed variable was estimated for a wide range of material products that were aggregated into four broad categories for presentation and analysis purposes: biomass, fossil fuels, metallic minerals, and non-metallic minerals. Various sources and historical records were necessary to reconstruct the historical evolution of these indicators. In the case of biomass extraction, data were taken from the Yearbooks of Agricultural Statistics, GEHR (1991), Garrabou and Sanz (1985), and González de Molina et al. (2020). For the years for which information was lacking, especially for several years between c. 1860 and 1890, we adjusted the data by modulating the series according to annual rainfall. The extraction of the rest of the minerals was obtained from the Estadística Minera de España [Mining Statistics

224

9 Social Metabolism at the National Scale

of Spain], published under different names since 1861. In this case, the records of some materials, especially quarry materials, were incomplete because much of the extraction took place outside the market and was not accounted for. In these cases, we used only the official statistics dating back to 1960 until today as they were more reliable. For previous years, we calculated the series based on cement and asphalt consumption variations of those materials according to their production, following the Eurostat criteria (2018) and, for the rest, in relation to population variations. Trade in materials was estimated using Spain’s Foreign Trade Statistics, published since the mid-nineteenth century also under different names. To facilitate the data processing since 1962, we retrieved international trade information from UNCOMTRADE and FAOSTAT, two global databases published by the United Nations and FAO, respectively, that offer online information in a more accessible format. GDP and population information were obtained from Bolt and Van Zanden (2014) and Carreras and Tafunell (2005) as well as from the Spanish National Institute of Statistics.

9.5 Material Extraction Material extraction rose from 15.8 million tons (Mt) in 1860 to 734.4 Mt in 2007, immediately before the “Great Recession” (Fig. 9.4). During that period, the population multiplied by 2.8, but extraction per capita quadrupled, from 4.0 to 16.4 tons per capita. Material extraction, both total and per inhabitant, had been growing since the nineteenth century, yet the “great acceleration” really began in the 1950s. Between 1860 and the Civil War, domestic material extraction had risen by 80%, but it increased fivefold between 1950 and 2007 (Fig. 9.4a). Spain thus participated in the world’s major physical economy transformation that unfolded over the last two centuries owing to the spectacular increase in material resource extraction from the biosphere and lithosphere (Graedel et al. 2015; Smil 2016). The technological revolution and access to new energy sources explain this unprecedented increase in the potential of human appropriation of natural resources. The extractive industry went from operating “blood engines”, that is, low-powered human and animal traction, to using heavy machinery capable of mobilizing hundreds of tons in a few hours (Smil 2016). In addition to the notable increase in extractive capacity, the topology of appropriated materials has changed. By the mid-nineteenth century, biomass (agricultural, forestry, and fishery products) accounted for 90% of domestic extraction, while the remaining 10% was a reduced assortment of metal ores and quarry products. Today, biomass barely represents 32% of total extraction, having reached its historical minimum in 2015 with 14%. The drop must be understood in relative terms, however, as total biomass extraction has continued to grow. This transition in extraction-type also determined the typology of environmental impacts, as well as the socioenvironmental conflicts associated with extractivism. In traditional societies, conflicts were essentially of agrarian origin and were dominated by peasant protests (Acosta et al. 2009). Environmental impacts mainly affected the

9.5 Material Extraction

225

Fig. 9.4 Domestic extraction of materials in millions of tons (a) and as a percentage (b)

agricultural sector, the most recurrent being soil losses due to erosion (Vanwalleghem et al. 2011), nutrient mining (González de Molina et al. 2015), or deforestation (Infante-Amate and Iriarte-Goñi 2017). As the extraction of abiotic materials grew, however, fresh conflicts, novel forms of protest, and new environmental impacts emerged. Between 1860 and 1935, agricultural extraction increased by only 42%, a growth that was even lower than that of the population (56%). Meanwhile, fossil fuel extraction multiplied by 21, metallic minerals by 7, and non-metallic minerals by 4. During this period, new conflicts began to be documented linked to mining extractivism and industrial activities associated with the processing of new inorganic materials (Ferrero 1994; Chastagnared 2017; García Gómez and Pérez Cebada 2020). Moreover, unprecedented environmental impacts started to spread, such as water, soil, and air pollution, mainly due to the expansion of metal mining (Pérez Cebada 2014). Ferrous metal extraction went from just over 100 thousand tons in 1860 to almost 10 million at the dawn of the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, Spain turned into a major global producer and exporter of iron ore. In the same way, other metals, such as copper, grew significantly. During the “Great Acceleration”, which took place in Spain from 1950 to the 2008 crisis, mining extraction was dominated by quarry products and as a consequence, by the urban boom. This urban upswing, in turn, concentrated much of the country’s social unrest and emerging environmental conflicts since the 1960s, including substantial cases of corruption that have been shaking Spanish politics to this day (Naredo 2003). The extraction of fossil fuels, especially lignite coal, also became significant over this period. Production expanded in the 1960s and replaced hard coal, which had dominated coal industry production since the nineteenth century. However, the share of lignite among extracted materials was always limited and its consumption depended historically on imports, as we will see below.

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9.6 The Physical Dimension of International Trade Another distinctive feature of the “industrial socio-metabolic regime” is the growth of international trade, that is, the exchange of natural resources between countries. In traditional societies, most transport was based on animal traction, which substantially limited the possibility of moving materials (Sieferle 2001). The development of fossil fuel-powered means of transport such as railways, steamships, motorized land transport, and later, aviation allowed to increase the flows of materials exchanged between distant countries. In the case of Spain, material trade began to expand during the so-called First Globalization (Fig. 9.5) in the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1860 and 1914, exports grew by 5.3% a year and imports by 3.2%. That is, in material terms, Spain boosted its exporting country profile. Until c. 1950, the basket of exported products was dominated by metallic ores (mainly iron ore) and biomass, while fossil fuels, especially coal, were the main import material. Later, material exchanges with third countries underwent strong oscillations due to the falls associated with World War I, the Crash of 1929, and the more dramatic ones during the Civil War and the post-war period. From the 1950s onwards, trade expanded rapidly again until 2007, when imports fell sharply but not exports. Annual growth during the “Second Globalization” (that we defined between 1950 and 2007) reached 5.8% in terms of exports and, impressively, 7.2% in terms of imports. These rates surpassed that of the first wave. Following the autarky, economic policy changes after the Stabilization Plan substantially transformed international relations, which were boosted by the opening towards the European Union, the USA, as well as by industrial reconversion policies. This trade liberalization led to massive inflows of all kinds of products at lower prices than those produced within the country (Tena 2005): not only oil—a scant resource in Spain—but also manufactured goods and even agricultural products. Although Spain retains the image of an agriculture-exporting country, the country’s agricultural imports have in fact largely exceeded its exports since c. 1960 (Fig. 9.5c). The main reason is grain imports for animal feed (González de Molina et al. 2020). How did the growth of physical trade affect the economy? On the one hand, it was easier for many countries, including Spain, to circumvent the relative scarcity of certain resources, especially fossil fuels. However, Spain’s alignment with the rest of Europe is very similar today—as a net importer of materials—to its alignment over the 1860–1914 period—when it was a net exporter. On the other, the trade boom also enabled many countries to outsource undesirable environmental impacts to third countries and to promote opulent consumption by appropriating materials from distant regions. In this way, “unequal ecological exchange” dynamics became widespread: while wealthier countries increased their external material deficits, they improved their real terms of trade (Hornborg 1998, 2007). Until the Civil War, Spain played a peripheral role, as it was a net exporter of materials that were of little value to the rest of Europe, especially metal ores and agricultural products. This trend changed radically in the mid-twentieth century, when Spain began to reverse the sign of its material relations. The country achieved positive balances, owing especially

9.7 Material Consumption Changes

227

Fig. 9.5 Imports (a), exports (b), and physical trade balance (c), in million tons

to material imports from “Global South” countries, to which it has now externalized environmental impacts, e.g., deforestation, land use, greenhouse gas emissions, or soil and water pollution (Aguilera et al. 2020; González de Molina et al. 2020).

9.7 Material Consumption Changes In pre-industrial societies, most consumption was satisfied by materials appropriated locally. Yet the possibility of easy-flowing commercial relations with other countries allowed to meet a significant share of consumption demands with “exotic” products. Countries with low resource endowments could thus increase their consumption levels through trade and vice versa. In the case of Spain, material consumption has gone from 63.6 Mt in 1860 to 399.4 Mt in 2016, peaking at 911.3 Mt in 2007. In per capita terms, consumption rose from just over 4 tons in 1860 to more than 20 tons in 2007 (Fig. 9.6a). This increase is due to both extractive capacity improvements, which explains 75% of the consumption increase, and international trade, which accounts for the remaining 25%. In other words, the last century’s formidable growth in material consumption is largely due to two factors: on the one hand, to technological improvements—that

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Fig. 9.6 Household material consumption per capita (a) and percentage of net imports in household material consumption (b)

have enabled expanding Spain’s appropriation of resources—and on the other, to third country resources. Figure 9.6b shows the weight of international trade in Spain’s domestic material consumption. Regarding the share of total imports destined to consumption, imports represented around 5% of consumption until the mid-nineteenth century and quickly reached 30% in the 1980s. After two decades of stabilization, imports grew rapidly again after the 2008 crisis, reaching 60%. In other words, almost two-thirds of the materials consumed within the Spanish economy come from abroad. Historical consumption trends show another interesting fact: while biomass consumption per capita has remained relatively stable, between 2.5 and 3.5 tons, abiotic consumption went from 0.5 to 17.5, growing faster from 1950 onwards. This means that the significant rise in material consumption has been due to the increasing use of appropriated subsoil resources and less to the resources obtained from the earth. According to Wrigley (2016), a necessary condition of modern economic growth is to break the “photosynthetic limitation”, characteristic of pre-industrial societies. The possibility of extracting materials from stocks whose availability was not limited by an annual productive flow—as in the case of biomass—facilitated the introduction of massive amounts of energy and materials into the global physical economy. This “vertical expansion” process, to use Barbier’s analogy (2011), is a decisive factor that explains both the planetary increase in resource consumption and the large-scale environmental impacts that are today calling our development model into question. In the case of Spain, each inhabitant consumed on average 4 tons in 1860, of which 3.6 were biotic products, 0.05 fossil fuels, 0.04 metals, and 0.38 quarry products. In the industrial socio-metabolic regime (based on data from 2007), each inhabitant consumes 2.8 tons of agricultural products, 3.1 tons of fossil fuels, 0.7 tons of metals, and 13.7 tons of quarry products.

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Finally, another consumption pattern characteristic is the diversity of materials used. In organic metabolic societies, most consumed products were limited to a reduced range of domestic agricultural products and an even smaller group of mineral products. In the mid-nineteenth century, a dozen agricultural products, including firewood, grass, wheat, barley, and some fruit trees, accounted for almost two-thirds of all materials consumed, while limestone and other quarry products represented over 90% of all extracted minerals. Today, hundreds of products are consumed and none, except oil, have a major weight with respect to total consumption.

9.8 Dematerialization or Rematerialization? Figure 9.7a shows the material intensity of the Spanish economy between 1860 and today. A generally decreasing trend can be observed, indicating a drop in the economy’s material intensity. If in the mid-nineteenth century, c. 1.5 kg was required to produce every $ of GDP (at constant 2011 prices), today, each GDP $ requires just over 0.2 kg. There are some exceptions to this trend. During the Civil War and the post-war period, the economy was more depressed than the use of resources, and in the 1960s and 1970s, formidable economic growth was accompanied by an even faster-rising use of resources. Over these periods, relative dematerialization slowed and even reversed. In any event, the balance sheet shows that the Spanish economy has substantially improved its material efficiency in relative terms and has apparently dematerialized (weak dematerialization, see De Bruyn and Opschoor 1997; Ruffing 2007). However, as we saw above, domestic material consumption (DMC) has not stopped growing, so we cannot refer to the dematerialization of the economy in absolute terms (strong dematerialization), whether generally or per capita. Nevertheless, consumption fell sharply between 2008 and 2014 due to the Great Recession—so an apparently transitory and absolute dematerialization occurred. To summarize: taking the year 1860 (1860 = 1) as a reference, the material intensity, which is indicative of relative dematerialization, fell to 0.18, while the DMC, indicative of strong dematerialization, rose to 6.2 (Fig. 9.7b). The economy grew faster than the use of resources, though the use of resources and its associated impacts continued to increase, with short-lived exceptions such as the Civil War (1936–1939) and the Great Recession, which began in 2007.

9.9 Determinants of Change In this section, we analyze the determinants of resource consumption accretion and perform an IPAT-type additive decomposition analysis based on Ang (2005). In other words, we quantify the share of environmental impact (I)—measured, in this case, as the direct consumption of materials—that can be explained by the population

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Fig. 9.7 Material intensity, measured as household consumption of materials of GDP at constant 2011 prices (a). Evolution of domestic Consumption of Materials and material intensity with reference 1860 = 1 (b)

increase (P), by wealth increase (A), or by material efficiency, essentially attributable to structural change and technological change (T). What was Spain’s long-term evolution? If we analyze the entire period under study, that is, between 1860 and 2018, we observe that material consumption grew by 328.6 Mt. This growth owes mainly to the country’s increase in wealth, which allowed to acquire more goods and services, generating an equivalent additional consumption of 438.8 Mt. It can also be explained by population pressure, which generated additional demands of 196.4 Mt. Material efficiency, generally attributable to structural and technological changes, generated savings of 306.6 Mt. That is, the consumption associated with income growth compensated for efficiency improvements. Therefore, the long-term development represents a clear case of “rebound effect” or “Jevons paradox” together with the additional pressures of population growth. All this explains the continued rise in resource consumption (Fig. 9.5, Table 9.2). Significant differences in the determinants of change were found throughout the period studied. During early globalization and the initial industrialization phases, population (leading to increasing consumption), income (producing a rise in Table 9.2 Additive decomposition analysis to quantify the weight of population, wealth, and material efficiency changes in material consumption (in the table, referred to as impact) 1860–1935 Impact

49.4

1935–1950 − 3.9

1950–1990 374.6

1990–2008 315.0

2008–2016 − 406.5

1860–2016 328.6

Population

37.9

14.1

98.5

101.6

9.6

196.4

Wealth

54.5

− 24.7

330.5

434.7

− 34.0

438.8

− 43.1

10.8

− 50.0

− 221.3

− 382.0

− 306.6

Efficiency

9.10 The Material Transition of the Spanish Economy

231

consumption), and material efficiency (that decreased consumption) all had a similar impact. During the Civil War and the post-war period, consumption dropped due to the fall in income, despite a continuously growing population and a loss of material efficiency that pushed up resource consumption over the period. Between 1950 and 2008, a huge rise in material consumption can be observed owing mainly to an increase in wealth and to a lesser extent, to a growing population. Nevertheless, material efficiency caused consumption to drop very slightly until 1990, though it declined much more significantly thereafter. Following the 2008 crisis, Spain experienced an unprecedented material consumption fall, as it plummeted even more sharply than during the Civil War and the post-war period. The 2008 downturn is attributable not only to income reduction, as occurred during the war, but also to material efficiency improvements. The latter, in turn, were not due to technological improvements but due to structural changes in the Spanish economy, in which high-material-intensity activities such as the construction sector lost weight.

9.10 The Material Transition of the Spanish Economy Spain’s metabolic shift from an organic to an industrial regime unfolded over the period covered by this study and was characterized by a sharp increase in material consumption, a transition to non-renewable resources, and the expansion of material exchanges between territories. At the start of the study period, the Spanish economy, like that of the rest of the world, was highly dependent on the products of the soil to satisfy its needs. In the mid-nineteenth century, 9 out of every 10 tons consumed came from the land, whose products satisfied most human needs (Kander et al. 2015; Wrigley 2016). In addition to human food, biomass was used for clothing (vegetal and animal fibers), for domestic and industrial fuel (firewood and other waste), for transport (through animal feed), and partly for building material (wood). In land-dependent systems, the only way to increase production was: (i) to push the boundaries of cultivated surface areas, which was increasingly unrealistic in highly populated regions—as was the case in most of Europe; or (ii), to intensify land use, that is, to increase production per surface area unit. This latter strategy, however, was also difficult to implement in countries such as Spain, with unfavorable agroclimatic conditions and soils that were depleted after centuries of extraction (González de Molina et al. 2015). In this “Malthusian crisis” scenario, the growth limits characteristic of agrarian societies could be circumvented through “vertical expansion”, that is, obtaining substitute materials from the subsoil (Barbier 2011; Wrigley 2016). The subsoil was conquered essentially via a transition to non-renewable energy sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas. These new energy sources were characterized by a higher energy density than traditional sources, as well as large-scale production independent of annual flows. Subsoil exploitation, together with new technological developments such as the steam engine, the combustion engine, or the chemical industry (e.g., with the industrial synthesis of ammonia), allowed to

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increase the extractive potential of other materials. In fact, many studies show a significant correlation between fossil fuel use and economic growth, although some decoupling has been observed to have begun in the last decades of the twentieth century (Kander et al. 2015). The incorporation of abiotic materials into the economy was not merely a cumulative process. It also implied structural changes in pre-existing production systems. In fact, a notable aspect of the industrial socio-metabolic transition is the functional shift in traditional agricultural systems. Indeed, the systems went from satisfying most needs to focusing on the production of food and raw materials (González de Molina and Toledo 2014). Studies on the agricultural impact of industrialization usually highlight the addition of external inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, etc.) that increase productivity. These analyses, however, tend to overlook the profound change in the functionality of agriculture caused by industrialization. According to our estimates, in 1860, only 20% of Spain’s agricultural physical production was directly destined to human food. Today, that figure is 60%. Spain’s socio-metabolic transition has followed the same pattern as that of most countries in the world, but with certain geographical and historical particularities. Unfortunately, long-term empirical evidence is available only for a reduced number of Western countries and this affects our comparative framework. Nevertheless, using existing evidence and the results obtained in this work, we can outline Spain’s major transition characteristics. In the mid-nineteenth century, material consumption per inhabitant in Spain was slightly below the global average. It was also well below that of European countries with a temperate climate and higher primary productivity— such as France or England—or below that of countries such as the United States— with extensive agricultural frontiers and high mineral resource endowments. Material consumption, typical of the transition to the industrial metabolic regime, began to increase in Spain much later than in most industrialized countries, although it did grow before that of emerging countries. This transition, however, was more abrupt than in most industrialized countries and it continued to unfold up until the 2008 crisis. Such an evolution contrasts with that of the rest of the developed economies where consumption stabilized in the 1970s (Widenhofer et al. 2013) (Fig. 9.8a). This spectacular growth led Spain’s material consumption to rise from below the global average in the early 1970s to one of the largest in the world in 2007. Moreover, the crisis had a more dramatic impact in Spain than in other countries and pressed consumption back down to below the global average. Based on the documentation available, this decline is comparable only to that of the Soviet Union following its disintegration (Krausmann et al. 2016). Spain transitioned to abiotic resources, a decisive factor to explain the industrial regime’s characteristic economic growth. The latter unfolded later than in other European countries, as shown in other studies on energy transition (Kander et al. 2015). In this case, however, the transition took place before that of “Global South” countries. In Spain, biomass ceased to be the most consumed material in 1964. The transition happened much earlier in the United Kingdom (before the nineteenth century), in the USA (1913), in Japan (1923), or in France (1930) and had even occurred earlier globally (in 1956). The transition, nevertheless, arrived later though

9.11 Conclusions and Future Research Agenda

233

Fig. 9.8 Evolution of Household material consumption (HMC) (a); the weight of biomass in HMC (b); and physical trade balance per inhabitant (c) in tons per capita

in countries such as China (1972), India (2000), or Brazil, where it has not yet been completed (Fig. 9.8b). Some countries have been more dependent on foreign lands than others during the socio-metabolic transition. At present, nations with higher incomes and high population density tend to be more dependent on foreign countries (Bruckner et al. 2012). In the early stages of the socio-metabolic transition, richer countries were not always net importers. England had a level balance sheet and was even a net exporter of hidden flows, since it allocated many resources to produce goods that it ultimately exported (Kander et al. 2017). Owing to its vast agricultural frontiers and mineral wealth, the United States was also a net exporter of resources, as was assuredly the case of other large, rich countries such as Canada or Australia. Countries that industrialized later, such as Spain or Czechoslovakia, also acted as net raw material suppliers to the rest of industrialized countries—in the case of Spain, providing mining and agricultural products. However, during the “Great Acceleration”, industrialized countries were unable to sustain their economic transformations with endogenous resources. All countries intensified their parasitic relationships—even those that, for various reasons, had been net exporters during the initial transition phases, while the material flows expanded from the “Global South” to the rest of the world (Schaffartzik et al. 2014; Infante-Amate et al. 2020) (Fig. 9.8c).

9.11 Conclusions and Future Research Agenda We have presented here the first, long-term annual series on material extraction, trade, and consumption of the Spanish economy between 1860 and 2016. The results allowed us to reconstruct and analyze the main trends regarding resource usage, the material intensity of the economy, international relations, and the chronology of the socio-metabolic transition. The main conclusions regarding Spain’s transition to industrial metabolism are enumerated next. (1) Material use upsurged, going from

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4 to 20 tons per inhabitant per year between 1860 and 2007. Growth was especially rapid between c. 1950 and 2007: Spanish consumption rose from below the global average to becoming one of the highest globally. (2) A transition took place from biomass—which accounted for almost 90% of the materials used in 1860—to abiotic resources—which today represent almost 80%. This shift occurred later in Spain (1964) than in most developed countries (all before 1950), but it unfolded earlier than in emerging economies. (3) Spain was a net exporter of materials, especially metal ores and agricultural products until c. 1930. From c. 1950 onwards, however, Spain became a net importer of all types of materials. In fact, in this latter period, Spain appears to have been a major net global importer, well above other high-income countries. (4) The material intensity of the economy fell, implying a continuous decoupling between economic growth and the use of resources. Nevertheless, total consumption continued to rise (until 2007), reflecting a re-materialization in absolute terms. (5) Although material efficiency improved, due to both technological developments and structural changes, population increase and above all, income growth drove up resource consumption. It is worth noting that this study presents significant limitations to be addressed in future work. The dynamics of material appropriation are well understood, yet little is known regarding how the materials are exploited. Such knowledge is necessary to determine the extent to which materials are reused as well as their end usage. Distinguishing the materials required in the processing phases from those that actually reach final consumption informs us about changes in production efficiency and which materials truly contribute to improving living standards. Finally, it is important to identify the share consumed by stock (material infrastructures that provide basic services such as accommodation or transport) and the share consumed by material flows (e.g., oil) directed towards maintaining the stock. Such estimates are essential as they allow designing more efficient systems that reduce material consumption.

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Kander A, Malanima P, Warde P (2015) Power to the people: energy in Europe over the last five centuries. Princeton University Press Kander A, Warde P, Henriques ST, Nielsen H, Kulionis V, Hagen S (2017) International trade and energy intensity during European industrialization, 1870–1935. Ecol Econ 139:33–44 Krausmann F, Schandl H, Sieferle RP (2008) Socio-ecological regime transitions in Austria and the United Kingdom. Ecol Econ 65(1):187–201 Krausmann F, Gingrich S, Nourbakhch-Sabet R (2011) The metabolic transition in Japan: a material flow account for the period from 1878 to 2005. J Ind Ecol 15(6):877–892 Krausmann F, Gaugl B, West J, Schandl H (2016) The metabolic transition of a planned economy: material flows in the USSR and the Russian Federation 1900–2010. Ecol Econ 124:76–85 Kuskova P, Gingrich S, Krausmann F (2008) Long term changes in social metabolism and land use in Czechoslovakia, 1830–2000: an energy transition under changing political regimes. Ecol Econ 68:394–407 Magalhães N, Fressoz JB, Jarrige F, Le Roux T, Levillain G, Lyautey M, Bonneuil C (2019) The physical economy of France (1830–2015). The history of a parasite? Ecol Econ 157:291–300 Naredo JM (2003) La burbuja inmobiliario-financiera en la coyuntura económica reciente (1985– 1995). Siglo XXI Pérez Cebada JD (2014) Tierra devastada. Historia de la contaminación minera. Síntesis Ruffing K (2007) Indicators to measure decoupling of environmental pressure from economic growth. Sustain Indic: Sci Assess 67:211 Schaffartzik A, Mayer A, Gingrich S, Eisenmenger N, Loy C, Krausmann F (2014) The global metabolic transition: regional patterns and trends of global material flows, 1950–2010. Glob Environ Change 26:87–97 Schandl H, Schulz N (2002) Changes in the United Kingdom’s natural relations in terms of society’s metabolism and land-use from 1850 to the present day. Ecol Econ 41(2):203–221 Sieferle RP (2001) The subterranean forest: energy systems and the industrial revolution. White Horse Press Smil V (2016) Making the modern world: materials and dematerialization. Lulu Press Tena A, Carreras EnA, Tafunell X (2005) Estadísticas históricas de España, siglos xix-xx. Fundación BBVA, pp. 573–644 Vanwalleghem T, Infante-Amate J, González de Molina M, Soto Fernández D, Gómez JA (2011) Quantifying the effect of historical soil management on soil erosion rates in Mediterranean olive orchards. Agric Ecosyst Environ, 142(3-4):341–351 Widenhofer D, Rovenskaya E, Haas W, Krausmann F, Pallua I, Fischer-Kowalski M (2013) Is there a 1970s syndrome? analyzing structural breaks in the metabolism of industrial economies. Energy Procedia, 40:182–191. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82377381.pdf Wrigley EA (2016) The path to sustained growth: england’s transition from an organic economy to an industrial revolution. Cambridge University Press. http://www.materialflows.net/visualisa tion-centre/countryprofiles

Chapter 10

Global Metabolism

10.1 Introduction Material and energy exchange flows between countries (N units) give rise to an intricate mesh of relations, the sum of which constitutes the scale of global metabolism (Fig. 10.1). Interactions vary as well owing to the particularities of different countries, each presenting varying degrees of social, cultural, technological, and informational complexities, national surface areas, domestic resource quantity and quality, ecosystem and landscape variety, etc. In this way, novel properties emerge that are not observed at other scales. Examples include unequal exchanges and the consequent imports and exports of order (negentropy) and disorder (entropy) between groups of countries within the world-system (see Hornborg 2007; Frank 2007; Wallerstein 1974); global material and energy flows (Naredo 2006); or the impacts produced expressed as ecological footprints (Wackernagel and Rees 1996). Globalscale metabolism has started to be analyzed beyond national metabolism comparisons, for example, studying material and energy flow transformations by region, i.e., groups of nations within a given territory (e.g., Schandl et al. 2009). A sociometabolic analysis at this scale allows us to overcome national disparities and to appreciate the real state of the world economy from a material perspective. Such a comprehensive study enables us to understand the real possibilities of maintaining growth as an economic model in a finite world. In short, it allows us to verify how it is impossible to maintain the system as it is today. Business as usual is not an option.

10.2 A Metabolic Crisis The 2008 crisis was, after the 1929 crash, the worse crisis of contemporary capitalism in both quantitative and qualitative terms, a crisis from which the global economy has yet to recover. Unlike the first crisis, which was an overproduction and distribution

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_10

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Fig. 10.1 Diagram showing metabolic connections between countries (N) and between each country with their domestic natural resources, which defines the object of study of global (international) metabolism

crisis, the latter was an overconsumption crisis (increase in per capita consumption of matter and energy) and one that set limits to the appropriation of natural resources. The triggers of the crisis included not only the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and subprime mortgages, or the contraction in demand brought about by COVID-19, but also the drastic price increase of raw materials (see below). The crisis cannot thus pass for just one more of capitalism’s cyclical crises. Its roots are structural and its effects are multidimensional. It has had an impact not only on the financial system, but on the very metabolism of the world economy, affecting both the extraction and consumption of materials. The accumulation of stresses—demographic pressure, climate change, resource scarcities, financial instability, etc.—is increasing global systemic risk (Homer-Dixon et al. 2015). The mechanism that made it possible to control social entropy, that is, made social inequality more socially acceptable, is increasingly difficult to sustain. After World War II, the capitalist world order tried to recover economic growth by reducing the price of food, energy, and materials needed to fuel the reproduction of capital, that is, by intensifying Domestic Extraction not only in “developed” countries but also in peripheral countries, extending the frontier of appropriation of resources (Moore 2015). Profits could thus grow again, warding off threats of social entropy by means of nominal wage increases and mass consumption. Post-war “social peace” achieved in industrialized countries came at the expense of a planetary increase in physical entropy. The exponential growth of energy and material consumption that led to the

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so-called Great Acceleration (Costanza et al. 2007; Hibbard et al. 2007) is a reflection of this. Yet the current crisis is showing that it is increasingly difficult to reduce social entropy by increasing physical entropy. The environmental crisis threatens to ruin the key mechanism that made capital accumulation and economic growth work, that is, the appropriation and capitalization of nature (Moore 2015). From a biophysical perspective, the crisis arises from the very core of capitalism social relations and could be defined as a metabolic crisis. They are based on a rationale of constant profit rate increases and continuous growth of energy and material consumption that makes it possible. Both mechanisms, however, run into internal limits (the downward trend of profit rates) and external limits (the depletion and deterioration of natural resources). Consequently, the crisis should be considered as a metabolic crisis (Garrido 2015). Capitalism shows no signs of changing course, perhaps because this deeply engrained mechanism of inter-entropic compensation is what makes it work. Capitalism is promoting a way out of the crisis that consists in increasing the extraction of resources ever more, causing more environmental damages, i.e., stealing future generations and the world’s poor of increasingly scarce resources, further accentuating territorial and social inequality (Pikkety 2014). If this course is not redressed, the hypothesis of a metabolic collapse cannot be ruled out, at the cost of great social suffering.

10.3 Economic Growth and Material Consumption The world population has doubled since the early seventies, from 3700 million to more than 8000 today (https://www.un.org/es/global-issues/population, accessed on 20 April 2023). The growth rate has been 0.9% per year from 1960. The world economy’s growth rate over the same period has been higher, rising from 1.39 trillion dollars in 1960 to 96.53 trillion dollars in 2021 (World Bank, https://data.worldb ank.org/indicator/, accessed on 20 April 2023) with a growth rate of 5.9%. However, since the beginning of the century, the price of many natural resources has begun to rise, creating a new economic context of higher and more volatile raw material prices, due to the scarcity or increasing costs to appropriate them (Fig. 10.2). The era of cheap raw materials that sustained economic growth during the twentieth century seems to be over (UNEP 2011, 2016, 29). Since the beginning of this century, the population and the world economy have grown at lower rates than during the second half of the last century, but material extraction has, on the contrary, accelerated. The relationship between both phenomena seems obvious and emphasizes the structural nature of the crisis. In fact, the annual use of materials on a global scale reached 95.143 million tons (95.14 Gt) in 2019, compared to 30.25 Gt in 1970, 3.1 times more. Cumulative annual growth was 2.3%, while global GDP rose at a rate of 5.9%. While the annual growth rate was around 2% until 2002, it has been growing at 3% since then, despite the

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crisis. The extraction of fossil fuels grew by 2.5%, metallic minerals by 3.5%, and non-metallic minerals by 3.4%. Extraction of biomass has grown at the slowest rate, at 1.7% (Global Material Flows Database: https://www.materialflows.net/, accessed 3 May 2023), highlighting the productive limitations of agroecosystems. Between that year and 2015, around 1000 Gt were extracted, i.e., almost a third of total extraction since 1900 (Krausmann et al. 2018, 137). Most used materials have been non-metallic minerals (46.6%) employed to build stocks. Only the world’s richest countries have reduced their domestic consumption of materials or brought their consumption to stagnation (Schaffartzik and Pichler 2017). The reasons are described below. 300

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Nov. 1993 Jul. 1994 Mar. 1995 Nov. 1995 Jul. 1996 Mar. 1997 Nov. 1997 Jul. 1998 Mar. 1999 Nov. 1999 Jul. 2000 Mar. 2001 Nov. 2001 Jul. 2002 Mar. 2003 Nov. 2003 Jul. 2004 Mar. 2005 Nov. 2005 Jul. 2006 Mar. 2007 Nov. 2007 Jul. 2008 Mar. 2009 Nov. 2009 Jul. 2010 Mar. 2011 Nov. 2011 Jul. 2012 Mar. 2013 Nov. 2013 Jul. 2014 Mar. 2015 Nov. 2015 Jul. 2016 Mar. 2017 Nov. 2017 Jul. 2018 Mar. 2019 Nov. 2019 Jul. 2020 Mar. 2021 Nov. 2021 Jul. 2022 Mar. 2023 Nov. 2023

0

Fig. 10.2 Natural resources prices. Source FRED (2023)

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Consumption of inorganic resources amounts to over 73% of total used resources. The total extraction of materials passed from 30.94 to 96.19 Gt between 1970 and 2019, with a large increase in extraction and use of construction materials and minerals, which parallels the impacts of fast demographic expansion and urbanization rates. Thus, a planet inhabitant currently needs around 12 tons per year of resources, while one hundred years ago that same figure was just above 4.5 tons. Global CO2 emissions continue to rise due to the growing use of fossil fuels, 80% of total global emissions being produced by only 19 countries. Nearly all mountain glaciers in the world are progressively shrinking, causing severe impacts on human beings. Ocean levels have been rising on average 2.5 mm per year since 1992 (IPCC 2019).

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Globalization continues to progress, driven by the need to mobilize all natural resources. The metabolism of national economies is increasingly dependent on global flows of goods. In fact, international trade of materials has grown at an annual rate of 3.9%. If, in 1970, the total amount of materials flowing through international trade accounted for just under 15% of Global Extraction, by 2019, that percentage had grown to almost 32%. In other words, almost a third of materials extracted globally circulate through international trade channels. Imports have more than doubled, going from 6.34% of global domestic extraction in 1970 to 15.31% in 2019. Meanwhile, exports have followed a similar path, from 8.58% in 1970 to 16.4% in 2019. As we shall see later, a large part of these energy and material flows are invested unevenly in the creation and maintenance of stocks (buildings, infrastructure, equipment, and machinery), further increasing the distance between some countries and others in terms of development and wellbeing. These data show that the famous “decoupling” has entered a phase of relative stagnation of wealth creation regarding the consumption of materials. The decoupling gave rise to extensive academic and political literature, and even to the emergence of the so-called “green economy” that believed it was possible to maintain economic growth thanks to the decreasing consumption of materials (UNEP 2011). The drop in the energy intensity of the major economic processes, which had been occurring throughout the twentieth century, supported this assertion (Fig. 10.3). However, the data on material extraction and consumption bring us back to the harsh reality, shattering the dream of indefinite economic growth. Per capita consumption of materials on a global scale, i.e., the planet’s metabolic profile, grew at an annual rate of 2.2% between 1970 and 2000, going from a per capita consumption of 8.4 tons in 1970 to 9.4 tons in 2000. Since the turn of the century, however, the pace of growth has accelerated (2.7%), despite the 2008–14 economic crisis and the subsequent economic contraction caused by COVID-19. Currently, material consumption stands at 12.3 tons/capita, which is 30.4% more than in 2000. Although world GDP grew (at constant prices) over those same years at a higher rate (2.99%) than DMC (2.7%), the difference is smaller than that witnessed in the last third of the nineteenth century, driven by the steady drop in material intensity per unit of GDP. Indeed, since the late 1990s, the decline in material use intensity has slowed, as shown in Fig. 10.3. While 1.98 kg of materials was needed to produce one dollar in 1991, by 2019, that figure was 1.1 kg (Material Flow Net 2023). Efficiency gains have slowed in recent decades and show signs of stagnation. The phenomenon seems to be related to the greater outsourcing of material extraction and processing to third countries, i.e., the “dirtiest” and most inefficient processes in terms of material consumption and waste production (UNEP 2016; Krausmann et al. 2017). In any event, GDP growth has also been linked to the spectacular increase in financial money (Naredo 2001) and the growing decoupling between capital flows and flows of energy and materials, that is, decoupling with respect to the real economy.

10.4 Stocks (Funds)/Flows Nexus

243 a)

b)

DE/GDP (Material Intensity)

c)

012

Dolars

010 008 006 004 002 000

Year

Fig. 10.3 Material intensity (domestic extraction/GDP). Source Material Flow Net and World Bank

10.4 Stocks (Funds)/Flows Nexus As we have seen, consumption reached 95.14 Gt in 2019 that is 3.1 times more than in 1970. Biomass accounts for more than a quarter of extracted materials (26.77%), fossil fuels almost one-sixth (16.51%), and the remaining 56.72% are extractions of metallic minerals and especially non-metallic ones (Material Flow Net 2023). The spectacular figure of mineral growth is due to rising needs of materials for building and maintaining “capital” stock, especially in rich countries. These stocks function as dissipative structures that provide services to society, with large amounts of energy and materials invested in their building and maintenance. These stocks, therefore, are responsible for the steady rise in energy and material demand. Any degrowth and sustainability strategy thus depend on the type of dissipative structures or stocks built and their dissipation needs. Indeed, the metabolism of the world economy has changed significantly. Most extracted materials accumulate in stocks—unlike at the beginning of the twentieth century. In combination with technical energy, they provide essential goods and services such as shelter, mobility, and communications. According to Krausmann et al. (2018), in 2015, 75% of global material extraction (69 Gt) was used to expand, maintain, and operate building, infrastructure and machinery stocks; 58% of the materials extracted in that year were used to build and maintain stocks: 7.1 tons/ capita were dedicated to stock building, 0.6 were used to provide food, 1.5 to feed livestock, 2.0 tons/capita to provide technical energy, and 0.9 for other dissipative usages. That same year, the Industrial New World enjoyed the highest levels of stocks per capita (446 tons/capita), followed by former Soviet Union countries (303 tons/ capita) and the Industrial Old World (278 tons/capita) (Wiedenhofer et al. 2021, 6). By 2015, a total of 961 Gt of materials had accumulated in the in-use stocks of

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manufactured capital. Most of these materials were non-metallic minerals used in construction (concrete, asphalt, bricks, sand, and gravel). However, 33 Gt of metals, 15 Gt of wood, 3 Gt of plastics, and 3 Gt of glass were also destined to in-use stocks (Krausmann et al. 2018, 136). As in the case of domestic material extraction, net investment in stocks has also accelerated so far this century, growing at a rate of 4% per year since 2002. China has become the main cause of this acceleration: between 1990 and 2015, China multiplied its construction effort fivefold reaching 314 Gt. Wiedenhofer et al. (2021, 10) have found no evidence to support the hypothesis of stock construction saturation (Lanau et al. 2019), except in Industrial Old World countries.

10.5 The Key Role of International Trade As suggested, observable differences in different countries’ “development” and welfare levels are related to the quantity and quality of the stocks that they have built and maintained over time. In fact, differences in per capita consumption of energy and materials are linked to the demand generated by these stocks. For example, consumption in high-income countries is on average 15.9 tons/capita/year, while in peripheral or “less developed” countries, average consumption is 2.6 tons/capita/ year (Krausmann et al. 2017, 657). However, these material domestic consumption figures must include the cost of extraction and initial processing of materials that are eventually imported by them. In fact, in many net-exporting countries of energy or materials, a portion of the extracted materials is invested in the extraction process itself and not in the endowment of stocks for the benefit of their own population. That portion of energy and materials can no longer be used to build and maintain stocks in the future. With globalization, international trade has become a crucial instrument for almost every country in the world. The larger a country’s metabolism, the greater its dependency on international markets for provision of natural resources not available from their own domestic extraction. For decades, sources of energy and materials— generally located in less developed and peripheral countries, but not necessarily— have been essential for sustaining the metabolic process of developed economies. According to materialflows.net database (https://www.materialflows.net/), global exports increased from 2.66 Gt/year in 1970 to 15.77 Gt/year in 2019. A total of 40% of fossil energy carriers, 35% of ores, 8% of biomass, and 3% of nonmetallic minerals are transferred via international trade across countries (Krausmann et al. 2017, 657). As expected, Europe, North America, and more recently also East Asia are the biggest net-importing regions, whereas all other world regions are netexporting regions (UNEP 2016). China is the country where the consumption of materials has grown fastest, going from 6 tons/capita/year in 1995 to 17 in 2010. Exports rose from 8.6% of global domestic extraction in 1970 to 16.4% in 2019. What international trade actually does is to displace environmental burdens from one country to another. For example, the global biomass market is dominated by the

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so-called flex crops: wheat, corn, and soybeans. The market situation, quality, and price determine whether these commodities are sold as foodstuffs, biofuels, or animal feed. The biggest global commodities of this type to come next are sugar, palm oil, and rice, reflecting, with the exception of rice, the growing needs of food-processing industries and the food needs of high-income countries. The general trend is thus to use imports to compensate growing demand that cannot be supplied by domestic extraction (Bruckner et al. 2012) or is cheaper in monetary terms. Across the embodied flows of materials, energy, land, and labor, the group of high-income countries used more resources from a consumption perspective than they provided through production in the year 2015. Their final demand exceeds domestic extraction by 10 Gt. The rest of the countries were net providers of raw materials, with their extraction exceeding their consumption of resources. High-income nations (hereinafter HIs) were both the largest domestic producers of primary energy (203.9 Exajoule per year (EJ/a), 1 EJ = 1018 J) and the main net appropriators of energy embodied in traded goods (22.7 EJ/a), resulting in a very high energy footprint (226.6 EJ/a). Energy—that is, almost exclusively fossil energy—appropriated by HI countries mainly stemmed from the upper-middle income (UMI) countries and China (Dorninger et al. 2021, 5). These were also the countries that appropriated the most virtual land (31%). HI countries were equally those that succeeded at appropriating the work provided by the rest of the countries. Yet, they also achieved a trade surplus of USD 48.5 trillion in 2015, that is, more than the rest of the countries in the world put together. In short, HI countries secure a disproportionately large percentage of materials, energy, land, and labor through international trade. This latter conclusion was reached by studying the physical trade balance (PTB) of several developed and underdeveloped countries (Muradian and Alier 2001; FischerKowalski and Amann 2001; Giljum and Eisemenger 2003; Muñoz et al. 2009). The Physical Trade Balance (PTB) of most world countries between 1962 and 2005 was analyzed (Dittrich and Bringezu 2010; Dittrich et al. 2011), and the conclusions supported the findings of previous works: as of the 1960s, more industrialized regions had positive PTB values, while developing regions presented negative PTB values. These tendencies gradually accentuated until 2005 (Dittrich and Bringezu 2010); in other words, resources continued to flow from south to north. According to Krausmann et al. (2017, 657), the shift from industry to services in industrial countries, high labor costs, and rigorous environmental standards result in externalizing resourceintensive industries to the Global South. Raw materials are processed in these latter countries and “light” products are exported to meet the needs of high-tech industries and consumers in the industrial world. Flows of energy, materials, land, and labor seem to go in the opposite direction to monetary flows. This phenomenon, however, is only apparent. If embodied resources are considered, both monetary and biophysical flows align in the same direction, as indicated by Dorninger et al. (2021, 9). HI countries appropriate a large share of globally produced or extracted materials, energy, land, and labor. In parallel, they appropriate a substantial share of the monetary flows. Peripheral countries therefore specialize in exporting products that generate less monetary added value. Yet it is precisely these goods that have higher extraction and initial processing physical

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costs. The so-called notary rule described by Naredo and Valero (1999) is thus met here. According to this rule, the final links of the production chain reap the greatest monetary benefits, as they require much smaller amounts of materials, energy, and labor. Resource use is distinctly unequal.

10.6 Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Material Flows Because of this, some academics have denominated this phenomenon as “unequal ecological exchange” (Hornborg 2011, 2019). The theory of ecologically unequal exchange considers the material aspects of international trade and postulates that there are asymmetric net transfers of resources (including labor) from peripheral to core areas of the global economic system (Hornborg 2019, 1998; Dorninger et al. 2021). In fact, peripheral countries have become extractive economies (Gudynas 2021) and have steadily increased their domestic consumption of energy and materials. Meanwhile, HI countries have slowed their domestic consumption down or brought it to stagnation by reducing material use intensity. Resource imports have thus become key to economic growth and to maintaining their per capita energy and material consumption levels. Indeed, such asymmetric resource flows are crucial for the capacity of cities, nations, and regions to accumulate technological infrastructure and achieve economic growth (Hornborg 2018, 2016). High-income economies have been investing a considerable part of the materials and energy consumed into building stocks/funds. These countries expanded their extraction of material resources from approximately 12 billion tons per year in 1970 to 19 billion tons in the years before the 2007/08 economic and financial crisis, which was associated with strong decline in extraction. In 2010, this group of countries accounted for 25% of global extraction (Schaffartzik and Krausmann 2021). These economies use more material resources for building and maintaining these stocks/funds (Duro et al. 2018) than they extract from their own territory. Indeed, domestic extraction in these countries has stagnated (Wiedenhofer et al. 2013; Bleischwitz et al. 2018), so the expansion and maintenance of stocks comes at the expense of third countries through flows of energy and materials extracted elsewhere. The building and maintenance of stocks/funds require controlling global energy and material flows. These stocks/funds continue to grow as a whole, and their energy demands continue to require increasing amounts of fossil fuels (Krausmann et al. 2020). As Dorninger et al. (2021, 10) rightly conclude, wealth inequalities among countries are functional and systematic: they are not merely a side effect of growth-led development. It does not seem, therefore, that poor countries will reach the wealth levels of rich ones; in other words, that developing countries will eventually become developed countries, as clearly indicated by the highly conventional denomination employed by international institutions. Poor, resource-rich countries thus suffer from the “resource curse”, understood as a manifestation of the entropic equation we formulated in Chap. 4: they become the external environment that makes internal

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order possible in rich countries. Inequality between countries logically increases in contexts of increasing resource scarcity. As we will see in the last section, it seems unlikely that the transition to the industrial metabolic regime will complete itself. Moreover, the increase in energy and material intensity—which implies transferring extractive efforts to peripheral countries with less efficient technology—is a potentially critical obstacle to accomplishing the transition towards sustainability (Schaffartzik and Pichler 2017, 2). Both the consideration of underdevelopment and development as sides of a same coin and the Marxist assumption that economic development is intrinsically unequal have a yet more obvious biophysical basis. In fact, asymmetry between countries— as famine and poverty—are not circumstantial but structural phenomena fluctuating in time but persistent, given they are derived from economic growth and the model of international trade supporting it. Development cannot exist without underdevelopment, and affluent countries require of poor countries to exist. Economic growth and inequality are inseparable from the industrial metabolic regime; in fact, despite the promises and expectations of international organisms, economic growth has not abolished but exacerbated inequalities. According to a recent report of the Credit Suisse Bank (Reuters, Zurich 10/10/2013), global wealth peaked to a historical maximum record of 241 trillion dollars, increasing by 68% during the past ten years. However, the richest 10% owns 86% of the total world’s financial assets, while 1% owns 46% of that total. Currently, there are 98,700 individuals with fortunes of over 50 million dollars, more than half of them in US.

10.7 The Unviability of the Industrial Metabolism Regime Some believe that the market economy, aided by some minimal state intervention, will ensure both the subsistence of over nine billion human beings forecast to populate the planet by 2050 and sufficient economic progress for any country to achieve the same level of wellbeing enjoyed in industrialized countries. Economic growth must simply continue. This belief is supported by the idea that without economic growth, no jobs or wealth distribution could be possible. There are even some authors in the field of environmental thought who claim that we are in the midst of a 300-year-old transition from agrarian metabolism—still predominant in territorial terms—to industrial metabolism (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2007, 223). The process would be completed when poor countries reach the same level of development as rich countries. Such an accomplishment is the utmost goal of many politicians and intellectuals in developing countries claiming their right to enjoy industrialized-economy living standards: after all, they contend, it is a matter of equity. Global access to the same levels of prosperity as HI countries is a reasonable objective that is socially fair. But it is ecologically unviable. Nor is it possible to generalize HI country levels of endosomatic and exosomatic consumption and nor could that be attained by economic growth. If the rest of the world reached HI country per

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capita consumption levels (approximately 28 tons/capita/year), an annual extraction of 197 Gt would be necessary, i.e., more than double the current quantity. This figure, which seems unattainable, would place the planet beyond a safe operating margin of material resource use. Although China has come a long way in that direction, we are in fact witnessing growing inequality in resource usage between and within countries. Only a small number of countries have access to these consumption and stock-building levels (Schaffartzik and Krausmann 2021, 53). If, as we stated above, economic growth is the essence of industrial metabolism, then it seems unlikely that sustaining a social relation system based on inequity would lead us to equal development. In short, it is physically and socially impossible to complete the transition from agrarian to industrial metabolism: capitalism and nature forbid it. Thus, the process that we are currently undergoing is not a transition towards a predominating industrial metabolic regime, but its habitual mode of operating. The only feasible transition would be towards a different metabolic regime based on significantly reduced material and energy consumption rates. And to be sustainable, the latter must be distributed among countries as equally as possible. Such an egalitarian allocation of consumption requires the shrinking of developed countries’ metabolism, and simultaneously, a rise in metabolic profiles of the poorest countries. This in turn requires substantially reducing the size and type of existing stocks/funds, especially in HI countries. The bulk of these stocks/funds consist of infrastructures that have high energy and material dissipation rates. Consequently, they hinder a sustainable future or any significant reduction in the metabolic profile of societies. Large amounts of infrastructures require, for example, the use of fossil fuels. The prospect of meeting CO2 emissions targets and limiting global warming to 1.5 °C is thus moving further away (Krausmann et al. 2020). The latter issue is covered in the final chapters of this book.

10.8 A Biophysical Reading of the Crisis But the effects of natural resource depletion and the worsening of the environment that make economic activity possibly go beyond the health of ecosystems. There are direct consequences on the relative prices of food, raw materials, and energy, as their prices rise. As Moore (2015) argued, the era of cheap nature has come to an end, and this directly affects the very heart of economic growth and capital accumulation. The extended reproduction of capital faces difficulties in a context of increasing scarcity of energy and materials and of increasingly adverse environmental conditions. The industrial metabolic regime itself is put into question, and with it, the social relations that implanted it. Marx ventured an economic explanation of its contradictions that can also serve to reaffirm the structural nature of the metabolic crisis. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) is possibly Marx’s greatest scientific contribution. Paradoxically though, it is also one of Marx’s most questioned theses, even by a major part of later Marxist discourses, despite the fact that TRPF constitutes an empirically verifiable normative formulation. Though the idea had

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already been advanced by David Ricardo, Marx made it theoretically coherent within the framework of his general theory of capital. It is well known that profit is the result of dividing the rate of exploitation by the organic composition of capital. Since an organic composition greater than capital is needed to obtain equivalent exploitation rates, the profit rate tends to decrease. This trend can be interpreted in biophysical terms, given that the organic composition of capital is directly related to the extraction of natural resources, their availability and their price. The organic composition could be considered as compound by funds or stocks that require significant flows of energy and materials to be maintained. The downward trend of the profit rate drives the search for new frontiers of appropriation of natural resources, encouraging their cheapening. But the horizon of depletion and the steady loss of extraction process efficiency make resources increasingly expensive and, therefore, lead to a greater organic composition (more funds or stocks demanding more natural resources). For example, it is increasingly expensive to extract the labor equivalent of one ton of oil (Hall et al. 2009; Hall 2011; Brener 2006; Tapia and Astarita 2011). In turn, the pressures to lower the cost of the organic composition of capital have unfolded on two fronts. The first front is technological, with the efficiency increase of the technologies used (fixed capital). The second front is political (even military) and covers the control of raw materials prices, the drastic reduction of fiscal pressure on large fortunes and extensive deregulation. But the fixed capital reduction deriving from technological improvement has led to rising production because of lower costs, reducing overall efficiency as predicted by the “Jevons Paradox” (Alcott 2005). This has resulted in expanding global consumption of materials and energy due to both raw materials consumption growth by emerging powers—through increasing production and internal consumption—and the outsourcing, by most industrialized countries, of processes that use materials more intensively, as described earlier. All this has reinforced the prospects of scarcity and consequently increased raw materials’ intertemporal discount rates due to their foreseeable depletion. These discount rates have in turn affected raw material prices, raising the costs of the organic composition of capital. In summary, it is becoming ever more difficult to increase profit rates because the availability of resources and the quality of environmental services are raising the costs of the organic composition of capital. The internal devaluation undergone by many industrialized countries, due to deteriorating wages and labor rights, could be largely understood as a response to this trend, expressed in terms of competitiveness in global markets. In other words, it is increasingly difficult to compensate the social entropy generated by the capitalist system using the consumption of energy and raw materials, that is, using an increase in physical entropy. Future scenarios are not very promising. The system has reached extraction and consumption levels that are hard to sustain. It has substantially reduced the chances of completing a planetary transition to an industrial metabolic regime. The likelihood that things will remain the same is very high, possibly leading to a metabolic collapse and a significant rise in social suffering and therefore social entropy. There are no guarantees that the market itself, in its current phase of wild deregulation, can avoid it. The most probable route is that this current situation will be

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prolonged, further deepening social inequality and ecological deterioration. Indeed, it is very likely that physical entropy will continue to increase (economic growth) to the benefit of industrialized countries to partially compensate for social entropy (maintaining and even increasing high levels of domestic consumption) at the expense of the natural resources of peripheral countries, that is, of poor countries, whose social and physical entropy will continue to increase, naturally in the knowledge that this solution has ever more obvious limits. The migratory phenomenon, now global, is but the visible response of poor countries to the plundering of their resources and the socio-ecological impact of extractivism. In other words, without a major change in the metabolic patterns of energy and materials extraction and consumption, the possibility of metabolic collapse or “synchronous failure” (Homer-Dixon et al. 2015) will no longer be a remote possibility or a mere working hypothesis.

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Naredo JM, Valero A (DIRS) (1999) Desarrollo económico y deterioro ecológico Fundación Argentaria. Madrid Pikkety T (2014) El capital en el siglo XXI. FCE, México Schaffartzik A, Pichler M (2017) Extractive economies in material and political terms: broadening the analytical scope. Sustainability 9:1047. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9071047 Schaffartzik A, Krausmann F (2021) A socio-metabolic perspective on (material) growth and inequality. In: Laurent É, Zwickl K (eds) The Routledge handbook of the political economy of the environment. Routledge, London, pp 47–59 Schandl H, Fischer-Kowalski M, Grunbuhel C, Krausmann F (2009) Socio-metabolic transitions in developing Asia. Technol Forecast Soc Chang 76(2):267–281 Tapia JA, Astarita R (2011) La Gran Recesión y el capitalismo del siglo XXI. Libros La Catarata UNEP (2011) Decoupling natural resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth. Fischer-Kowalski M, Swilling M, von Weizsäcker EU, Ren Y, Moriguchi Y, Crane W, Krausmann F, Eisenmenger N, Giljum S, Hennicke P, Romero Lankao P, Siriban Manalang A (eds) A report of the working group on decoupling to the international resource panel. United Nations Environment Programme. Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, Switzerland UNEP (2016) Global material flows and resource productivity. In: Schandl H, Fischer-Kowalski M, West J, Giljum S, Dittrich M, Eisenmenger N, Geschke A, Lieber M, Wieland H, Schaffartzik A, Krausmann F, Gierlinger S, Hosking K, Lenzen M, Tanikawa H, Miatto A (eds) Assessment report for the UNEP international resource panel Wackernagel M, Rees J (1996) Our ecological footprint. New Society Publishers, Philadelphia Wallerstein I (1974) The modern world system. capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. Academic Press, London Wiedenhofer D, Rovenskaya E, Haas W, Krausmann F, Pallua I, Fischer-Kowalski M (2013) Is there a 1970s syndrome? Analyzing structural breaks in the metabolism of industrial economies. Energy Procedia 40:182–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2013.08.022 Wiedenhofer D, Fishman T, Plank B, Miatto A, Lauk C, Haas W, Haberl H, Krausmann F (2021) Prospects for a saturation of humanity’s resource use? An analysis of material stocks and flows in nine world regions from 1900 to 2035. Glob Environ Chang 71:102410. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102410 World Bank (2023) National accounts data, and OECD national accounts data files. https://data. worldbank.org/indicator/

Chapter 11

The Cinegetic or Extractive Socio-Metabolic Regime

11.1 Introduction As we have seen, Social Metabolism, in its different versions, has been used to study the structure, functioning and material dynamics of human societies throughout history, i.e., as an explanatory theory of socioenvironmental change (FischerKowalski and Haberl 1997, 2007; Sieferle 2001; Toledo and González de Molina 2014, first edition). Social Metabolism enables studying the relationship between society and nature, that is, building a socio-ecological understanding of any society. Thus, social metabolism is an idealized, abstract, and general representation of the totality of human society in nature. From this perspective, the history of humanity is but the history of the expansion of socio-metabolism beyond the sum of the bio-metabolisms of all its members. As we have seen, the tangible or visible material flows from and towards nature are quantified in terms of energy and material flows and the building of stocks/funds. This consideration has led some authors to distinguish different historical socio-metabolic regimes (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1997). Energy use is undoubtedly the most significant classification criterion of socio-ecological systems. Energy sources and energy conversion technologies can be used to differentiate societies. Rolf Peter Sieferle (1997, 2001) was the first to conceptualize the modes of societal organization as socio-ecological systems, comprising social organization, their modifications of the environment, and the environmental impacts (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2015). He classified societies according to energy use and source and distinguished hunting/gathering regimes, agrarian regimes, and industrial regimes (Sieferle 1997). These three regimes essentially correspond to the three forms of appropriation we proposed in the first edition of this book as a connection hub between ecological and social processes. This concept of metabolic regime has a clear thermodynamic and evolutionary meaning and is therefore directly related to the theoretical proposal laid out in previous chapters. In this and the following three chapters, we attempt to systematize the historical knowledge available on these three regimes. The aim is to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_11

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provide a basic description of these three regimes from a metabolic perspective and to put forward some hypotheses about how they work in accordance with what we saw in Chaps. 4 and 5. The human species as such (Homo sapiens) is at least 300,000 years (Hublin et al. 2017), but if humanness is considered inclusively, it dates back to around two million years. During that period, paleoanthropological evidence suggests the existence of a minimum of eight species of the Homo genus related to H. sapiens. For nearly all of its history, the human species lived grouped into cinegetic or extractive societies (Meillassoux 1967). The qualifying terms cinegetic and extractive describe societies in which human actions over the terrestrial and aquatic landscapes—including continental and oceanic waters—are limited to: hunting, including several forms of trapping; gathering, both of plants and animals such as insects, mollusks, and crustaceans, or of their products (honey); and fishing. In these three modes, nature appropriation acts consist of removing handpicked parts from the ecosystem—plants, animals, and minerals: this implies that only exceptionally is the structure or dynamics of the ecosystem intentionally modified. Appropriated organisms are affected only in terms of populations, rarely in terms of landscape, as in the case of the intentional use of fire to modify certain habitats and to favor the gathering of certain species of plants or animal preys. This means that the consequences of the irresponsible use of resources are essentially restricted to the overexploitation of the appropriated plant and animal species, thus disturbing their population and reproductive processes. According to Sieferle (2001), the metabolic profile of hunter-gatherers is larger by a factor of 2–4 than the basic (endosomatic) metabolic rate of human beings. Total energy use is composed of the amount of food extracted from their environment (ranging between 3 and 4 GJ/capita per year) and fuel wood (around 7 GJ/capita per year), the total metabolic rate thus being 11 GJ. These figures provide evidence that hunter-gatherer societies were constrained by the density of prey animals within the distance they could be transported to the home as well as food source overexploitation risks. Under such circumstances, there was little incentive to increase labor intensity or to estimate population growth (Fischer-Kowalski 2023, 4).

11.2 The Simplest Social Organization The first mode of social metabolism—the only way to appropriate nature until about twelve to ten thousand years ago—was that of extractive societies organized into the simplest social organizations of hunters, gatherers, and fishers. While apparently obvious, the study of this appropriation modality had to overcome endless bias and prejudice. For decades, the prevailing view of primeval cinegetic societies centered on individual members being prehistoric or pre-human entities located in a twilight zone between the realms of natural (natural history) and human (history) evolution that entirely or at least mostly obeyed natural laws. As Childe wrote, the advent of agriculture put an end to human beings making a living: “like any other beast of prey,

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a parasite on other creatures by catching and collecting what food nature happened to provide [Child 1942, 55]”. Thus, hunter-gatherer societies were approached from the perspectives of Biology, Ethology, or Sociobiology, applying the same concepts used to study primates and other vertebrates—as if humans were exclusively an animal species part of nature. At this stage of metabolic development, humans seem to behave as one more species in an ecosystem and can thus appear as simple biological elements. Yet, in practice, and from a social perspective, humans perform qualitatively distinct processes. In fact, contrary to all other animal species, humans extract resources from nature by means of a metabiological act: appropriation/production. Because of that, as stated by Ingold (1987), the concepts of predation, foraging, cooperation, and territoriality used to analyze animal species are not equivalent to those of hunting, gathering, distribution, and land control: the former belong to the domain of ecological interactions of animal species—mostly of vertebrates, and in particular of primates—and the latter, to the human social domain. The substantial difference between, say, a troop of baboons predating, foraging, cooperating, and defending a territory and a band of humans performing apparently similar actions is that humans obtain materials from nature through an act conceived by the social collective, in which humans act as intentional agents leading to nature belonging to a separate reality (emergence of self-consciousness). Humans enjoyed two comparative advantages, due to their technological capacity. On the one hand, they used fire to prepare food. This allowed them to digest some feedstuff that otherwise would have been impossible to digest, broadening the base of available resources. This gave them an advantage over other omnivorous species since they had less territory to cover or less food to ingest. On the other hand, the use of hunting tools, which were not common in other species, allowed them to be more efficient at capturing prey. However, this advantage was a double-edged sword, as pointed out by Sieferle (2001): greater hunting success could lead more quickly to the prey’s depletion and force the community to move quickly to another area, increasing the environmental impact. Finally, the use of collective hunting strategies and collective access to food stimulated the communication and the evolution of language (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2014, 12). Cooperation became an evolutionarily successful strategy. At this initial stage of cinegetic-extractive social metabolism, humanity spread and occupied virtually all habitats on the planet through a colonization process that spanned over one hundred thousand years. Modern Homo sapiens originated in eastern Africa and started to proliferate to the whole continent 100,000 years ago. About 40,000 to 60,000 years later, a small subset of that same population entered Asia triggering the second and longer expansion in two probable directions: one along the southern and eastern coasts of Asia and western Oceania; the second, towards central Asia, and from there to the west into Europe and to western Asia and northern Siberia, eventually reaching America. The chronology of these itineraries has been confirmed by genetic (Stix 2013) as well as linguistic evidence, and a correspondence has been established between genetic and linguistic genealogies (Cavalli-Sforza 2000).

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Regarding social metabolism, the human species was exclusively cinegeticextractive until the advent of agriculture. Around 12,000 or 10,000 years ago, it occupied most of the planet from Australia, a large part of western and northern North America, including northern Mexico, and large parts of South America, Asia, and Africa, the population reaching an estimated one million inhabitants (Lee and De Vore 1968). Towards year 1500, the expansion of the emerging agricultural societies—the second mode of appropriation—pushed societies of hunters, fishers, and gatherers towards marginal, peripheral, and isolated areas in the southern extreme of South America, the North American pacific coastline, the driest portions of Australia, the Arctic polar circle, Siberia, and parts of Africa and Asia (Fig. 11.1). Despite severe population decimation owing to extinction, integration, or cultural dissolution, the cinegetic metabolism exists, resists, and subsists in several parts of the world, encompassing an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people (Burger 1987; Lee and Hitchcock 2001). Based on language, this latter population falls into roughly one thousand peoples or cultural units. Such a linguistic heterogeneity represents one-sixth of the world’s total cultural diversity, found mostly in Australia (about 400 languages) and Africa (Birdsell 1973; Lee and Hitchcock 2001; Codding and Kramer 2016; Svizzero and Tisdell 2015; Greaves et al. 2016). Most or nearly all of what is known about extractive or cinegetic societies derives from ethnographic research of extant peoples. Therefore, to characterize metabolic processes in this initial appropriation stage, it is necessary to acknowledge that

Fig. 11.1 World distribution of hunter, gatherer, pastoral, and fisher societies

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contemporaneous groups do not allow us to sketch past reality with great accuracy. Indeed, most extractive societies today have been polluted and hence altered owing to their contacts with agricultural, urban, and industrial societies through exchanges of technology, information, knowledge, and economic goods. The conception that contemporaneous extractive societies are isolated has been contradicted by evidence of commercial relations between them for hundreds, or maybe thousands of years (Headland and Reid 1989). This concern has even led to questioning the existence of cinegetic societies in the humid tropics of the world, a matter that has been amply discussed and disputed (Bailey et al. 1989; Colinvaux and Bush 1991). In essence, a clear distinction needs to be made between the modality of cinegeticextractive social metabolism that originated during the Pleistocene and that arising after the advent of agricultural societies, i.e., between Paleolithic-Neolithic and Holocene extractive societies (Marlowe 2005). Despite these distinctions, once the— mostly technological—differences between both modalities are weighted, and after considering the fossil and archaeological remains available from the Pleistocene, extant cinegetic societies are highly valuable to understand initial forms of social metabolism.

11.3 The Productive Versatility of Cinegetic Societies Owing to the very low level of technological development of these first human societies—limited to the use of rudimentary instruments, fire, dogs, and human energy— the three fundamental activities (hunting, gathering, and fishing) of this appropriation mode play a more or less significant role according to the production potential of each ecosystem or landscape occupied. For example, according to the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1967), Lee’s (1968) analysis of 58 extant extractive societies led him to find a correlation between geographic location—and hence climate—and the relative importance of hunting, fishing, and gathering. In warm and temperate regions, gathering predominates due to the abundance and diversity of plant species, in extreme cold climates, hunting prevails, while between 40 and 60° of latitude, fishing becomes the main resource (Lee 1968, 42). Productive versatility allowed the colonization of an ample variety of landscapes. Where resources in oceans, rivers, lakes, and lagoons were abundant, fishing became the main activity, supplemented with hunting and gathering. Conversely, in cold habitats where large mammals were abundant, hunting of big game was privileged, and in deserts, hunting focused on small preys. Porter and Marlowe (2007) analyzed 146 preagricultural and agricultural societies with different regimes—hunters, fishers, gatherers, and horticulturists, shepherds, and irrigation farmers, respectively. They found that cinegetic or extractive societies occupy habitats that are as productive as those inhabited by agricultural societies in terms of net and gross primary productivities. The social and demographic versatility of the cinegetic-extractive metabolism is visible in the continual adaptation of human groups to existing ecological conditions, expressed as the abundance or scarcity of essential resources, mainly of food

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and water. Thus, the amount and availability of resources (across both space and time) determine the duration and extension of annual migration cycles (nomadism) throughout their base territories. They can even lead to sedentarism, e.g., in the coastal regions of Australia or eastern North America in which the abundance of fish not only makes displacement unnecessary, but even promotes unusual human population levels (Sutles 1968; Birdsell 1973). In other cases, adaptation is achieved via a forced reduction in the number of unproductive—albeit consumer—members of the group through diverse practices such as infanticide (predominantly of female children) and abortion. The available ethnological evidence of correlations between the spatial and temporal abundance of resources with ecological zones or regions, climates, and variations in extractive activities sheds light on the large-scale changes that accompanied past climatic variations. For example, the first and medium coldest periods of the Pleistocene, as well as the temperature rise towards the end of this period and the beginning of the Holocene, had immediate repercussions on extractive activities— including associated knowledge and technologies—and hence on human diet. This eventually affected the size of human populations as well as their social and productive organization. Added to the above are intrinsic factors of human societies, such as the domestication of fire or dogs, the beginning of language, the cooking of foodstuffs—which would have led to an increase in brain size (Wrangham 2009)—and longer life expectancy unleashing grandparent-grandchild communication (Caspari 2013). Altogether, despite representing the simplest human societies, they involved an intricate interplay of causes, dynamics, and synergies.

11.4 The Metabolism of Cinegetic Societies Following the basic model developed in Chap. 6, the first step to analyze the metabolic process in the first cinegetic societies is to determine the basic unit of appropriation (P). Research on hunting, fishing, and gathering societies has identified three social units, each corresponding to a different scale of social organization: family, band, and tribe (Fig. 11.2). While the family is the bottom social and demographic cell, it is generally imbricated in a band, together with other families. Likewise, the assembly of bands benefiting from a given territory, speaking the same language, and sharing a common history form a tribe. Although exceptional or unusual cases may occur, it is generally agreed that while the family operates as the social and demographic nucleus, and the tribe essentially embodies a cultural identity, it is the band that functions as the unit in charge of appropriation. Therefore, the band should be adopted as the basic unit in metabolic modeling. The band is an independent and autonomous social unit—a patrilineal, patrilocal, exogamous, egalitarian, and non-hierarchical social unit. It understands and uses a given territory’s resources and is regulated by councils. That is, a band is a human nucleus formed by males and their corresponding wives (one or more per male) and by their respective offspring. They reproduce by means of exchanging women with

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Fig. 11.2 Diagram showing the main productive units in a cinegetic-extractive society (family, band, and tribe), and the exchanges between these units and nature. Abbreviations: F, family; B, band

other bands (exogamy) and are community regulated. At this organization level, the only existing labor division is based on gender: women are almost always devoted to gathering, while men mostly hunt and fish. In fact, some studies claim that the sexual division of labor was a key innovation giving Sapiens an advantage over Neanderthals and enabling their expansion beyond Africa (Kuhn and Stiner 2006). However, in some cases, archaeological findings show that women also hunted prey of the same size as men or specialized in smaller prey (Biesele and Barclay 2001; Haas et al. 2020). The band, and not the family, was the appropriation unit of extractive societies, as evidenced by the fact that the appropriated products were usually shared equally by all members. They are distributed independently of individual contributions or role in the appropriation process, or of their sex or age, although the sharing is closely related to kinship. This fact establishes the boundaries of the basic production or appropriation unit. It is essential to correctly delimit P in order to identify the metabolic processes and to establish the limits between ecological and economic exchanges. Virtually, all economic analyses of extractive societies—led by the pioneering work of Sahlins (1972)—confounded or disagreed on the boundaries of the ecological and the economic realms. This lack of definition derives from the dual (natural-social) nature of the human phenomenon, as highlighted by Ingold (1987). It constitutes the fundamental axiom of ecological and social analyses resulting from the concept of

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social metabolism. Sahlins (1968 and 1972) produced one of the finest analyses of material exchanges, but unfortunately examined extractive societies pooling them with the simplest agricultural societies under the common term tribal societies. This makes it difficult to distinguish what are actually two different metabolic regimes, as we shall see below. Thus, it appears that three extractive society units, representing three different social organization hierarchical levels or scales, correspond to three separate though connected dimensions: biological or demographic reproduction (family); material reproduction (band); and cultural reproduction (tribe). At this stage of human development, the individual in an extractive society performs three activities: biological or reproductive role; appropriation/production agent; and member of a given culture or cultural group. These three dimensions act as three clocks with interlinking wheels. In the extractive appropriation mode, based on the sole three activities allowing to extract goods from nature (hunting, fishing, and gathering), the material and tangible share of the metabolic process is reduced to appropriation, transformation (minimal), and consumption, given that at this stage of social development, there is no circulation of products. Therefore, all that is produced has a utilitarian value for the producing community. In bold terms, these societies merely sustain ecological exchanges, because the material exchanges between society sectors only take place as social exchanges, not yet attaining the status of economic exchanges (Toledo 1981). During this initial metabolic stage, and more specifically, in its Paleolithic version, exchanges of produced materials within society reflect social relations given that the economy is still embedded in the society or culture. This reciprocal exchange of things takes place between next of kin, friends, or neighbors in the form of dowries or support in matrimonial transactions, friendly agreements, alliances, and peace treaties ensuring coexistence. This condition can be generalized to all extractive societies prior to agriculture, but they changed with the appearance of agricultural societies that stimulated commercial exchanges (mostly of foodstuffs and other basic products). These Paleolithic and Neolithic extractive modes of appropriation need to be distinguished. Another characteristic feature of cinegetic societies is that, in their metabolism, the circulation and consumption of the appropriated/produced goods are not deferred but (nearly) instantaneous, given the lack of knowledge or technology to preserve and store products. Products are consumed almost immediately, and there is no storing, accumulation, or centralization of production. This fact is decisive in social, organizational, and especially demographic terms. Their nomadic lifestyle was not compatible with the displacement of large amounts of belongings, naturally making it unnecessary to build permanent infrastructures. Countless studies on the demography of extractive societies have produced rather accurate calculations of populations that could be attained under this socioecological modality. These estimates are built by modeling ideal situations through the weighting of several factors, such as abundance and variability of available resources, and the frequency, intensity, duration, and ease of communication. A consensus has been reached that bands did not exceed 100 individuals, with a magic

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number of 25, while tribe populations ranged between 200 and 900 members, with a magic number of 500 (Birdsell 1968 and 1973). In a metabolic regime in which humans were integrated in food chains, they were bound by a predator–prey relationship that controlled the population. There were limited incentives to have numerous children since children constituted a burden and could destabilize the fragile balance between population and resources. Furthermore, given the lack of food alternatives, babies were more dependent on the mother’s milk than in other metabolic regimes and this reduced women’s fertility rates. Food intake contained very little fat (both wild animals and most plant food have low body fat content) and the fat deficiency reduced women’s ovulation (Sieferle 1990, cited in Fischer-Kowlaski et al. 2014, 12). The above-mentioned demographic thresholds allow us to envision past and present situations. If the human population during the early Holocene (12,000–10,000 years ago) was one million, we can speculate that in that period, there were nearly 2000 different cultures (tribes), all under the cinegetic-extractive modality of social metabolism. In addition, nearly 500,000 individuals currently remaining at that stage of human development represent about 1000 different cultures. This means there has been a 50% reduction in their cultural variation. The limited technological capability of this first metabolic regime—that prevents humans from storing goods—almost inevitably leads to displacement, according to resource abundance or scarcity. The limitations also reduce the metabolism to an almost immediate consumption of what is appropriated or produced (because the small volume of circulating goods has a social purpose rather than an economic one). The latter not only has demographical consequences, but also shapes intangible spheres (the software), such as social and productive organization, institutions, and cultural identity.

11.5 The Intangible Dimensions of Cinegetic Metabolism The intangible dimensions of this metabolism are characterized by the impossibility of a central and lasting political power. Indeed, these units were decentralized, lacked authority, and were meant to compensate the weakness of matrimonial and filial relations, as well as the fragility and instability of the band and tribe institutions that weakened social cohesion. A band’s continuous mobility reduces and debilitates a tribe’s cultural cohesion in terms of a common language and an epithet distinguishing them from outsiders. Obliged to engage in face-to-face communication, a tribe’s members grouped into bands required minimal personal contact to maintain their own language alive. Because of this, the permanence of a culture under this mode of appropriation required a communicative geography allowing bands migrating throughout the year to minimally communicate, in order to ensure the permanence of their language or dialect. As a counterpart, their cosmovisions induced the practice of a sacred ecology allowing them to maintain a balanced relationship with natural

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processes, mainly with the populations of plants and animals that were their source of supplies. This first socio-ecological modality spanned nearly 300,000 years and allowed the human species to colonize a large part of the planet. It had well-established limits in terms of its capacity both to increment the return flow of matter and energy resulting from its actions, and to build larger society structures. Such limitations result from the complex interaction between the abundance of appropriated resources in space and time and the limitations of sources of energy, technological development, demographic constraints, potential social cohesion, and communication requirements (language) that made the group identity possible. The above explains why in its initial phase, human societies were represented by hundreds of thousands of minute units (bands with an average of 25 members) that were nomadic, communicated little among themselves, and were dispersed throughout the vast surface of the Earth. Despite such limitations, cinegetic-extractive metabolism accomplished a grand feat, one which has remained almost unequalled: sustaining the human species for nearly three hundred thousand years with minimal inputs and under adverse environmental conditions, such as climatic instability. Thanks to our first conspecific populations, humanity still exists. Such an exploit is unforgettable.

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Fischer-Kowalski M, Haberl H (2015) Social metabolism: a metrics for biophysical growth and degrowth. In: Martinez-Alier J, Muradian R (eds) Handbook of ecological economics. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp 100–138; 105–106 Fischer-Kowalski M, Krausmann F, Pallua I (2014) A sociometabolic reading of the Anthropocene: modes of subsistence, population size and human impact on earth. Anthropocene Rev 1(1):8–33 Greaves RD et al (2016) Economic activities of twenty-first century foraging populations. Why forage? Hunters and gatherers in the twenty-first century. School for Advanced Research, University of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, Albuquerque González de Molina, Toledo VT (2014) The social metabolism: a socio-ecological theory of historical change. Springer, first edition Haas H, Watson J, Buonasera T, Southon J, Chen JC, Noe S, Smith K, Viviano Llave C, Eerkens J, Parker G (2020) Female hunters of the early Americas female hunters of the early Americas. Sci Adv 6:eabd0310 Headland TN, Reid LA (1989) Hunter-gatherers and their neighbors from pre-history to present. Curr Anthropol 30:43–66 Hublin J-J, Ben-Ncer A, Bailey S, Freidline S, Neubauer S, Skinner M et al (2017) New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature 546:289–292 Ingold T (1987) The appropriation of nature. University of Iowa Press, USA Kuhn SL, Stiner MV (2006) What’s a mother to do? The division of labor among Neanderthals and modern humans in Eurasia. Curr Anthropol 47(6):953–980 Lee RB, DeVore I (eds) (1968) What hunters do for a living, or, how to make out on scarce resources. Man the hunter. Aldine, Chicago Lee RB, DeVore I (eds) (1968) Man the hunter. Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago Lee RB, Hitchcock RK (2001) African hunter-gatherers: survival, history and the politics of identity. Afr Study Monogr 26:257–280 Marlowe FW (2005) Hunter-gatherers and human evolution. Evol Anthropol 14:54–67 Marlowe FW (2007) Hunting and gathering: the human sexual division of foraging labor. Cross Cult Res 41:170–195 Meillassoux C (1967) Essai d’Interpretation du Phénoméne Écono-mique dans les Sociétés Traditionnelles d’Autosubsistance. Ca-hiers d’Études Africaines, France Murdock GP (1967) Atlas Etnográfico del mundo. Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, Perú Sahlins MD (1968) Tribesmen. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, UK Sahlins MD (1972) Stone age economics. Tavistock, London Sieferle RP (1990) Bevölkerungswachstum und Naturhaushalt: Studien zur Naturtheorie der klassischen Ökonomie, 1st edn. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt Sieferle RP (1997) Rückblick auf die Natur: Eine Geschichte des Menschen und seiner. Umwelt. Luchterhand, München Sieferle RP (2001) The subterranean forest: energy systems and the industrial revolution. White Horse Press, Cambridge Stix G (2013) Traces of a distant past. Sci Am 22:60–67 Sutles W (1968) Coping with abundance: subsistence on the Northwest coast. In: Lee RB, DeVore I (eds) Man the hunter. Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago Svizzero S, Tisdell C (2015) The persistence of hunting and gathering economies. Soc Evol Hist 14 Toledo VM (1981) Intercambio ecológico e intercambio económico. In: Leff E (ed) Biosociología y Articulación de las Ciencias. UNAM, México Wrangham R (2009) Catching fire: how cooking made us human. Basic Books

Chapter 12

Organic Metabolism

12.1 Introduction All the evidence points to the fact that about ten thousand years ago, a complex combination of factors gave way to a qualitatively different relationship between human societies and their environments. These factors include a leap in humans’ mental capacity, a generalized temperature increase (at the end of the Ice age), and in particular, the management of landscapes and plant and animal species. This leap is known as the Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution. It generated a second metabolic regime, which released a series of human group potentialities that had remained unexpressed under the limited relations with nature of extraction or cinegetic societies. This second metabolic regime surfaced in several parts of the world nearly 10,000 years ago and became the socio-ecological basis of human societies for several millennia, until only 300 years ago. A new form of connection with nature was then set in motion with the Industrial Revolution. A key factor triggered a qualitatively different process that generated new and unexpected forms of social complexity: the human capacity to manipulate the environment that began to unfold several thousand years ago. Although this new period is commonly dated nearly 10,000 years ago, it was more the result of a lengthy and gradual process of domestication of Nature. There is evidence that fire was used to modify landscapes somewhat intentionally to favor the abundance of gathered or hunted foodstuffs in Africa (50,000 years ago), Australia (40,000 years ago), and New Guinea (30,000 years ago). Archaeological records also exist on water management (its deviation or retention) to favor populations of useful plants. As noted, these practices were dependent on a mental capacity that went beyond problem-solving and the procedures and routines of acquired experience. They required humans to develop foresight, to plan, to select strategies, and to solve new or unexpected problems. And all this implied acquiring minimum levels of memory, language, imagination, and intelligence (Wynn and Collidge 2008).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_12

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While archaeology cannot prove when or where these human mind transformations took place for certain, indirect evidence has reached us. The first confirmation of an immaterial or symbolic culture is a 75,000-year-old putative necklace made of marine shell beads found in the Blombos cave near Cape Town, South Africa (Henshilwood and Marean 2003). Self-consciousness and the conceptions of time and death are attested by the records of the first tombs about 40,000 years ago. The earliest ideographic or pictographic representations go back to a similar age and support this consciousness.

12.2 The Onset of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry This evidence suggests that at some point in the development of hunting, fishing, and gathering societies—when resources abounded, allowing not only for demographic growth, but more importantly, for a sedentary life—conditions were in place for the first alterations of landscapes as well as plant and animal species to take place. The study of domestication in contemporary human communities provides a better understanding of events that occurred in the distant past. According to Casas et al. (1997, 2007), in the case of vegetation and plant species, humans performed three manipulative actions beyond mere gathering: tolerance, foment or induction, and protection. All three represent intermediate processes between plain gathering and cropping, and constitute three domestication mechanisms. Tolerance includes practices of allowing useful wild plants to grow within the crop fields. By means of foment or induction, producers encouraged useful plant populations to grow, associating selected plants by various means (using fire, intentionally sowing seeds, etc.). Finally, protection consisted of deliberately tending to useful wild plant species in their own habitat, e.g., through soil fertilization, pruning, protection against pests, frost or drought, elimination of competitors or predators, etc. (Casas et al. 1997, 2007). Similar domestication processes unfolded for animals, where the selective capture of young specimens and their sustenance allowed favoring certain individuals. Individuals were selected according to the following factors: their contributions as foodstuffs or pelts, degree of tameness, transportation advantages, role in agricultural practices, and interaction capacity. In both cases, there is evidence that domestication was gradual, despite apparent upheavals or unexpected leaps over extensive periods of time. Humans went from the basic and passive act of species extraction (Paleolithic) to managing and manipulating populations of useful species. They did so through artificial or human selection (Neolithic), which favored morphological, physiological, and genetic features, or their combinations, resulting in more advantages for humans, thus creating new subspecies, races, or varieties of plants and animals. A restricted form of these practices had probably preexisted for several tens of thousands of years, and the climatic change that took place during the late Pleistocene favored their diffusion, multiplication, and optimization. Plant and animal husbandry was thus born in several regions of the world around 10,000 or 12,000 years ago.

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During this Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution, not only did a huge variety of new plants and domesticated animals emerge, but new varieties and races also appeared. Overall, they led to a remarkable increase in the planet’s biodiversity: about 12,000 varieties of potatoes alone have been locally recognized and nearly 10,000 varieties of rice (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols 2008). According to studies by the Russian geneticist N.I. Vavilov, eight domestication centers can be identified around the world. They were modified by Harlan (1992) based on archaeological evidence from the lands where crops originated. Harlan (1992) defined five geographic regions, which he called centers, and another three regions known as non-centers. These centers are located in the Middle East—the Fertile Crescent—(Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran), Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America), and northern China. The non-centers are located in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Smith (1998) later added a new center corresponding to the origin of crops in North America, and more recently, Neumann (2003) proposed New Guinea as another center where banana, sugar cane, and several tubers originated from (Fig. 12.1). Most cases of animal domestication occurred in the above-mentioned regions sometimes synchronically, and at others somewhat later (Cox and Atkins 1979). The first animal species to be domesticated were sheep (11,000 years ago) and goats (10,500–10,000 years ago), mostly in the Middle East and others in different regions of Asia, Europe and Africa, followed by bovines and pigs (9000 years ago). In America, animal domestication was less widespread due to the extinction of large fauna in North and South America, owing, in turn, to overhunting and probably because of the recent arrival of humans. Species of camelids (llama and alpaca) were domesticated in the Andes region, while the dog and turkey were domesticated in Mesoamerica. The manipulation of plant and animal species (and, in a strict sense, their evolutionary mechanisms) led to a domestication process driven by protection, selection, and hybridization. On the other hand, the mastery of metals—iron

Fig. 12.1 Major agricultural diversity centers in the world. Source Harlan (1992)

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at first and then bonze—allowed the elaboration of tools linked to this biological domestication: plows and other agricultural tools, yokes, harnesses, and horseshoes.

12.3 The Domestication of Landscapes The transformation initiated by human societies to obtain food was not limited to plant communities. It also concerned soils, topography, microclimates, and other physical factors, including the manipulation of ecological and microbiological processes such as forest regeneration and fermentation. Species domestication was followed by landscape domestication as the first Neolithic societies modified natural landscapes to create anthropized sections, i.e., areas to produce goods. These novel Neolithic landscapes were designed to add—not replace—new products to those obtained from hunting, fishing, and gathering. They were achieved through the appropriate management of ecological, geomorphological, and hydrological processes and largely without disturbing natural cycles and processes. These large-scale changes embrace the wide range of modifications made to the structure, function, and evolution of landscapes. Three of these designed systems are notable at a planetary scale: hydraulic agriculture, terraces, and intertropical agroforestry management. Vestiges of intensive hydraulic agriculture are found throughout the world, notably in each region in which remarkable civilizations emerged, e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Mexico, and the Andes. These systems were designed to modify the topography and natural water flows to create appropriate conditions for irrigation or hydraulic agriculture (Fig. 12.2). For example, there is evidence that terraces were established in the humid lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula (Siemens 1989, 1998). Similar systems were also found in Guatemala, Belize, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru (Donkin 1979; Denevan 1982). These terrace systems, generally known as raised fields, are made of a network of channels and platforms along the shores of lakes, rivers, or flood plains. They include the regulation of drinking water to maintain the water levels required to develop intensive agriculture (Siemens 1998). In the Andean highlands of Lake Titicaca between Peru and Bolivia, a hydraulic agriculture system known as waru-waru used to occupy a surface area of over 200,000 ha. It has been partially reactivated today. For their part, the Aztecs used chinampas that probably constitute the most sophisticated, low-technology system of hydraulic agriculture (Fig. 12.3). Chinampas spread over 12,000 hectares and among other functions, provided the required foodstuff (maize, beans, amaranth) for an estimated population of over 228,000 people (Denevan 1982). Another ancient practice found in the world’s tropics is the conversion of natural forests into anthropized forests. The process involves transforming the original forest composition and creating forest gardens by managing tree species and introducing useful grasses and shrubs. Examples of commercially significant crops include the following: coffee, cocoa, cinnamon, black pepper and other spices, rubber, and

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Fig. 12.2 Flooded rice paddies epitomize intensive agricultural systems. They illustrate a sophisticated landscape adaptation to human needs, including the domestication of species specifically suited to these modified conditions, such as rice and the water buffalo

Fig. 12.3 In Mesoamerica, a remarkable traditional design is the hydraulic agriculture system known as chinampas. Chinampas were created on lake shores in the Valley of Mexico. They were the breadbasket of Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztec empire

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vanilla. These forest gardens are a sort of reconstruction of natural forests in which wild and cultivated plants coexist. The objective was to maintain the structural characteristics and ecological processes of natural forests to benefit local human communities, and to preserve some biological diversity. Studies of traditional agroforestry systems have shown the relevance and value of these forests in terms of biology, ecology, and production in countries such as India, Papua, New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and Mexico. They are generated by local cultures based on ancient local knowledge. Examples of these systems are the Shambas from Uganda, the Kebun-Talun from western Java, the Pekarangan, Ladang, and Pelak from Sumatra-Indonesia, the Kandy from Sri Lanka, and the T’elom and Kuajtikiloyan of the Huastec (Tenek) and Nahua peoples from Mexico, respectively. Agricultural terraces are among the oldest systems allowing to manage geomorphology, soil, and water processes in landscapes with abrupt reliefs and steep slopes. Archaeological records suggest that terraces go back to 3000–4000 years ago in several regions around the world. Terraced landscapes have led to the development of numerous civilizations on each continent, e.g., in China, India, Japan, Korea, and Ethiopia—where agriculture was advanced—and in three other key agricultural regions: the Mediterranean, the Andes, and Mesoamerica (Sandor 2006).

12.4 The Multiple Implications of the Neolithic Revolution Beyond aspects linked to production, this second modality of connection with nature unleashed a series of new processes, including: sedentarism; population growth in nuclear settlements (notably villages); social hierarchy; the use of animal traction, a novel labor force; the lapse of time between resource appropriation and consumption (including food storage); and very significantly, the appearance of economic exchange, i.e., the circulation of produced goods beyond the appropriation/ production unit. It is still difficult to understand the extent to which these processes were synchronous. These processes and many others interacted, creating complex synergies that generated new social configurations. Within these patterns, the complexity of social relations and human life was entirely determined by phenomena such as social hierarchy and specialization, multiplication of human settlements, generation of surpluses towards non-producing sectors, and naturally, an explosion of intangible dimensions: techniques, knowledge, ideologies, beliefs, and institutions. The appearance of cities about 5000 years ago was the spatial expression of a society that had become stratified through state-organized social power. These societies had become capable of absorbing the generated surplus—through several coercive mechanisms— of a predominant agricultural sector tasked with appropriating nature: the peasantry. By the year 3000 BC, the human species had reached an estimated global population of 14 million (Modelski 2003). This figure reflects the significance of the shift from an extraction mode of appropriation to an agrarian one.

12.5 The Distinctive Features of the Organic Metabolic Regime

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It is worth noting the impacts of this new relationship with nature on the planet’s ecosystems and landscapes. The domestication of species of plants and animals not only modified the original composition of plant communities, but also generated new spatial patterns: agricultural fields to generate human food and fodder for the new domestic animals, or timber and non-timber forest products. These transformations probably gradually intensified according to each site’s specific conditions. Landscape transformation was facilitated by fire usage and water management, together with the continual improvement of tools as well as varieties of useful plants and animals. In this context, a striking paradox is worth mentioning: the appearance of pastoralist modalities leading to Neolithic nomadism. Indeed, animal domestication led certain human groups that were highly skilled in herd management to spread to regions that were little or not at all suited for crops, and in which even hunter-gatherers would have struggled. This procedure gave rise to a differentiation between sedentary and nomadic pastoral societies. They appeared in grassland-rich landscapes, colonizing vast arid and semi-arid or cold regions in east Africa, the Sahel, and the Sudan sub-Saharan Belt, the Mediterranean, southeast and central Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, and southern Siberia, together with the steppes in the southern Arctic Ocean, parts of Greenland, northern Eurasia, and North America (Vasey 1992). Pastoralist societies are estimated to go back to approximately 6000 years ago. They played a central role in Eurasian history as well as in the expansion and diversification of language in Europe (Cavalli-Sforza 1996). In demographic terms, contemporary pastoralist groups have a total population of no less than 20 million, distributed across northern Africa (14 million), Arabic countries (5 million), Mongolia (half a million), the ex-Soviet Union, and China (Burger 1987). In terms of social metabolism, the appearance of this new metabolic regime generated a second mega-landscape: the transformed environment (TEN) that added to, but did not replace, the utilized environment (UEN). This transformed environment contributed to the growth of economic trade, which circulated part of the production to other sectors, i.e., the social environment (SEN), thus incrementing exchange complexity at local or domestic scales.

12.5 The Distinctive Features of the Organic Metabolic Regime A distinctive feature of organic metabolism was, and continues to be, the use of solar energy as the essential energy source for appropriation. This was achieved both by improving and using living organisms (biological converters) more efficiently, and by inventing artifacts that used solar energy indirectly, such as watermills, windmills, and wind-propelled sailboats. Amazingly, this particularity limited the scale of ecosystemic transformations for over 10,000 years, from the early plant and animal domesticator societies, to the beginning of the industrial and scientific revolution in the eighteenth century.

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Except for some products elaborated from mineral sources, most artifacts and raw materials used by humans originated in the land and were the product of photosynthesis. Biomass provided both foodstuffs and raw materials, as well as the fuels needed for social functions (Wrigley 1988, 1989; Sieferle 2001a, b). Agrarian activities were at the core of social metabolism, going well beyond the satisfaction of the human population’s endosomatic requirements. Agrarian activities were at the heart of economic activity because they supplied the bulk of the energy used for production, transportation, metal production, and crafts, as well as most raw materials. In this way, all other economic activities were strictly dependent on them. Croplands provided food, medicine, fodder, and fuels (crop waste and byproducts); pastures supplied food and, in particular, means for transportation and warfare; and forests supplied fuel and materials for buildings and vehicles (carts and boats). Because of this dependency on biomass, crops needed to provide more energy than that invested in their production (Tello et al. 2013). For example, in humid parts of Europe, during the age of pre-industrial agriculture, it has been estimated that the amount of food needed to sustain agrarian activities accounted for 14–20% of the total food produced. In other words, the energy input–output ratio was 5 to 1 (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2007, 224–226). In this regard, coefficients to measure the efficiency of the global investment of resources in production have become more widely used in the scientific literature, such as Energy Return on Investment (EROI) (see Giampietro et al. 2010; Tello et al. 2015, 2016; Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2017). The EROI measures biomass investment efficiency, and it has begun to be applied to past agrarian societies (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007; Smil 2010, Tello et al. 2013; Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2015; Guzmán Casado et al. 2018; Gingrich et al. 2018). While cultivation soon became permanent in more suitable croplands, the most widespread system was slash-and-burn agriculture. Slash-and-burn allowed achieving populations that were ten times larger than those of hunter-gatherer societies, ranging from 20 inhab/km2 in eastern North America to 60 inhab/km2 in southeastern Asia (Smil 2001, 212–214; Table 12.1). Thus, societies under the organic metabolic regime were organized into closed circuits and this organization resulted from the appropriation system. Excretion processes were incorporated at the same time, and given the organic nature of the wastes, they turned into inputs. Transformation processes were almost inexistent or restricted to domestic products or crafts (preserves, sausages, salted meats, etc.). Distribution mainly took place at a local scale. Agri-food chains were short, and their energy and raw material costs were low.

12.6 The Metabolic Appropriation Process Biomass appropriation and production thus constituted the decisive metabolic system that was at the heart of all other processes. It was possible thanks to the cultural management of ecosystems. This process of human colonization started at the very beginning of the Neolithic Revolution. During the early stages of colonization, when

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Table 12.1 Human population density Foraging

Population density inhabitants/km2

Live weight (kg/ha)

0.01 ≥ 1

0.005–0.5

Pastoralism

1–2

0.5–1

Shifting cultivation

20–30

9–14

Traditional farming Pre-dynastic Egypt

100–110

45–50

Medieval England

150

75

Global mean in 1900

200

100

Chinese mean in 1900

400

180

400

200

Modern agriculture Global mean in 2000 Chinese mean in 2000

900

410

Jiangsu province in 2000

1400

630

Source Smill (2013, 105)

population densities were minimal, deforestation took place together with a form of very low intensity agriculture. The main vector of deforestation was therefore agriculture (Kaplan et al. 2009). As the population increased, agriculture became increasingly intensive over different stages, favored by demand increase and, later, by economic incentives. Land use intensification appears to have followed similar patterns, regardless of space and time (Mustard et al. 2012; DeFries et al. 2004). Foley et al. (2005, 571) proposed a sequence of land use transitions based on intensity. More recently, following the same criterion, a Land Intensification Theory was advanced (Ellis et al. 2013, 7980). In metabolic terms, intensification refers to more intensive agricultural tillage and an increasing use of energy and materials as a strategy to increase biomass production and, therefore, the socially appropriated share of production. The most widespread accounts of organic or predominant societies of the industrial metabolic regime often attribute increasing land use intensity to population growth. This leads to greater soil productivity though also to a simultaneous fall in labor productivity. The dynamics of agrarian societies was described in this way by Boserup (1965), yet it has perhaps become a stereotype that has been applied anachronistically to organic metabolism regime (OMR) societies, i.e., societies in which labor productivity was not considered as an indicator. However, such a linear interpretation should be taken with caution. There are certainly numerous cases in which an increase in agricultural productivity has been documented (Bindraban et al. 2012; Currie et al. 2015) thanks to increased employment of the human workforce. Yet, in many cases, what occurred was an increase in fruit production and it is not clear whether there was also a general expansion of all biotic production generated by the crops (Smil 2011; Krausmann et al. 2013). Regarding this point, there is growing evidence in the literature that productivity growth was not a continuous

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process but one that underwent phases of involution and crisis (Ellis et al. 2013). We shall later see how the case of Spain confirms this suggestion regarding both woody and arable crops. In any event, the most widespread explanation of production intensification is based on Boserup (1965): greater land use intensity was a way of addressing population growth and the reduction in available land (Currie et al. 2015, 26). In recent years, the theses of Boserup and his followers (Lambin et al. 2001) have been consistently criticized. Some authors limit the relationship between deforestation and population density to pre-industrial societies, that is, to societies under the organic metabolic regime (OMR) (Kaplan et al. 2009, 3031). Others have called into question the general viability of the Boserupian theory (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2014). However, Ellis et al. (2013, 7980) suggest that land use intensification was a human adaptive response not only to demographic pressures, but also to social and economic pressures. For their part, Kay and Kaplan (2015) argue that the drivers of intensification are more complex than the mere population factor and point to a combination of diet, technology, culture, subsistence, and urbanization that lead to land use intensity. Finally, some authors argue that land changes at all spatial levels are influenced by flows of raw materials, energy, products, people, information, and capital. And the latter requires novel, theoretical, and methodological approaches to analyze the causal relationships of land system dynamics (Friis et al. 2015, 4). They thus propose to consider land systems as coupled human–environment systems. In this sense, land use systems can be better studied in terms of a specific metabolic design and land use transitions as components of a more general process of socio-ecological transition (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007; Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2014). A similar rationale applies to soil loss due to erosion. A recent comprehensive literature review on water erosion (Dotterweich and Dreibrodt 2011) described the development of soil erosion research and soil conservation, giving examples from ancient Greek and Roman times and from central Europe, southern Africa, North America, the Chinese Loess Plateau, Australia, New Zealand, and Easter Island. Soil erosion has been one factor within a complex causality spiral leading to socioeconomic instability and land use changes. It has even been related to the decline of numerous civilizations around the world (McNeill and Winiwarter 2006; Winiwarter 2014). In short, erosion rate increase or decrease is related more closely to the management of agroecosystems—which result from specific socio-metabolic configurations—than to the growth of socio-demographic or economic pressure.

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12.7 Mimicking Nature: The Replenishment of Soil Fertility Since external energy inputs were either minimal or inexistent in OMR societies, agroecosystem management was obliged to reproduce natural ecosystems as closely as possible (Gliessman 1998, 271). The impossibility of storing or transporting significant amounts of energy made it necessary to restart the process every year. To that end, management needed to interfere with the nutrient (carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous) and water cycles, and with biotic regulation mechanisms. Carbon management was achieved through the application of organic matter, which also contains appreciable amounts of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. In this way, in the absence of synthetic fertilizer production and of phosphate rock reserves, agricultural practices attempted to mobilize nutrients from different parts of the agroecosystems and the surrounding atmosphere. Via such practices, producers sought to compensate for the losses caused both by cropping and by natural processes such as lixiviation or volatilization (García-Ruiz et al. 2012). Fertility became the crucial factor as the yield and stability of agricultural production depended on it. Farmers developed various strategies to replenish fertility that became ever more sophisticated over time. The first consisted in colonizing and cultivating new lands, taking advantage of the nutrient stocks accumulated over time through natural processes such as atmospheric deposition and vegetation recycling. Slash-and-burn, shifting cultivation or swidden clearance by burning was widely used in border territories or lands with very low population densities. Clear illustrations of the expansion of the agricultural frontier are the colonization of the Great Plains of North America (Cunfer 2005), the Russian steppes (Moon 2013), the South America pampas, or the grasslands of Australia and New Zealand (Brooking and Pawson 2011). In some territories, this meant drainage, damming, canal-digging, and diking to remove water from wetlands and then to keep it out, as was the case in the Netherlands. The recycling of a large part of the biomass produced was another strategy, thus mimicking the functioning of the ecosystems themselves. Another strategy was to let the soil rest so that natural processes could replenish lost nutrients. Rotations, where crops alternated with more or less long periods of rest or fallow, were very common in organic societies. It was a way of returning some of the nutrients that had been extracted with the harvest to the earth. Indeed, most nutrients were replenished by giving back animal and plant wastes to the land, i.e., by recycling organic waste products (manure, forest litter, crushed bones, sewage, cesspit residues, ashes, sediments, etc.) (Wilken 1991; Güldner et al. 2021). That meant concentrating nutrients from other forest or pasture lands on cropland through livestock, which thus became a key for soil fertilization. The most widespread practice was perhaps the use of manure from cattle, which improved over time, particularly in Europe and in eastern Asia. Manures, however, were scarce and required extensive labor to apply them. Gathering, fermenting, and

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applying manure led to big nutrient content losses, and farmers needed huge amounts of manure to replenish soil fertility. The availability of manures was thus always limited. China is often cited as an extreme case of inability to spread the use of organic wastes to other lands. During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, rice-producing regions received ten tons of organic fertilizer per hectare, which led to intense economic activity related to the management and transport of large amounts of organic wastes from cities and towns. Nearly 10% of the total work invested in Chinese agriculture was dedicated to fertilization (Smil 1994, 62; Ellis and Wang 1997). In summary, farmers used three different ways to mobilize nutrients: burning, decomposition, or composting or digestion by livestock of some of the produced biomass (Cunfer 2021; Güldner et al. 2021). But not all societies could achieve the same level of acquisition of organic matter. In some lands, scarcity of organic fertilizers was somewhat structural, e.g., in climates with little precipitation and biomass production in which herds were not large enough to provide manure to cover fertilizing needs (González de Molina 2001; Garrabou and González de Molina 2010). Herd scarcity in many latitudes made it necessary to use fallow, green manures, and the planting of legumes in rotation with other crops, thus maximizing nitrogen supply. The latter formula had been extensively used in Europe since ancient times as well as in eastern Asia. The combination of legumes and green manures, fallow periods, and cereals originated crop rotation practices that became the most energetically efficient way to optimize traditional agriculture (Van Zanden 1991). Not only was soil fertility restored thanks to crop rotation, but crop weeds, plant diseases, and plagues were controlled. The productive management of agroecosystems was based, therefore, on the use and internal recirculation of biomass. In this way, recycled biomass flows (the unharvested biomass plus the biomass reused by the peasants) were the largest agricultural production input, besides manure and human labor. These inputs were, in turn, a local origin, even within the farm itself (Guzmán Casado et al. 2018). The high land and energy cost of livestock feeding was solved by closely integrating animal husbandry and complex land uses (Patrizi et al. 2018; Guzmán, González de Molina and Alonso 2011; Guzmán and González de Molina 2009).

12.8 Environmental Constraints The availability of water determined which crops could be cultivated. Some crops (citric and other fruit trees, vegetables, fodders, cotton, sugar cane, etc.) could only be planted if there were abundant and constant supplies of accessible irrigation water. In such areas, the diversification and specialization of crops—and of course, the rise of net primary productivity and hence of useful crop products—depended on the technological possibilities of irrigation. Irrigation water was transported using gravity, thus taking advantage of the kinetic energy provided by water runoff down slopes. Thus, orography and runoff coefficients conditioned the surface area of irrigated

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agriculture, while river and stream hydraulic regimes conditioned water availability throughout the year (Garrabou and Naredo 1999; Ávila Cano and González de Molina 1999; Vila-Traver et al. 2021). Such irrigation systems were based on small derivation reservoirs with scant storage capacity, as well as a network of channels to distribute the water to the crop fields. Animal traction was indispensable to ensure the toughest tasks such as plowing, threshing, and transporting grains, extracting oils, and extracting irrigation water. This animal traction input allowed cultivating a more extensive surface than was possible with human labor alone. Oxen, cows, and water buffaloes equipped with appropriate harnesses performed the hardest tasks, to which horses and other equines were later added. Working beasts also provided essential products such as manure, milk, meat, and hides. In agrarian societies that were basically vegetarian, milk and fresh meat provided valuable protein supplements. Hide was the raw material used to make numerous tools that were indispensable for cultivation and for traditional manufactured goods. Animals propagated on their own, but the use of domesticated animals required large investments in plant biomass to ensure the metabolic processes needed for their maintenance and reproduction (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1997, 64). The complementarity between human and animal labor was ideal as long as working animals could be maintained either by grazing existing pastures regarded as unsuitable for cropping, or the biomass not directly consumed by humans (Gliessman 2002, 273–274; Gliessman et al. 2023). The proliferation of burden beasts could have replaced a greater share of human labor and led to higher productivity. Yet it could not progress beyond a given threshold, even with more sophisticated harnesses and machines, because animals competed for land with humans for feed. During the early nineteenth century in Europe, a horse team consumed a minimum of two tons of grain per year, or about nine times the grain consumed by a person over the same period (Smil 1994, 76). Limitations also existed in terms of maximum traction power deployed: oxen can only tow between 14 and 24% of the weight pulled by a horse, and their speed is generally about two-thirds that of horses at a walking pace. Thus, an ox can only deploy a towing force between 300 and 400 W in a sustained way, while a relatively weak horse reaches a power of 400 or 600 W (Wrigley 1992; Smil 2001, 222). Farmers sought to grow a larger variety of plants, and to make them more productive and resistant, or in other terms, to obtain the maximum possible amount of useful biomass. To that end, farmers developed processes of domestication, selection, and improvement of cultivable plants over time to improve the ratio between harvestable and total biomass. The selection process was oriented towards species and varieties of useful plants allocating higher amounts of photosynthates to harvestable parts to the detriment of other plant parts. This does not imply that selection and breeding were only directed towards increasing the commercial yields of plants—as is the case today. Over the past few decades, seeds have been selected according to certain parameters of high yields, flavor, appearance, genetic uniformity, fast response to fertilizers and irrigation, ease of harvest and processing, resistance to transportation damage, and a reduced expiry. In agrarian societies, farmers pursued other objectives beyond commercial benefits when practicing selection, for example in the case of

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cereals, obtaining suitable animal feed and the use of hay for construction or fuel. That explains the significant differences observed between the harvest coefficients of modern and traditional varieties. Current plant breeding aimed at biomass accumulation in harvestable parts has reduced the amount of energy allocated to characteristics that confer higher environmental resistance. Because of that, present cultivars need better conditions regarding soil humidity, nutrient availability, absence of pests and diseases, temperature, and sunlight than those possibly met in the past. Thus, unsurprisingly, while traditional cultivars generated less commercial yields, they were better adapted to their environments (Odum 1992, 204) and resistant to eventual drought, structural nutrient scarcity, or the attack of pest insects. Any attempt to maximize crop yields necessarily implied a reduction in biological diversity through higher crop density, the elimination of competitors, and the control or removal of harmful fauna. However, farmers needed to maintain maximum biodiversity if they were to gain in crop stability and reliability. Due to that, peasant agroecosystems generally presented greater biological diversity of populations and crops, as well as non-cultivated plants including wild plants in and around cultivated fields. In such conditions, they were less susceptible to pests and diseases. A major feature of species domestication was high genetic variation. Hundreds or even thousands of varieties or races could be distinguished within cultivated species. Each race or variety commonly had a genetic profile adapted to specific ecological conditions: humidity ranges, temperature, natural cycles or rhythms, climatic or edaphic thresholds, and to particular human consumption needs (size, color, flavor, scent, manageability, spatial and temporal availability, nutritional value, suitability for crafts, etc.). All societies under the organic metabolic regime undeniably developed practices of agroecosystem management that apparently produced lower average yields than those of modern agriculture. This was due to the multifunctional nature that harvested biomass used to have: not only did it feed humans, it also provided other raw materials to serve as an energy source or for animal feed. The case of Mediterranean woody crops is highly significant: olive groves not only provided oil for human consumption as is the case today, but also provided oil to illuminate homes, to grease machines and appliances, to make soap, biomass for animal feed, firewood for cooking or heating, etc. (Infante-Amate 2014). This diversity of uses distributed the photosynthate across the various parts of the cultivated plants. What we witness today is quite the opposite, the olives cultivated to produce oil concentrate all the plant’s production effort (González de Molina et al. 2020). The same applies to cereals: not only were they dedicated to feed human beings but also to provide straw for animal feed and to feed the trophic chains as some of it was returned to the soil (Carranza Gallego et al. 2019). Except in tropical climates, all these practices shared common features, such as the cultivation of cereals as the main means of sustenance, cereal and legume crop rotation, and the use of animals mainly as a labor force and to a lesser degree as a food source. However, crop combinations and their rotation, types of domesticated animals, and of course, diets were specific to regions. Despite the apparently low cultivation intensity, organic agriculture was able to sustain population densities

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above 100 inhabitants per square kilometer. More intensive farming systems in Asia and Europe were able to feed over 500 inhabitants per square kilometer, i.e., over five people per hectare (Smil 2008, 2013). Assuming an average harvest of 300 kg of grain per hectare in the year 1000 AD, and 400 kg/ha by the year 1700, total world harvest can be estimated to have been of about 50 million and 120 million tons in those times, respectively. Considering that edible plants provided 90% of the needed calories, or an average of about 3.5 GJ per capita per year, such harvest volumes could have fed up to 200 million and 500 million people in the above-mentioned years, respectively. Taking into consideration that the world population was estimated at 300 million inhabitants by the year 1000, and 600 million in 1700, about one-third and 15% of the population both years must have been fed by gathering, slash-and-burn agriculture, and pastoralism. During the eighteenth century, modest though significant increases in land productivity were achieved, allowing for an equivalent population growth. Between 1700 and 1800, cultivated land represented 300–420 million hectares, i.e., a 40% increment, while the human population rose by 65%, from 600 million inhabitants to nearly one billion. The availability of cultivated land per capita dropped by 20%, and we must assume that average yields per unit of cropland expanded at the same rate (Smil 2013, 119–120).

12.9 Transformation and Distribution If the human capacity to intervene in ecosystems was limited, the capacity for extraction and transformation was also limited. The meager capacity to concentrate and store energy imposed a limit on the use of metals. For example, European iron production in the seventeenth century was only 2 kg per capita per year (Schandl and Krausmann 2007, 104). Using the most advanced technology at the time, the production of metals was 2000 tons per year. Metal production and the use of its products were restricted until steam machines appeared and coal was used instead of charcoal. In addition to animal traction and wind as well as water kinetic energy, the main force driving the crafts and manufacturing sectors and providing heat for cooking and warming homes was biomass combustion. The latter included firewood, charcoal, crop wastes, and, where forests were insufficient or absent, dry manure, plant or animal oils, and waxes. The power achieved was largely inferior to that later obtained through fossil fuels. Biomass energy density was below 15 MJ/kg of fresh weight, while that of coal is between 25 and 30 MJ/kg, and oil between 40 and 45 MJ/kg (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2007, 227). Biomass conversion efficiency was also low. For example, energy conversion into charcoal generated a 60% loss with respect to the energy contained in firewood (Malanima 1996 and 2001). Charcoal and firewood availability could even limit the growth of cities. Estimated per capita firewood requirements, including industrial needs, range from one ton for cities in the tropics, and twice that amount in colder climates. It is estimated that in the mid-nineteenth

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century, just before the use of coal was adopted, three to six tons of charcoal and firewood were consumed each year per capita in the US and northern central Europe (Smil 1994, 119). Animal and human traction were also limited for structural reasons: physical fatigue and allocation of land to food production. The efficiency of human and animal traction depended on improved designs of wheels, slopes, inclines, pulleys, and cranes, which allowed increasing the power. Limited power—i.e., about 100 W for human work and 300 W for oxen traction—restricted the capacity to transform human activities and, as we shall see below, their displacement radius. The scope of metabolic distribution was considerably restricted by its dependency on appropriation and consequently, on the limited transportation possibilities. The low speed of burden beasts and their reduced merchandise transportation capacity (326 kg for horse-pulled carts in fourth-century Rome, and 490 kg for oxen-driven carts) worsened the state of the roads and created unfavorable transport conditions. The medium- and long-distance transportation of people, animals, and merchandises was severely restricted. Passengers could travel on a cart 50–70 km a day (Smil 1994, 131). Other structural factors further hindered the possibility of mitigating these power limitations by increasing the number of animals. All the materials involved in transportation—including harnesses and their metal components that required extracting minerals before being casted—were largely dependent on the amount of biomass available to feed the animals and the fuel needed in metal workshops. Wood, fodder, or basic foodstuffs, and other bulk products could not be transported by land over long distances that have been estimated at about 10–50 km on average (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2007, 227). There was a sort of iron law of transport (Sieferle 2001a, b) that dissuaded people from moving bulk merchandises over distances for which animals needed to consume more energy than that contained in what was transported. In consequence, for many centuries, transport between eastern and western lands, for example between the Indies and Europe, was constrained to small volumes of high value merchandise—precious metals, spices, or textiles among others. Wallerstein (1974) called them preciosities and their high symbolic or economic value made them worthy of transportation despite the energy costs. Exceptions to this transportation restriction were certain materials including precious woods, metal for warfare, and some building materials that were valued more by dominant social groups than the metabolism of the importing country as a whole (Martínez-Alier 2007, 232; Hornborg 2007, 6). These transport constraints also had consequences on the size of factories, because fuel or raw material imports could not overcome the location and installed power limitations deriving from the use of energy from combusted biomass, or from eolic or hydraulic power. An example is iron production: in the eighteenth century, about 50 m2 of firewood were required to avoid forest overexploitation, and this involved a yearly exploitation of between 10 and 20 ha of forest. Consequently, a typical iron furnace with an annual capacity of 500–1000 tons needed to exploit an equivalent forest surface between 50 and 200 km2 , with an average firewood transport distance of 4–8 km. The latter was the maximum to achieve a transport energy cost

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equilibrium, thus restricting the possible locations and energy intensity of factories or workshops (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2007, 227). Fluvial and maritime transport powered at first by rowing and later by sails was much less costly in terms of energy than terrestrial transportation. They thus represented the sole feasible long-distance means of transport. Yet, the volume of economic and ecologic exchanges between territories transported by boat was also limited. British ships of the Colonial India fleet had a capacity of around 1200 tons in 1800. Nineteenth-century clippers barely exceeded a speed of 9 m per second (Smil 1994, 139). These figures illustrate the physical restrictions that prevailed until the late nineteenth century limiting international trade, and hence the exchange of materials and energy between societies.

12.10 Markets, Consumption, and Excretion From a physical standpoint, the market represents a social relation of energy, materials, and information exchanges mediated by power relations embodied in currency or other attributes. Because agrarian society populations tended to achieve selfsufficiency and circulation, and exchanges were physically limited, the market played a secondary role, partly due to transport limitations, and partly because the market was a power relation mediated either by privileges, status, money, and lineage, or by relations of patronage, kinship, friendship, or vicinity. The market was also a social mechanism that was strongly influenced by ethical considerations based on a moral economy that regulated and prioritized equilibrium and stability rather than growth or excessive enrichment. If we consider that a market tends towards growth in production efforts—selling more to gain more—its limitations in a stationary society are logical: profits at one end harm the other end. Prices used to reflect environmental damages or resource scarcity more immediately than in present-day markets in which fossil fuels and mineral reserves allow sustaining productivity, even when the resource base deteriorates. The above perhaps explains why prices or the exchange value of basic products were closely related to their use value. For example, the market assigned a value to foodstuffs according to their endosomatic usefulness, i.e., based on the amounts of kilocalories they supplied to whom ingested them. Therefore, products that provided more energy were more expensive. Nowadays, however, the utilitarian association is almost lost and price determination follows different principles. For instance, vegetables today are relatively more expensive than cereals, despite the fact that cereals supply many more kilocalories than vegetables (González de Molina and Guzmán Casado 2006). There is generally no correlation between price and the nutritional value of foodstuffs. All these restrictions had a key impact on the metabolic process of consumption, which remained constrained within relatively narrow and sometimes random margins. The endosomatic/exosomatic consumption ratio is today 80 to 1 in some

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societies, while in the past, it did not surpass a value of 8 to 1, although it was usually of 2–3 to 1 (Malanima 2005, 16). The limited capacity of these societies to mobilize and transform materials also explains why the excretion process was relatively reduced and, in the case of agrarian activities, closely linked to appropriation, playing an essential part in restoring soil fertility. The organic and local nature of nearly all the materials used facilitated recycling. Despite what has been said, relocation of wastes, generated, for example, from biomass combustion, or from the transformation of minerals and other substances, could not threaten the global environment, but could have an impact at a smaller scale. Deforestation—implemented to a larger or lesser degree by most agrarian societies—was the local practice that had most global effects on the environment. The essential source of energy was certainly the biomass harvested by agrarian societies on their own lands. External energy or material imports were much less significant. Organic metabolism societies have been the object of a sufficient number of studies for us to corroborate both what we have argued until now and to delimit these societies’ typical metabolic profile (Table 12.2). Fischer-Kowalski et al. (2007, 225–227) compiled several works on the size of social metabolism and observed certain regular patterns and limits, as shown in Table 12.2. These authors’ studies of Austria and the United Kingdom, two of the wealthiest countries in the second half of the eighteenth century, have shown that these nations received a primary energy input of between 50 and 80 GJ/year. They confirm that most of the primary energy was derived from biomass, while wind and hydraulic energy amounted to only 1% of the total energy input. Between 3 and 10 GJ/ year of the harvested biomass was directed towards human food. Nevertheless, while food production was the main goal of agrarian production, domestic animals—that Table 12.2 Annual metabolism per capita for different modes of subsistence (metabolic profiles) Hunter-gatherers

Agrarian societies

Industrial societies

Energy input (GJ per capita per year) 10–20

ca. 65

223

Biomass (Foodstuffs, wood…)

Biomass Vegetables, 3; Fodder, 50; Wood, 12

Energy carriers Fossil energy, 125; Hydraulic energy, 23; Wood, 33; Agricultural biomass 42

Materials input (t per capita per year) ca. 1

ca. 4

21.5

Biomass (Foodstuffs, wood, etc.)

Biomass Plant foodstuffs, 0.5; Fodder, 2.7; Wood, 0.8

Diverse materials Agricultural biomass, 3.1; Wood, 3.3; Fossil fuels, 3.0; Gravel, sand, etc., 9.0; Others, 3.2

Source Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl (1997, 70)

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served to feed humans, but above all to obtain traction power and manure—required dedicating 30–40 GJ/cap/year to animal feed. The remaining share of the energy input, oscillating between 15 and 35 GJ/cap/year, was devoted to heating homes and generating power for manufacturing shops and small factories. The latter were dependent on climatic conditions, the size of industrial or manufacturing industries, and the availability of firewood and hence, of forests. Agrarian societies were able to sustain larger stocks than hunter-gatherer societies. But despite this, because agrarian societies had a low nature intervention capacity, building and infrastructure stocks remained reduced in size. They built houses and paths and increasingly roads, ships, bridges, urban settlements, and defense walls around them. All these require not substantial amounts of materials (wood, stones, and sand) and energy, destroying habitats and opening ways for transportation and trade (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2014, 13). They constructed low-energy buildings for ceremonial or symbolic purposes. However, based on recent studies on local communities of peripheral countries, it is estimated that the ratio was between one and two tons of stock per inhabitant (Mayrhofer-Grünbühel 2004; Ringhofer 2010). Krausmann (2008) studied pre-industrial agriculture in four different cases (Theyern, Nussdorf, Voitsau, and Großarl) that reflected Austria’s agroclimatic diversity and reached similar conclusions. We also obtained a comparable order of magnitude when we examined the agrarian metabolism (thus excluding energy sources not derived from biomass, and only considering agrarian activities) of the Santa Fe peasant community in Granada (southern Spain) in the mid-eighteenth century. The values were nevertheless lower as the soil and climate conditions were that of a semiarid climate with limited access to irrigation. Domestic energy input accounted for almost 34 GJ/inhabitant/year, while the final energy was close to 14 GJ/inhabitant/ year: 80% of the domestic extraction was dedicated to feeding herds that provided both the population’s animal protein needs and manure for covering the agrarian system’s fertilizer requirements (González de Molina and Guzmán Casado 2006, 89; see Chap. 7). Finally, several case studies have been recently published on extant agrarian societies that function with a mostly organic metabolism: Campo Bello, in the Bolivian Amazon (Ringhofer 2010); Sang Saeng, in northeastern Thailand (Grünbühel et al. 2003); Trinket Island, between Indonesia and India (Singh et al. 2001); and Nalang, in Laos (Mayrhofer-Grünbühel 2004). The only differences found were in the input of external subsidized fossil energy and in the flow of services (medical, educational, etc.) that are typical of industrial metabolism, turning them into hybrid systems with predominant basic agrarian metabolism features. No studies have been conducted at a sufficiently broad time and land scale to establish the metabolic profile of OMR societies with certainty. However, Marina Fischer-Kowalski and colleagues have estimated, based on several European case studies, an average biomass consumption of 45 GJ/cap/year. Based on these data, they concluded that the metabolic rates of OMR societies stabilized around AD 1000 and began to gradually decline after AD 1500 reaching a global average of 45–50 GJ/ cap/year (Fischer-Kpwalski et al. 2014, 23).

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12.11 Organization and Functioning of Organic Metabolism Biomass combustion or ingestion covered all animal traction needs, ensured the replenishment of soil fertility, domestic fuel, and served to power the crafts industry. Most economic activities and transport required a specific land surface area, to provide for more than human food. As it was almost impossible to import significant amounts of external energy to manage ecosystems, farmers had to fulfill their own necessities and other demands with the land surface available, which was fragmented for alternative uses. Peasants were obliged to establish a strategy of different, complementary land uses. Croplands were devoted to the production of foodstuffs for human consumption, fibers, and other desired raw materials. Pastures and grasslands were used to feed animals, and finally, forests produced firewood and timber for building needs. As stated by Sieferle (2001b, 20), the various land uses were linked to the diverse types of energy: croplands provided metabolic energy for feeding humans; grasslands for feeding animals were associated with the mechanical energy provided by traction animals; and forests were linked to thermal energy of fuels needed for cooking, heating, and manufacturing. When one of the uses became insufficient to satisfy demand, attempts were made to compensate the deficit with other land uses. For example, when working animal herds grew beyond the grassland capacity to feed them, croplands had to provide fodder from a part of the cereal and legumes harvest, or from crop wastes. Naturally, all three alternative land uses could take place on a single plot by combining crops and products (e.g., in agroforestry systems). The feasibility of this solution, however, depended on the particular ecosystem soil and climate conditions, as well as on the land’s production capacity. In climates in which productivity was limited by low precipitation or nutrient scarcity, biomass production costs were greater than in more favorable environments. In dry, semi-arid, or arid regions in which water was scarce, land uses could compete between them and be almost exclusionary, forcing farmers to use more land. Useful agrarian surface (i.e., the surface suited for social metabolism) was thus divided according to the obtained products: agricultural, animal husbandry, and forestry. Their degree of incompatibility depended on the suitability of each agroecosystem. These agrosilvopastoral systems implied the complex integration of several land units with different levels of energetic yield per surface unit (Margalef 2006). The achieved equilibrium between exploitation and conservation led to a suitable type of agrarian landscape adapted both to the environment and to social needs (Agnoletti 2006; Marull et al. 2006, 2010). An example is the traditional three-field system characteristic of central Europe. The system generated typical landscapes with surrounding open grasslands and forests (see a description from the perspective of Environmental History in Warde 2009, 74). The ager, saltus, and silva land distribution was dictated by two other imperatives. The first was the diversity of appropriation; that is, spatial heterogeneity was a way of mimicking natural ecosystem dynamics and to maximize stability (Fig. 12.4).

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As established by Gliessman (1998, 304): “From this comparison we can derive the general principle: as more agroecosystems are more structurally and functionally similar to the natural ecosystems within their biogeographical region, the more probable it is that agroecosystems are sustainable”. The second was that the equilibrium between the different land uses was crucial to achieve socioenvironmental stability, thus avoiding dangerous territorial disequilibria that would then require demographic adjustment, the appropriation of other lands, immigration, etc. These land use allocations reduced the yields of what is nowadays understood as harvest, i.e., the volume of grains directly traded on the market or used to make bread. Restoring soil fertility required assigning land to fallow or to feeding the animals that produced manure. Working animals had to be fed with grasses and, when these were insufficient, with grain deducted from human food. Wastes from cereal and legume harvests were an essential supplement to feed animals in many agrarian cultures. In fact, traditional crop varieties were selected with that function in mind, which is why hay and grain harvest ratios largely favored the former. These production characteristics as well as other traditional agricultural practices explain why yields were lower than today. Rather than merely commercializing a given crop, farmers sought to optimize the net primary productivity of the system as a whole, to ensure the system functioned without deteriorating the environment. Only a share of total net primary production was devoted to human consumption, agroecosystems included, and a smaller portion of the appropriated ecosystems was directed towards the market. This land use equilibrium can also be appreciated at an aggregate scale. The Vienna School has conducted detailed land studies of Austria. One of them shows that in the early nineteenth century, the country used 40% of its total land for food production, 10–15% for working animals, and 30% for heating fuel. The biomass directed towards non-energy uses, such as timber for construction, was produced using less than 10% of the total surface area (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2007, 227–229). These findings are also compatible with the results we obtained for Santa Fe regarding the maximum energy density of Austrian ecosystems, i.e., 50 GJ/ha/year. To exceed such a limit could only be feasible through large energy and material subsidies from the outside, either as fertilizers or as mechanical traction. The approximate 30 GJ/ha/ year average could sustain a population density of nearly 40 inhabitants/km2 , with an annual mean energy use per capita of approximately 70 GJ. The use of materials would oscillate between 5 and 6 tons per capita, corresponding to about 75% of the total biomass (Krausmann and Haberl 2007, 32). Any attempt to increase these figures would require incorporating more labor, which would inevitably reduce the available energy per capita. Land use distribution had to reflect the necessary long-term balance that each agrarian society had to maintain between the endosomatic/exosomatic population requirements within the useful land surface area. Figure 12.5 shows the main variables involved in creating this fine equilibrium. The level reached by one or several of these factors shown in Fig. 12.5 (population and its level of endosomatic consumption, power coming from both human labor and animal traction, fertilization capacity) determined the amount of produced or appropriated biomass, i.e., the magnitude of the metabolism. It also worked the other way around: the amount of appropriated

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Fig. 12.4 Concentric space organization of peasant communities in Medieval Europe. The cropland area (ager) occupied up to two-thirds of the land used. It was dedicated to sowing wheat, rye, barley, and oats—generally used for horse feed—and to a lesser extent, to millet, sorghum, and several kinds of legumes. The most common modality was the three-field crop rotation system: one field was dedicated to fall cereals (wheat or barley), a second to spring cereals (barley or oats), and a third left fallow where herds were allowed to graze and fertilize the land. Meadows of cultivated grass were sometimes provided for grazing animals, though less frequently. Vegetables and fruit trees were cultivated in gardens close to houses. Another area was devoted to vineyards and olive groves for the production of wine and oil. Finally, the farthest areas were covered with grasslands and forest, and were usually commons. Source Cantera-Montenegro (1997)

biomass determined potential population size, and its endosomatic and exosomatic needs maintained the appropriate equilibrium between herd sizes and fertilization capacity. Land limits or dependency on organic metabolism could only be overcome through appropriation of more land or its products. Labor was a limited resource and it was socially distributed. Work availability depended on the number of individuals in the community, their reproduction rates, and the demographic structure (Giampietro 2003; Ringhofer 2010; Schandl and Grünbühel 2005; Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2010; Singh et al. 2010). Compared to the time allocation in hunter-gatherer societies, where adults invested little more than one hour a day in hunting and gathering, dedication to economic activities grew considerably in agrarian societies, and children’s involvement in farm labor became significant (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2010, 25; 2011). As cropping intensified and yields per surface unit expanded, investment in time grew as well. Production and invested labor have always been closely linked in traditional agriculture. The amount of cultivated land and the intensity of cultivation depended on human and animal driving force. If the population grew, the possibilities of cultivating more land or doing so at a higher intensity also expanded. Conversely, a drop in population size could lead to a reduction in cultivated land surface, or even result in the abandonment of a fraction of cultivated land. This pattern was rather common in Europe’s

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287

ENDOSOMATIC CONSUMPTION

APPROPIATED TERRITORY

INSTALLED POWER

FERTILIZING CAPACITY

EXOSOMATIC CONSUMPTION

Fig. 12.5 In the regions with organic metabolism, the appropriated land size was determined by four main factors. See text

demographic evolution since the early twentieth century, which was accompanied by the expansion and contraction of cultivated land surface areas. If enough land was available, production could be increased by replacing human labor with animal work. In both cases, productivity was limited, especially with the intensive use of human labor. For that reason, labor productivity was very low in this kind of agriculture. Moreover, demographic density and land cultivation were highly correlated: more intensive agricultures had to sustain high population densities and vice versa. Productivity could only be increased by improving the production techniques such as irrigation or a better combination of crops. Feasibility was restricted by the chronic scarcity of organic matter and fertilizers, i.e., by a larger surface area of land suitable for cultivation or grazing to feed a larger herd, and by investing a considerably larger amount of labor to produce and apply organic fertilizers. The expansion of the appropriated land had not only topographical limitations but also physical ones. As the surface area of exploited land increased, the costs of transport of materials, working animals, and human labor also grew. The increase in time lost in transportation reduced the time available for farm work. Consequently, the surface area could only be successfully appropriated by incrementing the ratio of power invested in transport or farm activities; both of which in turn depended on land availability (Giampietro et al. 1993, 142 and 151). Biomass productivity increase for any metabolic purpose could only be achieved by exploiting a larger surface area. But this solution had limits, not only because it was restricted to land availability, but also because it required more labor per surface unit; therefore, a drop in labor productivity would have occurred sooner or later. Considering the necessary land balance required by organic societies, the possibility of a progressive economy, i.e., sustained economic growth, was unlikely due to the impossibility of

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indefinitely expanding production without human labor and territorial costs. Therefore, the magnitude of organic metabolism tended to remain stable and its economy tended towards a stationary state (Daly 1973; Sieferle 2001b). Based on all the above, organic metabolism societies had to pay high land costs to satisfy their needs. Because of this productivity/appropriated area compromise, technological innovation was primarily oriented towards saving land. Indeed, surface area was the limiting factor that could become scarce in the case of demographic growth. Land costs not only reflect land requirements—i.e., the surface area of land needed to produce a given amount of biomass according to its edaphic and climatic conditions— but also land configuration, specific land use combination, or the land functionality assuring its long-term stability. The latter implies biodiversity and diversified land usages. Under industrial metabolism, this equilibrium was replaced by equivalent land corresponding to the use of fossil fuels (Guzmán Casado and González de Molina 2009; Guzmán Casado et al. 2011). Therefore, in any given society, the land cost varied depending on population size and metabolic profile, and evolved through different steady states. And this is another defining feature of organic metabolism: the tendency towards equilibrium and stability (reproduction), leaving a limited scope for the continued growth of physical production. Anthony Wrigley introduced the term “organic economies”, describing societies with organic or agrarian metabolism as societies in which “[…] neither the process of modernization nor the presence of a capitalist economic system was capable of guaranteeing sustained growth […] [Wrigley 2004:29]”. Nevertheless, agrarian regimes could also experiment periods of physical expansion. Episodes of economic growth have occurred throughout history and particularly in the Modern Age, based on production specialization and urbanization (Wrigley 1987, 1988; De Vries 2008). Yet, these episodes have been temporary, driven more by the colonization of new lands than by major technological leaps (Sieferle 2001b). Some organic societies—e.g., the Roman Empire—ultimately collapsed, and others returned to their initial state. This is the case, for instance, of the Chinese province of Lignan studied by Marks (2007). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lignan clearly followed a process of agrarian specialization and foment of commercial crops, causing substantial land use changes and the partial commercialization of peasant economies. But this growth did not generate an appreciable metabolic transformation, nor did it introduce a transition towards industrial metabolism: agrarian growth was discontinuous. This stationary state tendency, also based on scarcity, required a strict regulation of the factors that could destabilize the system. In that context, social regulation mechanisms included emigration to more fertile regions, birth control, feeding habit changes, commercial trade, the conquest of new lands, and unequal resource distribution (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1997, 62). But we will discuss the dynamics of organic metabolism later.

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12.12 Common Features of Societarian Diversity A complex chain of societal configurations took place under this general mode of nature exploitation, i.e., the organic metabolic regime. Society configurations ranged from tribes to seignorities or chiefdoms, and from the latter to various modalities with state characteristics, including antique, classical, and modern civilizing developments. Despite their marked differences, these societies were all based on a single form of appropriation of nature that was perfected and gained in efficiency over time, always within a well-established scale of magnitude. The first empires, a configuration in which one state dominates another, also arose under this form of social metabolism. In hindsight, most historical facts occurred under organic metabolism. All the complexities of human nature, whether noble or terrible, overpowering or insignificant, profane or sacred, sublime or vulgar, were always fed by intermittent solar energy. In fact, we can perform a biophysical or metabolic reading of this process. When societies became sedentary, new needs arose; for example: they had to secure the usufruct of the land they had labored, that of the cattle they had raised to work the land, and they had to defend their crops and ensure their food. This required building stocks or production infrastructures (irrigation) and conserving and defending them against looting attempts. These conditions required supplementary work and a certain division of labor that favored the emergence of social groups specialized in the use of violence and in administration. These social groups had to be fed by a share of the crops and gave rise to the surplus and institutionalization of governance rules, i.e., to the emergence of the state. Cases include the hydraulic societies that emerged around the Nile, Indus or Euphrates and Tigris rivers, where ceremonial stocks (temples, pyramids, palaces, etc.) were erected to legitimize their highly hierarchical organization (Smil 2008; Fischer-Kowalski 2023, 5). The sedentary lifestyle, which permitted drawing more milk from domesticated cattle and new artifacts to cook and make a wider range of foods digestible, sustained the population increase that was necessary to meet the greater workload required by agricultural activity. This population growth increased population density and favored its expansion throughout the world (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2014, 11). The population of hunter-gatherers inhabiting the world grew from 6 to 13 million (Livi-Bacci 1992, 31), or 90 million individuals according to different estimations (Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2014, 11), to the 940 million of humans living in the world just before the Industrial Revolution (Cipolla 1978; Livi-Bacci 1990). Throughout the age dominated by agrarian societies, the population as a whole slowly increased, undergoing many fluctuations. This growth pattern is coherent with the type of metabolism we have been describing. Nevertheless, throughout history, the trend of organic-based societies has generally been population growth. Hunter-gatherers practiced a much laxer population control so population density quickly reached levels that favored the appearance of infectious diseases, epidemics, and pandemics caused by the proliferation of human pathogenic microorganisms (McNeill 1976, 1980; Cohen 1989; Ewald 1994; Crosby 2007). The high mortality rates resulting from such proliferation in a world in which

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food production was much more closely linked to available labor force needed to be compensated by higher birth rates. Wars, famine, and epidemics were common in agrarian societies. In such conditions of high mortality, attempts to control birth rates became more difficult or even senseless. Large families were socially encouraged. Owing to these reasons and others, population figures were not stable and oscillated considerably (Sieferle 2001b, 32–33). This behavior, which has always favored population growth, can be explained by a defining feature of OMR societies: the close link that has always existed between work on the land and the production of biomass, the main source of energy. Children constituted the essential labor force, without which it was not possible to maintain production in the medium and long term. In fact, OMR societies maintained a highly unstable balance between work and production. In other words, these societies were forced to maintain a trade-off between production effort (both to produce and to maintain fund elements) and the level of endosomatic and exosomatic consumption (Daems et al. 2021). It was not only necessary to produce to subsist, but also to generate a surplus with which to reward non-peasant social groups. These traits explain, in turn, why OMR societies were scarcity-based societies (Wrigley 2016), as opposed to hunter-gatherer societies. Appropriated biomass could only expand through an equivalent increase in the work invested, as Boserup (1965) showed for agricultural societies generally. At the beginning of the Christian era, the world population had already reached 170 million. By the fourth century, the expansion cycles of both the population and agrarian production broke down with the bubonic plague—the Plague of Justinian— that afflicted China and Europe between 441and 444 AD. A new expansion cycle would later begin with the clearing and cultivation of new lands, and a significant leap in human appropriation of net primary productivity. The human population was decimated by a combination of events that took place over these years: climatic fluctuations, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and devastating epidemics. The Great Famine of 1314–1322 created unfavorable conditions for the Great Plague that began in Sicily in the year 1347 and spread to the European continent. During the three hundred years between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, the population managed to increase by 12.4%, reaching 440 million. The new population and agriculture expansion cycle would be interrupted by fresh climatic and biological events in the seventeenth century. Epidemics continued to generate demographic fluctuations and population decline, but would no longer cause the demographic cataclysms of preceding centuries (Cipolla 1993; McKeown 1990).

12.13 The Leading Role of the Peasantry In organic metabolism societies, most of the population are peasants, in accordance with the weight of agrarian activities. This does not mean that the peasantry has become a relic of the past, or that it represented an early stage of human history (Rostow 1960), as traditionally regarded both in liberalism and in Marxism. The

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peasantry has not disappeared in today’s world, despite the prophetic theories of classical agrarian thought (Calva 1988; Toledo 1990; Kearney 1996; González de Molina 2001; González de Molina and Sevilla Guzmán 2001; Holtz-Giménez 2006; McMichael 2008). In view of that, the peasantry can be logically defined as a social category that is essentially historical, and that retains somewhat familiar and homogeneous features, although the latter have undoubtedly been transformed over time. From a socio-ecological perspective, we could consider the peasantry as: “owning a fragment of nature that is directly appropriated at a small scale by means of their own manual labor, having solar irradiation as their fundamental source of energy, and their own knowledge and beliefs as their intellectual means. Such appropriation constitutes their main occupation, from which they consume firsthand, in whole or in part the obtained fruits, and from which they satisfy the needs of their families either directly or indirectly through their exchange [Toledo 1990]”. This latter perspective allows identifying the peasantry as a social category associated with a social metabolism regime. Thus, the common features observable throughout space and time are better understood and contextualized using an explanatory theory of their evolution, or as we understand it, of their transformation into other novel and distinct social categories. In other words, the peasantry is the social group around which agrarian societies organized their solar energy-based agrarian activities— and continue to do so in many regions of the world. This means that the peasantry can largely be identified with organic metabolism (González de Molina and Sevilla Guzmán 2001). The peasantry social group was thus responsible for performing the key metabolic functions of organic metabolism societies, including the bulk of the appropriation process. This also explains why it was the largest social group (González de Molina and Sevilla Guzmán 2001). According to organic metabolism characteristics, the appropriation subject could be defined as: a cultivator with sufficient labor force and knowledge about natural and agricultural cycles acquired through experimentation; farmers pursuing sustenance rather than maximizing opportunities for consumption or benefits, limiting their consumption to the family’s required work allocation; an individual persisting in production with a long-term vision and exploiting oneself where necessary, or consuming less than the minimum to endure conjunctural difficulties relating to the environment, politics, or the economy; and, in sum, an individual striving to maximize the net primary productivity of agroecosystems without overexploiting the land that their self-sufficiency and sustenance depend upon (Toledo 1990). Most of the peasantry’s defining features (Calva 1988; Sevilla Guzmán and González de Molina 2005) were functional or well adapted to organicbased economies. The latter could only function with producers who identified agrarian production with family economy and by mobilizing all workers able to perform agricultural labor. Successional and marriage strategies had to allow aggregating a maximum number of production factors, so that appropriation processes would continue to ensure the survival of future generations. The only way organic economies could function was through the existence of a mutual support network of farmers that guarded families against adversity and was mediated through kinship, neighbors, or friendship. Their functioning depended on

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the generation of a common culture and ethics, on an identity that gathered and codified knowledge about the environment, crops, animal management practices, and about the efficient or inefficient practices to face everyday challenges, etc. That is, economic functioning depended on all the key factors enabling to sustain successful farming over the years. A necessary condition was to adopt diversified land use, exploiting the spatial heterogeneity required by the complementarity and integration of agriculture, animal husbandry, and forestry, thus making the farming system possible. Multiple land use was also a diversification strategy against the inherent risks of climate or economic fluctuations. In this way, maintaining the land in a good condition—e.g., respecting natural cycles and soil fertility restoration systems— became a sine qua non condition for farmers to subsist and for the future survival of their children. An ecological rationale has been proposed precisely for these reasons (Toledo 1990; Toledo and Barrera-Bassols 2008). With this multiple use strategy in mind, peasants managed to subsist by manipulating geographical, ecological, biological, and genetic components (genes, species, soils, topography, climate, water, and space), as well as ecological processes (succession, life cycles, and material flows). This same diversified arrangement was applied to each production system, e.g., terrestrial or aquatic multiple-cropping systems, instead of monoculture, monospecific herds, forests, or fisheries. In sum, domestic peasant units tended to practice an unspecialized production based on the diversity of resources and practices. This subsistence mode led them to optimize the use of all surrounding landscapes by cycling materials, energy, and wastes, diversifying the obtained products, and above all, integrating different practices: agriculture, gathering, forest extraction, agroforestry, fishing, hunting, small scale animal husbandry, and crafts. All peasant producers require intellectual resources to appropriate nature. In subsistence economies, this knowledge of nature was decisive in the designing and implementing survival strategies. Knowledge was orally transmitted across generations, and through it, peasants refined their relations with the environment. Since this body of information follows a different logic than that of current science, it has been called saberes, a Spanish term referring to a pool of specific (local) knowledge (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols 2008). Peasant societies own a repertoire of ecological knowledge that was generally local, collective, diachronic, and holistic. In fact, peasant groups have developed management strategies over time and have generated cognitive systems about their surrounding natural resources, which are transmitted across generations in the form of processed information flows (Fig. 12.6). A number of social institutions have attempted to ensure the maintenance of the group, protecting society from environmental or economic perturbations. Indeed, resilience and stability over time depend on the efficiency of such institutions. The role of domestic units is well known in the context of human reproduction and peasant economies, and in the development of strategies that eventually affect population size and the ability to generate productive work. This issue has thus been sufficiently covered in historical and anthropological works (Goody 1986; Bourdieu 1991, 2004) and we will not explore it further here. It is more relevant here to focus

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Fig. 12.6 A contemporary peasant property in the periphery of Cordoba, Spain. The plot covers approximately one hectare and is divided into different patches devoted to a variety of horticultural products, a horse, and the family house surrounded by trees. The photograph was taken from the building of the School of Agricultural Engineers of the University of Córdoba (Spain). This university has repeatedly analyzed peasant family dynamics in its courses. Photograph taken by Julio Sánchez

on the institutional framework and social behavior that have also contributed to the continuity of the metabolic relationship as processed information flows. The peasant group could only handle a small share of suitable land: its own farms. Joint management and control—that are also essential for the domestic economy itself to survive—were ensured by the peasant community. The community was the minimal unit of land population. Peasant domestic groups specialized in agrarian activity predominated in this community, and all other crafts or professional activities were directed towards it—as auxiliary, complementary, or dependent activities. Most social life took place in hamlets, villages, or small population nuclei for several reasons: the localized and usually rather closed dimension of the energy and material flows; scarce external exchanges; together with the population and land distribution patterns. The essential information allowing social metabolism to function flowed from all the above. The peasant community was, therefore, the smallest production organization unit driven by solar energy. From a political perspective, these basic land occupation cores had ample capabilities regarding all agrarian production factors and the whole appropriation process. Their political institutions—whatever they were—were responsible for establishing norms that prevented forests or land from being overexploited or impeded overgrazing during the appropriation of firewood or manure. They also had to regulate land use alterations, fostering or not the necessary equilibrium between the different farms within it. Their political institutions were equally in charge of safeguarding

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individual conditions of production by implementing actions in the domains of public health, beneficence, instruction, defense against external threats, or the provision of material aid in moments of crisis. Overall, collective norms in organic societies aimed at avoiding the excessive use or consumption of common resources (Warde 2009, 76). These common rules regulated the functioning and practices of farmers, sometimes rigorously. The picture could not have been more different than that portrayed in the classic tragedy of the commons advanced by Hardin (1968), who assimilated open fields and the communal system with unrestricted access. Both access and use were strictly controlled in order to incite cooperation and to prevent free rider behaviors; that is, no one could take advantage of common resources in such a way that these would become overexploited. In other words, these social institutions attempted to constrain both social entropy and physical entropy, since resource transfers from and to other territories were limited. Because of that, societies tended towards a steady state. In fact, as soon as the new capitalistic social network was established, it immediately attempted to abolish these social institutions. As stated by Warde (2009, 76), “the abolition of systems of collective constraint through the enclosure movement, that waxed most prominently and early in England but that would embrace most of the western Europe in the nineteenth century, remove the issue of the consequences of neighbourly action from the agronomist’s purview. The system of agricultural action became the farm unit, the environment denoted as ‘natural’ or ‘market’ forces [Warde 2009, 76]”. Throughout history, elites and dominant classes have developed specific strategies to ensure their control precisely because of their wide-ranging and decisive capabilities regarding the stability of the metabolic relationship. The instruments of vassalage, patronage, and clientelism were profusely used to guarantee this authority. Local communities frequently had the power to administer the land in material terms. Because of this, they organized metabolic appropriation in practice and contributed to the balance between the different forms of land use, ensuring that the steady nature of the economy was reproduced. Social institutions played a decisive role in the functioning of social metabolism, either because they regulated access to the land, possessed large surfaces of land, or administered it—including natural ecosystems or even a part of the agroecosystems. They were thus essential instruments to preserve stability or to generate crises. A major role of laws and other norms, whether positive or consuetudinary, was to ensure stability. Some of these regulations—whether they established individual or communal properties—were directly oriented towards protecting large portions or the whole of the land occupied by each community. This way, they ensured the longterm functions inherent to lands (of food or energy provision, beneficence, agrarian functions, etc.), avoiding changes in land use or overexploitation. For example, in the early modern period, under the Crown of Castile, the concept of communal property was used to protect forests and grasslands against the real threats of clearing or private appropriation—to satisfy the needs either of agricultural production growth, or the ambition of feudal lords and local elites (González de Molina and Ortega Santos 2000).

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In short, OMR societies functioned and lasted over time thanks to the continuous flow of processed information maintained through cooperation and the common ownership of the most critical fund elements upon which rested the steady state. As we shall see later, it was precisely growth in inequality and the breakdown of social relations—essential to cooperation—that is, the imbalance between population and resources that drove territorial and commercial expansion (such as acquisition of resources through trade and mercantile activities). This inequality fostered land acquisition, the emergence of empires, and competition between states with varying results. It was this imbalance that eventually accelerated population and consumption growth and initiated the transition to the industrial regime. Peasant institutions were designed following centuries of trial and error to foster cooperation, to protect, and to maintain the steady state. Peasant culture, which was based on scarcity and intergenerational calculation, tried to contain social entropy within limits, avoiding the compensation of social or territorial inequality by means of physical entropy. This balance between social and physical entropies could only be upheld within tolerable levels of social or territorial inequality. The various political entities of agrarian societies were tasked with defending the appropriated land against raiding or overexploitation attempts, or by conquering or subjugating new land. The social entropy of a territory or community could rise due to growing population, per capita consumption or due to an increase in inequality, reducing the reproduction possibilities of some of its members. In a context of limited resources, the reduction or compensation with more resources, physical entropy could only be increased by appropriating the resources of other lands, either via peaceful or violent means, first in nearby lands, and gradually in more distant lands (Daems et al. 2021). When this was impossible or inconvenient, political or military subjugation of other lands could take the form of the payment of tributes or other goods. In agrarian societies, one community or class exploited another usually by appropriating surpluses through force or legal coercion. This also applies to tributary or feudal societies, or to the wars of the ancient world through pillage or the imposition of tributes. This flow of resources became indispensable to support the colonizing power of the dominant society. The territorial expansion of agrarian societies was not always due to a population/resource imbalance, but clearly, expansionist adventures were physically impossible without the resources provided by the newly conquered lands, as demonstrated by the well-known case of the Roman Empire.

12.14 Unsustainability and Crisis of Organic Metabolism The expansion or contraction of organic metabolism resulted from the factors outlined here. When population density, consumption, external demands, or other factors declined, adjustments unfolded smoothly by reducing the equivalent share of either land surface area under appropriation, or the farming labor intensity. More serious issues arose when larger demands had to be adjusted based on a limited land surface area. Agrarian societies had access to at least three possible solutions to avoid a

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dangerous increase in social entropy. The first was to return to the previous state of equilibrium—although this was not reached in a short period of time—by means of social homeostatic mechanisms: emigration, birth control, wars, reduction of tributes and of social exploitation, etc. These mechanisms could not always be applied. Indeed, in some societies, ideological changes and the state of knowledge advancement hindered their application, but they favored the pursuit of alternative answers. The second category of solutions was to increase production itself by several possible means, the most obvious being to increase the appropriated land surface, or to optimize different land uses where possible. Nevertheless, this was not always a feasible, or at least ideal, solution. Conflicts between local communities over communal resources, unoccupied lands, or over land use, such as grazing land or cropland, were frequent (Pascua 2011). Another option was to enhance soil productivity, which could be achieved through crop rotation, more intensive cropping, shortening of fallow periods, or sowing more productive seeds. But all these procedures required more labor, more water (which was scarce in some cases), and the application of more organic matter, and this was not equally feasible everywhere (González de Molina 2002). Soil fertility replenishment was the main limiting factor of productivity increase even in areas in which the available labor force was plentiful (Güldner et al. 2021; Cunfer 2021). Obtainable organic matter sources could supply enough nutrients to sustain 12–14 persons per cultivated hectare, but such limits could not be surpassed by traditional methods (Smil 1994, 80). Production intensification strategies could generally only be successful if enough land was available to feed the animals required to mobilize the nutrients needed to increase soil fertilization. A further solution that was particularly adapted to dry climates was to expand irrigated lands and to consolidate the sources of irrigation water. In fact, this option was the most widespread across all Mediterranean countries, China, Mesoamerica, and the Middle East. Nevertheless, until the arrival of fossil fuels, the greater groundwater extraction capacity, and the building of large reservoirs, extending irrigation was territorially limited and was subject to the seasonal regime of rivers and other water bodies. Finally, an improvement in labor productivity, which either freed work power or made it more efficient largely depended on the introduction of new implements or on the substitution of human work by animal labor. But given its high land cost, the latter solution still depended on land availability. The above-mentioned strategies resulted in a slow agricultural yield progression, which in certain regions on Earth was vital for cities to grow, and ultimately, for social complexity to increase. According to data advanced by Smil (1994 77), in more ancient societies, agriculture could sustain a given average number of persons per cultivated hectare. Hundreds of years would have to elapse before that figure doubled: it seems that 2000 years were needed for a duplication to occur in the Middle East, China, and Europe. Despite these data, we cannot accuse traditional agricultures of being inefficient. Major regional achievements took place allowing 10–14 persons to be sustained by one hectare of cropped land in some areas of Japan, China, Vietnam, and Java thanks to rice cultivation under irrigation (McNetting 1993).

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12.15 The Agrarian Empires A third set of solutions was based on the appropriation of more land through either violent or peaceful means. These solutions, and the tributes demanded in the form of either goods or currency, were widely used to avoid the Malthusian trap of agrarian societies. Myrdal (2007) studied the formation of the Swedish Empire in the seventeenth century. This author found that the main expansion objective was to conquer lands with a surplus of grain production—together with other goals of a religious, commercial, or geopolitical nature. Agricultural production had stalled just when the population was growing causing a severe food crisis. A similar pattern was followed during the Ottoman expansion in southeastern Europe. The creation, expansion, and consolidation of agrarian empires in antiquity have been widely studied in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and the Andean region. In the case of Mesoamerica, states expanded through the swelling of tributes acquired either through conquest or agreements. In the case of the Incas, imperial power consisted in an imperial elite by controlling and appropriating the biophysical flows, and by culturally representing these flows as balanced, fair, natural, and inevitable. This ecological process led not only to the creation of “things” such as textiles, chicha, and stone walls, and to the transformation of landscapes, but also to the appearance of different kinds of people (Bogadóttir 2016, 169). This author calculated the ecological footprint of the main products appropriated by the Inca State in the form of taxes and collected by each household: one or two awasqa tunics annually, i.e., at least 1 million awasqa tunics every year or 1.92 million ha of pastureland and 23,000 ha of agricultural land (Bogadóttir 2016, 165). By the sixteenth century, the Mexica or Aztec Empire—the major empires of ancient Mexico—encompassed a huge dominium, both in terms of land and in number of subjugated or integrated peoples. Domination usually took place through seignorities or chiefdoms that were sociopolitical entities known as altepetl, governed by a lord or king (the tlatoani). The latter could be simple and little stratified, or plural, cosmopolitan, multicultural, and highly hierarchical. Each altepetl was an organized corporation and ruled over five, ten, or more localities or agrarian communities. By 1420, the Mexica Empire dominated between 600 and 700 out of a total of 1200 seignorities (García-Martínez 1998). The codex known as the Matrícula de Tributos (Tribute roll) contains a detailed record of foodstuffs, raw materials, crafts, and diverse objects that were tributes to the Mexica Empire from 39 regions and 326 localities or towns. It has allowed compiling the daily volumes of inputs received by the central power throughout the years (Bartra 1974). The European conquest of many regions on Earth from the sixteenth century onwards must also be understood as the result of this territorial demand to build stocks. Without the territorial expansion that followed the Age of Discovery, the economic growth of European organic metabolism would have been impossible, as exemplified by the relocation of European silver mines in the American colonies (e.g., Potosí) (Moore 2007). By the mid-fifteenth century, central Europe led the world production of iron and silver. The production of over 30,000 tons of iron, a

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figure that grew rapidly during the first half of the sixteenth century, required access to massive forest surface areas. Between 6000 and 8000 ha of forest were cleared each year, i.e., from 440 to 600,000 ha between 1424 and 1440. Metallurgic expansion consumed the forests of central Europe at an unprecedented pace. Deforestation in the sixteenth century largely exceeded that of the thirteenth century. The price of firewood quickly rose from the year 1470, leading charcoal to become the greatest expenditure (over 70%) in metal production. Most forests were of common use and peasant opposition to deforestation created more difficult conditions for the metals industry, slowing down the process. Social and environmental problems arising from metal sector expansion led to the relocation of the activity to the New World where wood was plentiful and the labor force inexpensive. In the early seventeenth century, Europe produced only one-tenth of the silver ingots that reached Seville. A similar story can be told of other mining centers in Colonial America. Clare’s (2022) study of the Pacific coast of Costa Rica offers a clear example of production during Spain’s colonial expansion in America. The author identified three types of organic metabolism organization, all subordinated to the changing needs of the metropolis and the interests of the Spanish crown. These expansionist solutions bore high costs in human, political, and administrative terms, compromising long-term feasibility. The impact of the European conquest of America caused a true demographic collapse. It is estimated that approximately 56 million individuals died in the hundred years following the so-called discovery. Added to the massive abandonment of farmland, which was converted back into forests, the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere fell by between 7 and 10 parts per million (ppm) and the average temperature by 0.15 °C. This reduction was probably related to the Little Ice Age (Koch et al. 2019). The development of commercial relations between countries became an excellent and peaceful alternative. Land was imported through the market and commercial trade. Indeed, transferring domestic demands to other lands relaxed the relationship between population density and resource availability. As the radius of land imports widened, the possibility of obtaining territory through military intervention decreased accordingly. In other words, the further away the energy and materials were exchanged, the greater the chances that the exchanges were of a mercantile nature, i.e., mediated by money. As a complementary measure, the population could be sent to colonize new lands, thus relieving demographic pressures. This is one reason why agrarian societies ultimately colonized most of the planet. Some agrarian societies could thus maintain a certain degree of economic growth during a sufficient length of time. Nevertheless, the above does not contradict the trend of agrarian societies towards a steady state mentioned above, nor their incapacity for sustained or permanent economic growth. Yet, beyond the risks of continued political domination or the insecurities associated with transport, territorial expansion presented hazards regarding the environmental damages caused by a more copious metabolic activity. McNeill (2007, 200) has shown, for example, that the expansion of sugar cane cultivation in the American colonies created the conditions for yellow fever to propagate. Impacts have not only been caused by the world’s so-called biological unification and its dramatic effects on

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the indigenous population (Crosby 1988). Throughout history, major waves of colonial and imperial expansion (whether European or that of other civilizations) have also wiped out ancestral languages and traditional cultures. Europe’s conquest of America decimated up to 90% of the native population (Denevan 1992; Koch et al. 2019), extinguished hundreds of cultures, and according to one study, reduced regional linguistic diversity from 1490 to 400 languages (Loukotka 1967). Lizarralde (2001) independently estimated that the number of indigenous groups in South America fell by 34% after contact with Europeans. Marks (2007, 42) studied a prototypical case of the damages caused by agricultural expansion: “During the middle sixteenth century the population substantially diminished and forests returned to Lignam (southern China), the range of tigers expanded, even in densely populated areas as in the of Guangzhou prefecture in the Pearl River Delta. When the population began to recover, the tigers and the people entered in contact. By 1700 the habitat of the tigers had probably been destroyed in and around Guangzhou, while the mountains in Guangdong and Guangxi became reforested, as was most of the southwestern littoral. When people moved to the mountains and burned the forests, tiger attacks became dispersed, ending at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the northernmost zone of Guangdong…If forest clearing destroyed the tiger’s habitat, placing them at the verge of extinction, other kind of wild life expected the same fate [Marks 2007, 42]”. Indeed, population density oscillations allowed restoring the forest cover and provided favorable conditions for certain species to thrive. It was only when population growth was restrained by the mechanisms that kept it relatively stable, and that commercial relations became permanently established that agrarian expansion began to generate more durable damages, some of which would be irreversible. Despite it all, the environmental impacts of agrarian societies were mostly local or regional and affected limited areas. Yet, as opposed to current times, the damages were so noticeable and the repercussions were so immediate that they quickly became social issues. Thus, seen from this perspective, agrarian and industrial societies cannot be distinguished as good or bad, but according to their different degrees of potential environmental harm and impact tolerance. However, if we regard society durability, i.e., sustainability, as the main criterion of historical analysis, we must recognize that the organic metabolism regime has lasted longer than the industrial regime is expected to last, given that it is beset by insurmountable unsustainability problems. This is why the arguments according to which agrarian societies are unable to develop long-term sustainability are untenable, such as that stated by M. FischerKowalski and H. Haberl: “They depleted many natural resources on which they depended, such as forests and croplands, and only offered rather miserable ways of life based on hard work and malnutrition for most of its members. The technological advances such as the use of iron plows and horses had only a temporary utility rapidly compensated by population growth [Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1997, 68 and 69]”. Such a negative view of agrarian societies overlooks the fact that environmental damages were precisely local in nature, not on a global scale as is the case today. This perspective also ignores the pool of good (and sometimes bad) practices leading to

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sustainability that derive from agrarian societies’ necessary and continuous adjustments to gain stability and recover their steady state. The hard work and sometimes the malnutrition that characterizes agrarian societies are certainly undesirable. Yet using qualifying agrarian societies as miserable leads to a moral discussion in which today’s material wellbeing is used as a comparative standard. And this standard is all the more difficult to defend given that we are living beyond our material means.

12.16 The Collapse of Organic Metabolism Societies Sieferle (2003) elaborated a thorough summary of the potential environmental damages caused by agrarian societies and the sustainability issues they had to face. These societies cleared forests, created agroecosystems, selected some species, and pursued the extinction of others. Their strategy centered on monopolizing an area— together with its solar irradiation—to develop organisms useful to humans. They constantly had to struggle, more or less successfully, to sustain a fragile balance between population growth, agricultural technological performance, and the labor supply needed to maintain the agroecosystem productivity and soil fertility. Agrarian societies were therefore constantly at risk owing to technological and political dependencies and to the fluctuations of natural systems. And it is these circumstances that may have led these societies to develop the arsenal of adaptive strategies and management practices that are today invaluable to design sustainable production systems. In fact, many of these practices were successful: as acknowledged by Sieferle, the socio-ecological regimes that emerged around the world persisted for thousands of years until today. As accurately stated by Paul Warde, there was no explicit sustainability concept like the one we have today, but peasants had “some kind of ethic of sustainability, or perhaps less pejoratively, of durability [Warde 2009, 87]”. Clearly, however, the expansion of some agrarian societies, notably in Europe and some in Asia, multiplied their environmental impacts and hence the risk of unsustainability. For Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl (1997, 66 and 68; see also Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2014), agrarian societies can help to understand the “dramatic changes in modes of production, the resources used, the ways of population control, and the complex interaction of the elements… and throw some light about the question of why some cultures collapsed and others survived [Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1997, 66 and 68]”. The unsustainability issues of agrarian or organic metabolic regime certainly arose from the imbalance between population and resources, particularly land, as it was the only means to capture the net primary productivity that everything else depended on. The provision of land owned by a local community was thus decisive. As mentioned above, population growth generated land scarcity. Given the impossibility of acquiring new lands, cultivation intensification—and the resulting productivity increase—was the only possible solution. But this alternative was also limited by factors such as the community’s capacity to fertilize the soil or the adequate

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integration of land uses. These limits could be surpassed by breaking the agrosilvopastoral or nutrient mining equilibria, causing chemical soil degradation. The latter event, accompanied by physical soil erosion, occurred in the late nineteenth century in a community in southern Spain (Montefrío, province of Granada) that we studied (Infante-Amate et al. 2013). Intensification in this case was the chosen solution to face the population increase. In the past decades, a plethora of works have focused on the collapse of empires or cultures, many of which have focused on environmental aspects (Diamond 2004; Mieth and Bork 2005). Some of these cases involve agrarian societies and have received particular attention, such as the collapse of ancient Mesopotamian cultures (Butzer 2005) in which, according to these works, the overexploitation of hydric resources played a primordial role. Another example is the Mayan culture, which until the year 1000 AD reached a population of over three million inhabitants distributed across Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. By the time the Spanish conquerors arrived, the region had a little over 100,000 inhabitants. Poor agricultural practices—especially excessive erosion and water management failures—could have originated the collapse of the Maya. Over one hundred different hypotheses have been postulated about this collapse however (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols 2008). It would be historiographically inaccurate to assign the collapse of certain civilizations or societies to a single cause—in this case, the environment (Butzer 2012). But environmental variables played a key role in the decline of such societies, particularly of empires, among other reasons because of their deep reliance on land, as we have seen here. While environmental factors were not the only causes of these collapses, they certainly played a significant role. Any political expansion had to be supported by resources plentiful enough to maintain stability. In the same way, it is logical to consider that an empire’s costs increased proportionally to its land surface area. This assumption seems to be supported by recent studies (Tainter 1988, 2011; Reale and Shukla 2000; Hughes 2007; De Vries 2007; Butzer 2012). Regardless of their somewhat reductionist conclusions, studies such as that of Tainter (1988, 2007) advance hypotheses on the social complexity of empires that can provide insights into the survival predicaments that these societies had to face over time. The first stage in the construction of empires was the conquest of smaller reigns and the exploitation of their resources, as this was easier than increasing the yields of their own agriculture. To this end, empires invested a significant amount of their total energy in armies and the administration, rather than in raising the quality of life of their farmers. The conquest of reigns was a way of expanding the total energy ratio of metabolism beyond the amounts that could be harvested through the exploitation of domestic land. But unlike agriculture’s characteristic uninterrupted flows, the resources obtained through conquest were merely stocks that would eventually be exhausted through usage. When no more reigns remained to be conquered and their stocks exhausted, the task of sustaining the population’s unproductive sector fell entirely on the surpluses generated by agricultural activities. At that moment, the uncoupling between expensive administration and supply costs, and the surplus produced by the primary sector became palpable. This uncoupling could for a while be overcome by raising taxes

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on farmers, thus reducing their consumption, but this solution made life impossible for farmers in the long term, causing the loss of a sense of belonging to the empire that was so essential. In such conditions, social problems or imbalances, although small, could lead to the collapse of the system as a whole. This is what seems to have happened to the Roman Empire (Tainter 1988, 1994; Hughes 2007). Studies on the historical collapse of empires or cultures are, however, extremely complex and subjective given their—sometimes—excessive duration. We are interested here in breakdowns originating in the malfunctioning of the metabolism, which disintegrates because the metabolic configuration cannot be made to work, and the durability of the regime cannot be ensured. We call this failure a metabolic collapse and it does not necessarily lead to social or political collapse. Metabolic collapse is an imbalance between flows and funds and/or stocks that lack internal congruence and lead to significant asymmetries that put the continuity of the metabolic regime at risk. For example, an excessive growth of industrial agriculture production means brings about a steady increase in intermediate costs leading directly to swelling production costs and lower income; the lack of agricultural profitability leads to activity cessation, that is, to the abandonment of agricultural activity (González de Molina et al. 2020). This disintegration can take place at different scales, from widespread local failures (see an example in Villa Gil-Bermejo 2017) to the collapse of empires.

12.17 The Environmental Conflicts of Organic Metabolism If legal and political institutions as well as social rules have attempted to stabilize social metabolism, the unequal distribution of power and wealth in agrarian societies turned socioenvironmental conflicts into permanent sources of instability and social entropy. The main conflicts originated in the appropriation of net primary productivity and its social utilization insofar as they ensured the subsistence of individuals or the social group. This does not imply that these were the only types of conflicts, but they are the most relevant from our environmental standpoint. When placing the land at the heart of social relations—as a condition to facilitate photosynthesis—it is essential to consider the particular ways in which each society organized the appropriation. Hence, in societies supported by organic energy, environmental conflicts center on struggles to win the access and usufruct of the different land uses—cropping, grazing, gathering from the wild, hunting, fishing or extraction of materials, and even the use of irrigation water. Communities and social groups confronted each other on the amounts of biomass or extracted materials. Written or consuetudinary legal norms regulated the access and use of resources by assigning ownership and usufruct rights to certain social groups based on kinship, blood lineage, caste or community, or simply through ownership rights. Only a few societies distributed such rights in an egalitarian way. Two major types of environmental conflicts affected agrarian societies: those deriving from the unequal distribution of resources between communities, and those deriving from the unequal distribution of resources between social groups within a

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community, in other words, regarding the access to and use of the stocks/funds. The latter type is often confused with conflicts traditionally considered as class conflicts, among others. The income of dominant groups depended directly on natural resources and was often composed by natural resources. This is why the control of natural resources and stocks/funds was a source of power and why such control served to ensure a privileged access to resources. A large part of class conflicts in pre-industrial economies, or in present organic energy-based economies, can also be considered as environmental conflicts. Many peasant revolts in the history of feudal and tributary regimes followed this pattern. For example, the German Peasants’ War in the 1320s was related, among others, to peasant access to communitarian forests. Feudal lords had attempted to restrict or even abolish this access when they realized that metal production—that was on the rise—provided them with a profitable market for their products (Moore 2007, 128). Communities or entire societies engaged in territorial conflicts to gain the usufruct of a given land. Such confrontations took place at different scales: from neighboring communities within the same area to conflicts between states (city-states, empires, feuds, tributary seignorities, monarchies) and between peripheral imperial states, which could turn into wars. Local conflicts were brought about by struggles between communities to control and appropriate land, or by the demands of individuals or groups within a community to appropriate a larger fraction of the disputed resources. For example, agrarian societies attempted to preserve their steady-state social equilibrium through the community appropriation of the essential resources or funds that ensured the continuity of agrarian activity: fodder for working and transport animals, fuels, building materials, mobilizable nitrogen supplies, refuge from natural enemies, other nutrient pools and biodiversity, indispensable raw materials for agriculture or industrial activities, etc. In other words, it was expensive to import necessary nutrients and energy to sustain an imbalanced agrarian system and it was easier to protect the land from individual appropriation. Therefore, communally-owned lands were vital to sustain organic energy-based economies and they were especially protected by communities—but thus did not shield them from conflict. If free rider attitudes became generalized, disequilibrium and conflict arose. So communal lands, far from being free access lands, were strongly regulated. In fact, many environmental conflicts in those times concerned these lands: be they against the usufruct of intruders (which unified the community), or against their appropriation by landlords (seizure or limitation of appropriation), and even against poor members of the community. Access to communal resources was the regulated right of one or several social groups organized as a community, class, or group of classes. Communal resources were often excluded from commercial usage but were not outside the legal control of local or state political institutions. The impact of these kinds of conflicts was clearly negentropic regarding the protection of common lands from degradation. At a broader scale, political entities, i.e., city-states, seignorities, monarchies, and empires, fought for the exploitation of natural resources. The motives of many environmental conflicts over the past 10,000 years have been linked to: population/ land carrying capacity ratio; the need to acquire sufficient resources to feed the

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growing construction of material stocks (infrastructures, palaces, civil and ceremonial buildings, etc.); or to enable a state’s imperial expansion, among many others. The attribution of sovereignty to the seignorities or to the state—understood as the capacity to reserve a given land for the exclusive use of its subjects—favored a competitive territorial exclusion behavior, encouraging protests and violence. Diplomatic tensions and sometimes war between two or more political communities to gain the control of given lands and their resources are interesting from the perspective of environmental history, even if they took place before the global expansion of industrial metabolism. Given their key role in the organic metabolic regime, metabolic appropriation conflicts were the most abundant—though they were not the only ones. Strife also arose between and within other metabolic processes, in particular those deriving from the transformation of materials and the consequent disposal of wastes. Nevertheless, the intrinsically low intensity of the metabolic processes of transformation, transportation, consumption, excretion, and the small size of the built infrastructures explain the reduced number of the so-called nimby (not in my back yard) conflicts (Guha and Martínez-Alier 1997). Environment-damaging activities, especially mineral transformation and wastewater disposal, were normally geographically close to one’s own resources.

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decomposition analysis between the energy returns to external inputs, internal biomass reuses and total inputs consumed (the Vallès County, Catalonia, c.1860 and 1999). Ecol Econ 121:160– 174 Tello E, Sacristán V, Cattaneo C, Olarieta JR, Marull J, Pons M, Gingrich S, Krausmann F, Galán E, Marco I, Padró R, Guzmán GI, González de Molina M, Cunfer G, Watson A, MacFadyen J, Fraˇnková E, Aguilera E, Infante-Amate J, Soto D, Parcerisas Ll, Dupras J, Díez L, Caravaca J, Gómez L, Fullana O, Murray I, Jover G, Cussó X (forthcoming) The energy trap of industrial agriculture: a summary of the results of 82 energy balances of past and present agricultural systems in North America and Europe (from 1830 to 2012). Agron Sustain Dev Toledo VM (1990) The ecological rationality of peasant production. In: Altieri MA, Hecht SB Agroecology and small farm development. CRC Press, Boston, pp 53–60 Toledo VM (1993) La racionalidad ecológica de la producción campesina. In: Sevilla E, González de Molina M (eds) Ecología, campesinado e Historia. Ediciones La Piqueta, Madrid, pp 197–218 Toledo VM (1994) La Apropiación Campesina de la Naturaleza: una apro-ximación etno-ecológica. PHD dissertation, UNAM Toledo VM, Barrera-Bassols N (2008) La memoria biocultural. La importancia agroecológica de las sabidurías tradicionales. Icaria, Barcelona Turchin P et al (2018) Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization. PNAS 115(2):E144–E151 Van Zanden JL (1991) The first green revolution: the growth of production and productivity in European agriculture, 1870–1914. Econ Hist Rev 2:215–239 Vasey DE (1992) An ecological history of agriculture. State University Press, USA Vila-Traver J, Aguilera E, Infante-Amate J, González de Molina M (2021) Climate change and 672 industrialization as the main drivers of Spanish agriculture water stress. Sci Total Environ 760(673):143399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.143399 Villa Gil-Bermejo I (2017) Transformaciones en el Metabolismo Agrario y su impacto socioecológico: Montefrío, 1750–1920. Universidad pablo d Olavide, Tesis doctoral inédita Wallerstein I (1974) The modern world system. Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the european world-economy in the sixteenth century. Academic Press, London Warde P (2009) The environmental history of pre-industrial agriculture in Europe. In: Sörlin S, Warde P (eds) Nature’s end: history and environment. Macmillan Press, New York Wilken GC (1991) Sustainable agriculture is the solution but what is the problem? Occasional paper 14. BIFADEC, Washington D.C. Winiwarter V (2014) Environmental history of soils. In: Agnoletti M, Neri Serneri S (eds) The basic environmental history. Springer, New York, pp 79–119 Wrigley EA (1987) People, cities and wealth. The transformation of traditional society. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Wrigley EA (1988) Continuity, chance and change. The character of the industrial revolution in England. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Wrigley EA (1989) Dos tipos de Capitalismo, dos tipos de crecimiento. Es-Tudis D’història Econòmica 1:89–109 Wrigley EA (2004) Poverty, progress, and population. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Wrigley EA (1992) Cambio, continuidad y azar. Carácter de la Revolución Industrial inglesa. Crítica, Barcelona Wrigley EA (2016) The path to sustained growth: England’s transition from an organic economy to an industrial revolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Wynn T, Collidge FL (2008) A stone-age meeting of minds. Am Sci 96:44–51

Chapter 13

Industrial Metabolism

13.1 Introduction The third social metabolism regime appeared when humans extracted goods from nature by mobilizing not only solar energy, but also other new kinds of energy mainly of mineral origin—including uranium, the essential component of nuclear power plants. The shift from a mainly solar-powered production to one based on fossil fuel or mineral energy as a product of the industrial revolution generated a qualitative change in the degree of transformation of ecosystems and the whole metabolism. The use of machines powered by mineral energy (i.e., carbon, oil, and gas) amplified the transformation capacity to such an extent that a single producer could multiply production several times by unit of time. This economic and technological leap suddenly modified how producers interacted with natural phenomena and elements, causing changes in demographic dynamics, circulation and consumption of products, worldview, territorial equilibrium, knowledge, and industrial development. The new forms of energy not only enhanced producer capacity to increase the flow of goods from nature, leading to a notable increase in labor productivity, but also to greater surpluses. Production changed in scale, manufacturers became specialized and more dependent on external inputs, and above all, the industry became consolidated, thus ensuring the supply of foodstuffs, raw materials, water, energy, and materials to cities (Debier et al. 1986; Smil 1994). This third metabolic regime turned ever more towards urban and industrial demands and needs, driving and favoring systems that increased surpluses. The latter, for its part, required specialized systems that led to applying similar conditions to nature to that implemented in industrial factories. From a metabolic perspective, this appropriation leap led to a historically unprecedented growth in circulation, transformation, consumption, and excretion processes. Circulation was boosted by the creation of increasingly fast and efficient transportation—by land, sea, and air—that now allow moving commodities to all corners of the earth. This trade expansion

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Gonzá1lez de Molina and V. M. Toledo, The Social Metabolism, Environmental History 14, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48411-7_13

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was accentuated by novel capacities of transformation of produced goods, notably the conservation of perishable products. The new production chains, from appropriation to consumption, and the wide range of infrastructures also came with new energy and material costs, while generating massive amounts of wastes, expanding the sphere of excretion as never before. With industrial metabolism, the synergies between metabolic processes also multiplied. Their most noticeable and unexpected consequences were a huge increase in human population, unimaginable impacts on the ecosystems, and ultimately on the Earth’s entire ecosystem. In spatial terms, industrial metabolism has induced the excessive growth of the transformed environment (TEN) at the expense of the utilized environment (UEN), even in pristine or hitherto unexploited areas on earth. These spatial consequences are visible, including, for example the expansive deforested areas appearing first in temperate countries, and more recently, in intertropical regions as well. At the same time, the specialized, monotonous, and extensive nature of the TEN has transformed appropriators and extractors into production units that are entirely devoted to economic exchange. They are therefore highly dependent on external inputs and trade, which has generated the net monetization of the appropriation act. All these changes have taken place so suddenly that the technological transformation triggered by the energy source shift has radically transformed countries, regions, and landscapes within a few decades. In the following sections, we carefully examine this rapid transformation that has drastically modified the planet’s prospects and the whole of humanity. The shift has been so abrupt that many of us have forgotten that what we call modernity has in fact just begun, and that the preceding stage was ostensibly different.

13.2 The Origins of Industrial Metabolism A little over 200 years ago, a series of social, economic, political, and technological transformations took place in Western Europe that changed humanity’s fate. One consequence of such a transformation was the emergence of a new rapport with nature: the industrial metabolic regime. European societies entered a novel expansion phase during the eighteenth century once they had overcome the climatic and environmental perturbations of the previous century (Pfister 1988; Grove 2007; Modelski 2007; Torbenson et al. 2023). These expansion pressures could have led to the creation of new steady-state equilibriums had it not been for the long-term social organization changes they induced. Indeed, after a long period of marked fluctuations and scarce development, Europe’s population started to grow from the year 1750 and doubled within less than a century. Public hygiene and health improvements reduced the dramatic mortality rates, almost eradicated the plague in Europe, and mitigated the damage caused by still recurring epidemics of cholera, measles, typhus, etc. Crops and market supply improvements ultimately increased the population’s natural defenses against many diseases, lowering mortality figures (Wrigley 1985, 2004, 2016; Livi-Bacci 1999).

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The population itself, however, does not seem to have been the main determinant of the metabolic change that would follow, but rather its consequence. Traditional narratives about the origin of the Industrial Revolution, which first linked it to the Agricultural Revolution, have been challenged. Robert Allen’s phrase sums up well the shift in perspective: “First it was the city and then the countryside, and not the other way around” (Allen 2009, 58). The idea that the old regime collapse was led by a revolutionary and exclusively European bourgeois class has also been disputed. According to historians of the so-called California School, the capitalist structure was not exclusively European, but common to all advanced economic centers in the Eurasian world. For his part, De Vries (2008) opposed the Marxist idea that primitive accumulation was marked by coercive proletarianization and exploitation arguing that the increase in family consumption favored the increase in wage labor. In this new narrative, environmental factors began to play a leading role. Indeed, some historians—e.g., Pomerantz (2000)—have suggested that Europe and Asia presented little productivity and income differences during the seventeenth century. Therefore, economic growth was similar in both regions immediately before the Industrial Revolution. According to this author, the secret underlying the great divergence between European countries, China, and Japan—all with similar levels of socioeconomic and cognitive development—was easy access to both carbon and to third country raw materials through trade and colonial domination. The appearance of modern States encouraged European territorial expansion. Several external phenomena contributed to such a divergence, such as: slavery in Africa; the conquest of new territories thanks to their inhabitants’ developed resistance to epidemics; and even the global commercial networks held by the Chinese, which added to their craving for American silver. All these factors were exploited by the European economy. As commented by Vries (2001), the two essential differences between the United Kingdom and the East are “carbon and colonies”. However, these explanations of the Great Divergence are still widely debated and of great interest in the field of Environmental History owing to the role of fossil fuels. Allen et al. (2010) believed that the reasons advanced by Pomeranz and the so-called California school are insufficient to explain the divergence, even though they agree that fossil fuels played a major role. For them, the question is why coal was cheap and why did technological innovations make it indispensable. These authors studied wage evolutions in England and the Netherlands and found that they were higher than in the East and other parts of Europe. They concluded that high wages significantly stimulated machine substitution. We will come back to this later. These arguments have been questioned in turn taking the wages earned exclusively by men into account, leaving out that of women and children, which would question their upward trend (Humphries and Weisdorf 2015). Allen (2015) responded to these criticisms, claiming that English food consumption contained products (meat, cheese, butter, or beer) that were not available to the majority of the population in other parts of the world and that this necessarily reflected higher incomes, including the wages of children and women. Further hypotheses have been advanced to explain the divergence. Among them those provided by the so-called “industrious revolution” current, according to which

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the English population was progressively oriented towards the consumption of goods that implied replacing leisure with more work, adopting typical “modern economy” behaviors. The industrious revolution theses imply a change in perspective, from supply to demand: that is, from focusing on aspects such as technological change, capital supply, energy, and raw materials, or on the institutions that made the industrial revolution possible, to the world of consumption, especially domestic consumption (De Vries 2008; Sugihara and Wong 2015, p. 284). In any event, it is important to note that from a biophysical standpoint, the Great Divergence could not have taken place without access to fossil fuels and key natural resources based on both domestic extraction and international trade (Pomerantz 2000; Hornborg et al. 2007). The Industrial Revolution would probably not have been possible either. As stated by Paolo Malanima (2020, 3), the role of energy should not replace other factors of change but should be seen as the limiting factor. Several researchers hold that the Industrial Revolution would have faced serious problems without subsoil coal and the ghost acreage available to the British economy through international trade, which supplied foodstuffs as well as plant and animal raw materials (Jones 1987; Pomerantz 2000). A few years ago, Alf Hornborg (2007) highlighted the pivotal role of grain imports in England’s industrial revolution, that also applied to sugar, tea, coffee, etc., and that McNeill calls the “ingredients” of the industrial revolution (McNeill 2019). Without raw materials from other continents, the revolution would not have been possible or would have been significantly delayed. Despite their decisive contributions, peripheral countries, often under colonial domination, did not receive the necessary compensation. A textbook example is the use of slaves on cotton plantations throughout the Americas and other parts of the world, or sugar cane plantations in Cuba or Brazil (Funes Monzote 2004) and wool imports from Argentina, New Zealand, or Australia. As indicated by Moore (2015) or Alf Hornborg (2019), the low price of these materials conditioned the cheapening of both raw materials and workers’ wages, thus facilitating capital accumulation. Although many metallic minerals used in the revolution came from areas close to industrial sites, most originated from Chile, Montana, Malaysia, Andalusia, or Australia. The demand increase from such distant places favored the deforestation of large areas of the planet and must have indirectly affected CO2 concentration and thus the climate. Tragic illustrations include the desertification of the Chaco region in Argentina, that was devastated by abusive tannin tree extraction, or hardwoods in Costa Rica (Clare Roadhes 2022). In short, industrialization established many teleconnections between England and other European and non-European territories. The industrial revolution was not merely a European or British phenomenon, it was actually a global phenomenon (McNeill 2019). Nevertheless, the key role of institutional changes has not been sufficiently highlighted in this debate. The main difference between the UK and its rivals—France, Spain, or the Netherlands—was the form of government that emerged once the seventeenth-century constitutional conflicts were settled in 1688, when the aristocracy won the battle against absolute monarchy. The Glorious Revolution established a contractual monarchy in which economic policy decisions depended not on the monarch but on the consensus between the two parliamentary chambers. The

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House of Commons adopted numerous dispositions that fostered fluvial, maritime, and terrestrial communications, transaction security, tax increases, etc. The House of Commons was elected through a system that allowed representing the elite’s major interests differently than in other European absolute monarchies in which the business sector was unrepresented. Another distinction was the healthy state of the finances and debt capacity that derived from a tax reform that also included the most affluent classes—contrary to the case of most European monarchies in which privileged classes were opposed to tax reforms that would weaken their privileges and exactions. Early globalization required institutional economic and technological changes that made the expansion of national and international markets possible. It was the participation in expanded markets that favored the divergence between countries and regions. Considerable Atlantic trade profits, particularly those made by the UK and the Netherlands, increased political negotiation power regarding commercial interests and induced significant institutional transformations. It was this Early Globalization that contributed to accentuating the original GDP per capita differences between Eastern and Western countries by means of the direct and indirect economic advantages of international trade. Modern Europe’s institutional framework ultimately allowed widely—and unequally—diffusing the positive effects of commerce on economic growth. Atlantic trade seems to have contributed to the First Great Divergence (Acemoglu et al. 2005; Dobado et al. 2012). Allen (2009) similarly underlined the relevant role played by mercantile policies in the promotion of British trade. Without mercantile policies, it would be difficult to explain how London quadrupled its population between the sixteenth century, when it peaked at 200,000, and 1800, when it reached nearly a million. Over that period, the urban population grew from 7 to 29% and the active agrarian population fell from 75 to 35%. As a result, British capital saw a significant rise in real salaries, which, as we will see, played a key role in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution (Allen 2009). By the 1820s, the differences between the two most advanced European economies and China were substantial. The per capita GDP of the Netherlands was nearly 90% higher than that of China’s Hua-Lou region (Li and Van Zanden 2012). And by 1700, Japan’s per capita GDP was less than half that of Great Britain, dropping to 30% by 1800 (Bassino et al. 2011). In short, the new institutional framework paved the way for markets, individual freedom, private property, free trade, and the pursuit of individual and collective wealth. Social wealth was assimilated with the physical growth of the economy while production and technological change were identified with progress (Naredo 1987). The profound difference of this organized set of social relations was the fact that they favored the idea of growth, while agrarian societies, in contrast, were based on a stationary conception of society. In their conception of the economy and social ethics, the ultimate good was the growth of the biophysical basis of the economy, reflecting social progress and human wellbeing to which any society should aspire. In this way, a shift took place from a cyclical—or even spiral—conception of time and history, to an entirely lineal vision.

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13.3 The Energy Transition In the decades before the industrial revolution, population and consumption growth exerted increasing pressure on forests, favoring the expansion of agricultural land to produce foodstuffs. Conversely, growing household demands for fuel also exerted pressure, generating major tensions that help us to understand social transformations. The growing replacement of human labor with animal power (Wrigley 1993) threatened to neutralize the improvements achieved by the agrarian revolution and increase animal energy costs. At the end of the eighteenth century, there was a growing demand for rotary traction by cotton fabric factories. No suitable places were left to install new waterwheels on riverbanks. Metal production was similarly restricted—to a maximum of 2000 tons per year—by the very high cost of charcoal used in the furnaces (Schandl and Krausmann 2007, 104–5). Moreover, the expansion of domestic commercial activities accentuated road network obsolescence and the cost of animal traction transport. All these requirements combined created disproportionate land demands that exceeded British territorial capacity. The needs of urban dwellers and that of the incipient industries led to a struggle for resources, competing with the age-old rural population. This extreme land scarcity would drive the energy transformation, technological innovations, and ultimately, the metabolic change that began with the Industrial Revolution, as Richard Wilkinson suggested in his main thesis (1973). Technological innovations were the result of society’s valiant struggle against ecological boundaries. When land started to falter, it became more profitable to produce machines that operated with fossil fuels than to use horses that required agricultural land. Textile manufacturers were able to expand without threatening food production agriculture thanks to cotton imported from India, and later, wool from Australia, and similarly thereafter. Yet, the energy change explanations in this narrative are perhaps too simplistic. Recent environmental historiography has confirmed that from the outset, the energy transition should not be understood as biomass replacing fossil fuels, but as an addition of new energy carriers (Miller and Warde 2019). These fuels present a higher energy density than biomass and their conversion efficiency into useful work is close to 40%, whereas animal and human biomass conversion barely exceeds 15% (Malanima 2020, 10). According to Warde (2019), the transition originated in the metabolic rift that began in the sixteenth century between the accumulation of monetary capital (or preciosities) in the hands of certain social groups and the “photosynthetic constraint”, to use the term coined by Wrigley (2016). In 1660, only 35% of the energy consumed in England and Wales came from coal, while by 1760, that figure had risen to 64% and by 1860, to 93%. The transition was slow at first but accelerated during the eighteenth century. Allen has advanced convincing reasons for such a major change (2009, 2010 and 2013). The author refers to the pace of invention and technological innovation both in industry and in the design of households and their heating systems, but above all, the combined effect of the relative costs of labor

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and coal. Wages peaked as the costs of energy plunged. These trends made the new technologies that replaced labor with capital and energy profitable. Indeed, during the eighteenth century, the UK was a high-wage economy, while in other countries in Europe and Asia, salaries were close to poverty thresholds. On the contrary, the price of coal from mines in northern and western UK was among the lowest in the world. According to Allen (2013, 3–14), the successful economic globalization achieved by Modern Age England favored such price behavior. Trade expansion made cities grow as well. As mentioned above, London was the fastestgrowing European city, going from 50,000 inhabitants in 1500 to nearly one million in 1800. This sudden growth expanded household fuel demand. Firewood and charcoal demand increases made fuel prices rise owing to scarcity and the growing distance that had to be covered to supply it. Coal price had long been similar to that of firewood and charcoal, but the price increase of these latter fuels made coal less expensive. Once the energy contained in charcoal and firewood became twice as expensive as that of coal, people attempted to replace firewood with coal. This price behavior also stimulated invention, eventually leading to the energy transition. According to Allen (2013), the small inventions that fostered the industrial revolution took place in the UK because this was the only country in which they could be profitable. Salaries were also high in the Netherlands and the country’s domestic consumption increased owing to its commercial expansion. Amsterdam, like London, shared these factors that were favorable to the industrial revolution. However, coal consumption expansion was delayed in the Netherlands due to extensive turf deposits and a relatively larger availability of firewood and charcoal than in England—obtained from Nordic countries across the Baltic Sea. The price differential between coal and biomass was not substantial enough to favor their replacement, making it unnecessary to invent machines that used coal. China was experiencing an opposite process over that period. Chinese real wages were comparatively much lower than in the UK or the Netherlands—among other reasons, because of demographic growth and a relative abundance of labor—so energy costs were very high. These price ratios obviously failed to encourage the introduction of labor-saving innovations, despite China’s abundant reserves of coal in the north of the country. Such a rationale is appealing to environmental historians. According to the Boserupian thesis—thus named because it supports the proposals of Boserup (1983)—the earliest innovations (including the energy shift) resulted from population-resource tensions, representing the first serious attack on organic metabolism stability. Scarcity, as an ecological phenomenon, would have become a powerful economic factor, increasing labor and natural resource costs, hence stimulating technological innovation. The latter assumes that the market economy always existed. The rationale overlooks the UK’s political-institutional transformations since the late seventeenth century, and establishes the changes as the major mechanism of economic regulation. Technological innovation in the context of increasing prices would not require any further explanation, because it was a logical choice for economic agents familiar with monetary calculation and mercantile logic—requiring no further analysis as it forms part of human nature. From an evolutionary viewpoint, this explanation is

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the logical consequence of accumulated difficulties. It would be, in Tainter’s words, a “problem-solving response” (Tainter 2011), that is, problems generated by the relative scarcity of resources. However, the explanation is incomplete: it does not elucidate why this response was generated, nor why at that specific moment. Population growth and resource scarcity had led to substantially different theses at other times, from population control, to emigration, to armed conflict, etc. As held by Worster (1988), there is sufficient accumulated empirical evidence to suggest that all social relations and institutions that became known as the capitalist system appeared first, later favoring the expansion of the western European population, and eventually, that of the whole world. The latter had already been advanced by the most acute contemporary observers, e.g., Marx. Capitalism triggered such huge transformations that, to paraphrase Polanyi (1990), they provoked the Great Transformation of interrelations with nature. Increases in demand from the agrarian and manufacturing sectors certainly led to land scarcity, stimulating the energy shift and associated technological innovation. Yet this was only possible in a society in which a new and growing segment sustained money, individual interest, and a worldview favorable to applied scientific development as its dominant values. Land scarcity also occurred outside the UK in other countries and regions—as well as in different periods—where industrialization never took place or came later. Capitalism caused land scarcity and not the other way around. Yet, industrialization and industrial metabolism would have been impossible without the generalized exploitation of fossil fuels—that present incomparably greater energy density than biomass—and through their use in the exploitation of new sources of materials. A subsoil source of energy should allow detaching metabolic activities from the land. This claim is accepted by nearly all environmental historians (Erb et al. 2007, 73) and by a growing number of economic historians (Cipolla 1994; Leach 1992; Malanima 2001, 2020). The sustained expansion of society—measured as economic growth based on massive consumption of natural resources—could never either have been possible without the appropriation of the then immense coal reserves, and later, oil reserves. These energy sources removed the inherent limits of organic metabolism, or to be more precise, they altered their ecological scale (Sieferle 2001, 38). The new capitalist social relations that drove economic agents to chase monetary profit ultimately fostered economic growth as a model of development. This promotion came with the concurrence between the interests of the business class and the State, that was concerned with incrementing public wealth, taxes, and its diplomatic and military power. Until then, business profits had depended on the number of labor hours or on laborer efforts. Both factors presented clear physical limits, but increasing the labor production capacity could allow surpassing these limitations. Working instruments, that had until then represented mere tools, became the components of a larger mechanism through the invention of machines. When workers used more highly complex and more numerous tools simultaneously, a new and more powerful traction mechanism became necessary. But that mechanism could not be operated by charcoal. Coal had been known since ancient times, but its use was limited despite its clear energetic and hence economic advantages. From this perspective, the desire to increment profit beyond the physical limits of labor reproduction time

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led to unprecedented nature exploitation (González de Molina and Sevilla Guzmán 1992) and this exploitation increase currently remains the secret formula underlying industrial metabolism. Regarding the synergies between technological innovation and the energy shift, Smil commented: “inventions and diffusion of new prime movers drove most energy transitions: just think what steam engines did for coal and what internal combustion engines have done for hydrocarbons [Smil 2013, 10]”. Labor exploitation could only be intensified because of a corresponding increase in nature exploitation, which transferred the entropy generated during the production process to the environment. From that perspective, capitalist production can be understood as the progressive transfer of social entropy towards the environment—that early on in the Industrial Revolution was sustained by laborers—generating an increasing environmental impact. By the end of the eighteenth century, mining, metal production, and transportation innovations were so closely linked to coal that the subsequent global expansion of the industrial economic model became closely connected to the consumption of that form of fossil energy. The energy shift increased the per capita use of energy and materials threefold or fivefold, and the economy physically multiplied 15–25 times. At present, the use of materials can reach up to 50 tons/ha/year and that of energy up to 600 GJ/ha/year (Schandl and Krausmann 2007, 104). Given these figures and the contradictions of organic metabolism, we can regard the fossil fuel transition as inevitable, given that European economies could not have grown in such a way through solar energy alone (Sieferle 2001, 41; Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2007, 232). The most distinctive characteristic of industrial societies is that their operational economic growth model is based on the sustained increase of its volume of social metabolism. According to Smil (2001, 255), 500 kg of wood were consumed yearly per capita in 1850—when the predominant fuels were still firewood, charcoal, and hay—but by 1990, that figure peaked to 1.5 tons of oil, i.e., it increased 20-fold. This energy consumption allowed the development of a largely urban civilization with unprecedented levels of material consumption. We will not speculate here about what would have occurred had an alternative technological course been followed based on renewable energies. What we will note is that interestingly, the abundance and cheapness of coal—whose non-renewable and noxious effects remained unrecognized until the publication of Jevons’ (1865) work—set an industrialization path dependency, not only for England, but for almost all Western countries. An unparalleled synergy thus emerged between technological transformation, the economy, resources, sources of energy, and the size of the human population and its needs. A gigantic metabolic change was underway.

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13.4 A New Cognitive Framework for Processing Information: A Novel Cosmovision This metabolic change occurred within the framework of another revolution in the collective representation of nature according to which nature fell under the dominion of humans. It thus replaced the former vision of solidarity between humans and nature that induced cooperation and collectivity. Berman (1988) describes this separation from nature as a sort of disenchantment, as nature was thereafter regarded as an external, desacralized machine that could be analyzed and exploited for the benefit of human beings. Science took over the role played by religions and the fresh moral standard, i.e., the economy, radically altered humans’ relationship with nature. The elements of the natural world—regarded as sacred throughout most of the history of the human species—were ultimately considered as mere factors of production of commodities that could be appropriated or exploited. Secularization triumphed and nature was muted. The highly entropic development of capitalism would be difficult to understand without a prevailing anthropocentric worldview, the partial development of science and its technological outputs, and the progressive domination of self-profit. These conceptions and cognitive achievements replaced collective or communitarian work, overlooking or minimizing it, suppressing, or minimizing the very act of cooperation that was key to the human species’ permanence and evolution for nearly 200,000 years (Bowles and Gintis 2011). The fact is that eighteenth-century European culture was based on the idea of reason and that the progress it brought was uniquely capable of providing happiness to mankind. Science as the expression of the possibilities of reason became the instrument that allowed human beings to master their own destiny. From there on, science replaced religion as the prevailing discourse. It was seemingly laic, but it was actually just as consecrated—as brilliantly demonstrated by Koestler (1968) and other authors. Historians such as Mokyr (2009) have underlined how the Industrial Revolution was closely linked to the scientific revolution that had already been underway since the seventeenth century. The latter had marked a phase in which scientific advances began to be applied to technological innovations and improvements: the so-called industrial enlightenment. Progress eventually became synonymous with improved material wellbeing, and in turn with self-interest, giving way to the dominant economic science we are familiar with. It was deemed natural that mankind—in accordance with its preponderant role in the new cosmogony—seek to benefit from its production activities and that human work should generate private accumulation of wealth, its own work and natural resources becoming subordinated to this universal law. The goal was no longer to satisfy the needs of households or of the community, but—based on the natural supremacy of humans and of trade—to pursue individual realization expressed as the accumulation of money through the market. Markets were also natural institutions. They arise spontaneously as soon as the restrictions and moral prejudices of religions and other traditional beliefs are broken, mankind thus recovering its freedom. The economic system should thus eliminate all sorts of rules in order to favor supply and

13.5 Changes in the Metabolic Function of Biomass

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demand since the market self-regulates through freely fixed prices. A new production rationality was thus created. It would lubricate the surging economic system and would legitimize the domination of humans over other humans, and over nature itself. The metamorphosis accelerated. It began in England and leapt into continental Europe, expanding towards its peripheries, on to the colonies, and reaching today all corners of the world with uncertain results. Industrial metabolism has not been, however, the sole domain of capitalism. So-called real socialism shared most capitalist production premises, particularly capital accumulation, albeit in the hands of the State. This confluence of the two major contemporary production modes was embodied in economic growth, acting as the underlying mechanism of industrial metabolism. Today’s ecological crisis owes precisely to economic growth in its present form, i.e., a continuous increase in physical production volumes. And that is why the ecological crisis, understood as the depletion or degradation of natural resources, is closely linked to this mechanism. Indeed, economic growth and the wellbeing of mankind have become totally dependent on the sustained increment of the economy’s physical basis, i.e., on the growing utilization of energy and materials. It would be too long here to describe the entire evolution that has led to the presentday crisis in detail. We will, however, underline the physical-biological components of that major transformation that has clearly brought about our current levels of unsustainability.

13.5 Changes in the Metabolic Function of Biomass At the onset of industrialization, agriculture, despite losing some monetary significance, acted as a determinant in physical terms. Industry required large amounts of labor and animal power, and the sustentation of a growing non-agrarian population. This occurred before new technologies could provide energy or material inputs outside the agrarian sector. British agriculture continued to be organic, and it would remain so for a long time. The main challenge was then to raise production without depleting soil fertility. During that early stage of industrialization, as stated by Krausmann et al. (2008a, b), the need to satisfy the growing demand was a bottleneck for economic growth. Nevertheless, the agrarian system pressures paved the way to the industrialization of agriculture, a process that would be completed in developed countries at the end of World War II. There were three major waves in the industrialization of biomass production: the first was fostered by an institutional transition towards capitalism. It took place within the agrarian sector, and optimized its possibilities by incrementing biomass production. The second wave corresponded to the first agrarian metamorphosis based on artificial fertilizers, in other words, on an external subsidy of energy and materials from non-renewable sources; and finally, the third phase was the total penetration of fossil fuels in the agrarian sector (Krausmann et al. 2008a, b). These three waves fit Bairoch’s (1973, 1999) canonical characterization of the history of contemporary

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agriculture. Several other transformations were detected, that led, in the form of revolutions, to its complete industrialization. Yet it is perhaps an overstatement to call these changes revolutions—according to historian preferences a couple of decades ago. But it is true that more decisive innovations spread in a concentrated fashion at specific moments during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The need to meet growing human and animal foodstuff demands—owing to expanding urbanization and general demographic growth—was common to all countries that initiated their industrialization in the nineteenth century. Many European countries had been suffering from internal agroecosystem pressures, and, to a lesser extent, external pressures because of rising biomass production. The population increase that began in the eighteenth century, urbanization, the greater consumption of the upper classes, and the different demands generated by burgeoning industrialization converged in a legal-political structure that protected the traditional configuration of agrarian metabolism and the distribution of land uses. This facilitated institutional change (Liberal Revolutions), especially regarding the regime of feudal ownership and the liberalization of agrarian markets.

13.6 The Four Pathways to Agricultural Industrialization From that point onwards, European agroecosystems could meet demands by implementing one or several of four options, depending on their land surface as well as their climatic and soil conditions. The first consisted in pushing agricultural boundaries as much as possible. Undeniably, it was in the UK countryside that the transition first began. Farmland grew by 58% and the land area dedicated to cereals by 62.8% between 1700 and 1830 (Schandl and Krausmann 2007, 87). From this perspective, the growth potential of UK agricultural production depended on the innovations of the Agricultural Revolution. But it also rested on breaking away from agrarian metabolism rigidity and, therefore, on the possibility of access to more land to meet the population’s endosomatic consumption, particularly in urban areas. The UK exhausted its possibilities of increasing biomass production through its own resources earlier than any other European country. But this was not the case of most European countries, which were still far from reaching the maximum growth potential offered by their agroecosystems. Such was the case, for example, of Austria (Krausmann 2001), the Swiss canton of Berne (Pfister 1990) and Andalusia, in southern Spain, or Catalonia (González de Molina et al. 2010; Tello et al. (2010)). Some countries even had abundant land and could meet the needs. The clearest example is the United States and many other countries in the Americas such as Argentina or Brazil (Garavaglia 1999; Padua 2002, 2004). The second solution consisted in saving land by increasing yield per land unit. The most well-known innovations in this respect took place precisely in the UK and gave rise to the so-called Agricultural Revolution. The latest historiographical contributions, however, do not refer to sharp changes but rather to the slow introduction of improvements in the eighteenth century that boosted productivity (Overton 1991;

13.6 The Four Pathways to Agricultural Industrialization

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Allen 2004; Warde 2009). New rotations, combining cereals with leguminous crops and fodder allowed implementing better crop and livestock farming associations, increasing livestock numbers, substituting human labor with animal traction, and greater quantities of manure, almost eliminating fallow. With growing production, farm income also rose, improving productivity by releasing manpower that could be employed in industry while feeding a growing urban population. A similar solution was practiced in Austria (Krausmann et al. 2008a, b, 194). Market and private property expansion throughout Europe favored the quick diffusion of these improvements. By the end of 1700, these innovations had effectively reached Denmark, Hannover, and to some other regions of Germany and Switzerland. During the early nineteenth century, they had reached France and other countries. Biomass production increase was indispensable to supply basic foodstuffs and other agrarian raw materials to the rapidly expanding European cities of the time. For centuries, the size of cities had been limited by the availability of nearby land and by animal transportation costs, which made it very costly to physically transfer the necessary amount of biomass. In 1820, Vienna required almost 22,000 km2 to meet the needs of a population of nearly 250,000 inhabitants. Ninety years later, in 1910, the city had almost one million inhabitants, but the surface area required to meet its needs was around 24,000 km2 (Chen & Chen 2012). In 1784, just before the French Revolution, the food footprint of Paris was 60,000 km2 for a population of 660,000 inhabitants. A similar surface area was still required for Paris in the late 1920s, when its population reached nearly three million inhabitants. During the nineteenth century, the food footprint of Paris dropped from 0.092 to only 0.02 km2 (Billen et al. 2009; Kim and Barles 2012). In many other parts of the world, the land-saving solution (mixed farming) had either already been adopted, as in Asia, or soil and climate conditions did not allow it, as in the case of the Mediterranean world. By that time, non-industrial systems allowed feeding about 500 million human beings with a surface area that was smaller than the USA’s entire agricultural land surface and on soils used for nearly 4000 years. Chinese farmers produced three times more cereals by surface area unit than North American farmers and Korea and Japan presented similar figures. The numerous techniques and strategies used by the farmers in these countries included a complex system of channels and irrigation areas, organic fertilizers (including green manures, household wastes, manures, composts, and ashes) and cereal varieties well-adapted to regional conditions (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols 2008). The third solution was to specialize the production, favoring one land use over others. The studies conducted in England, the canton of Berne (Pfister 1990), certain areas of Andalusia (González de Molina et al. 2010) and Catalonia (Tello et al. 2010) show that in general, marketable production increased based on the promotion of agricultural crops and production specialization that tended to break the balance between the different land uses that had characterized organic metabolism. Soil fertiliuty replenishment played a crucial role in the three solutions outlined above. Intensifying cultivation or cultivating new lands taken from forest and animal feed surface areas required greater amounts of nutrients. The imbalances were making it more difficult to produce animal feed and manure, often limiting agricultural

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production growth (Guldner et al. 2021). There are reasons to believe that in many countries, the expansion of agricultural boundaries or yield increases were attained at the expense of nutrient reserves accumulated in the soil over centuries, either naturally or through farming management. Our study of southern Spain shows that the agrarian sector reacted to this growing market pressure by transferring not only the country’s internal demands but also the British economy’s demand for food and raw materials, specializing above all in the production of cereals, grapevine and oil (López Estudillo 2002; Garrabou and González de Molina 2010). In the case of grapevines at least, and possibly olive trees as well, given Spanish agriculture’s structural shortage of organic matter (González de Molina 2002), greater crop intensity was achieved by extracting the soil’s nutrient reserve (González de Molina et al. 2010). As described by Cunfer (2005), North American prairies functioned in the same way. Therefore, the USA’s agrarian growth in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century could be classified as extraction growth that did not have any severe consequences due to the fast spread of chemical fertilizers (Cunfer 2021b). Importing nutrients or biomass for human and animal feed from other territories was the fourth solution. This solution was widely practiced until the end of the nineteenth century, especially between neighboring countries and territories. As we have already mentioned, the Industrial Revolution was also sustained by the growing imports of food from other regions and countries. In the classic debate between protectionism and free-trade-ism, there are diverse and complex arguments for and against either of the two options, but the debate can be better understood from a material perspective. Countries such as the UK chose free trade because, among other reasons, the country did not have the necessary domestic resources to sustain the urban demands deriving from industrialization. In around 1870, when the modernization potential within the solar energy-based agrarian system had been exhausted, the UK changed its economic strategy by importing growing quantities of basic foodstuffs from other parts of the world (and by adjusting its surplus population via emigration). Hornborg (2007, 268) estimated that in 1850, in the UK, the exchange of manufactured cotton fabrics for wheat, which obviously did not need to be grown inside its borders, spared almost three million hectares of cultivated land that could be assigned to crops other than wheat. In 1900, the land area equivalent to the imported cereals was similar in size to that available for domestic farmlands (Krausmann et al. 2008a, b, 194). This cereal flow even permitted the British agrarian sector to specialize in livestock production, which consumes a great deal of land but saves manual labor, producing lean benefits for large English landowners. Yet, this extra land was not always appropriated peacefully. On several occasions, it was achieved via political-military means and nineteenth-century colonialism is a good example of this. Consequently, Europe’s agricultural industrialization was supported by trade with many peripheral countries, most of them net biomass exporters. In practice, agrarian product supplies (coffee, cocoa, sugar, cereals, fruits, livestock produce, etc.) represented a low-cost land subsidy offered by peripheral countries (Schor 2005), providing Europeans with more available land for specialized production.

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327

The same applied to fertilizers and other agrarian inputs imported from poor countries. Poor countries exported their soil nutrient reserves (Mayumi 1991) as sugar cane, cotton crops, etc. The cases of Peruvian guano and Chilean saltpeter well illustrate the effects of these uneven exchanges, not because of the actual impact on European agriculture, but because of the net production capacity loss (Leff 1986) brought about by the export of these resources. However, Krausmann et al. (2008a, b) claim that these natural fertilizer imports to Europe did not play a decisive role in sustaining domestic agrarian production growth or in increasing the offer of foodstuffs in Europe. According to Smil (2001), the global production of nitrogen as guano and mineral nitrates reached 240,000 tons in 1990, which is a rather insignificant amount in practice. Whatever the case, industrialized country soils could sustain more intensive cultivation thanks to the appropriation of nutrients and virtual lands (Naredo and Parra 1993; Geogescu-Roegen [1971] 1996) of poor countries, who were thus prevented from developing their own agrarian sector. In fact, in 1847, guano from the Chincha islands became Peru’s major export product. In 1845, exported guano accounted for 73.8% of the total value of Peruvian exports. Throughout the guano period between 1840 and 1880, Peru exported eleven to twelve million tons of guano to be used as a natural fertilizer benefiting European and North American soils. Resource depletion and synthetic fertilizers eventually put an end to the guano business (Tudela et al. 1990, 78). Similarly, Chilean saltpeter began to be exported early, in 1830, to Europe, and from 1879 to 1883 the struggle to control nitrate mines caused the War of the Pacific between Chile and Peru. The Chilean State obtained up to two-thirds of its income from saltpeter exports. A long list of colonial products could be added to these two natural fertilizers to illustrate the degree to which economic dependence and the primary exporter model exhausted the natural resources of poor countries, including indigo, sarsaparilla, cochineal dye, and rubber, among many others. Until the 1960s, coffee represented 59% of Cameroon exports and 66% of Colombian exports; coffee and cocoa accounted for 87% of the exported products from Ghana, and 57% from the Ivory Coast; 74% of Cambodian exports were rubber and rice, and so on (Palazuelos 1990). A textbook example is given by Díaz de Astarloa (2020) in Argentina, which since the early 1960s was a net exporter of nutrients through grain exports. However, these narratives, which are consistent with historiographical findings on the great divergence and unequal exchange, are being contested, as we will see later. In any case, production intensification disrupted local nutrient flows and made the replenishment of soil fertility dependent on distant national and international markets. The exhaustion of the agrarian growth potential in the second half of the nineteenth century in many parts of Europe threatened a Malthusian crisis: technological change, or in other words, the arrival of synthetic chemical fertilizers, was still a way off. European emigration in the second part of the century, or the expansion of the international food market should be analyzed from this perspective. It was precisely the need to import growing amounts of food from overseas that fostered transport improvements and, paradoxically, triggered the agrarian crisis towards the end of the century.

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In any case, fertility replenishment studies (Krausmann 2006; Tello et al. 2010; Cunfer and Krausmann 2009; González de Molina et al. 2010; Villa 2017; see also the case studies collected in the special issue coordinated by Cunfer 2021a) confirm that this played a key role in the sustainability of organic agrarian metabolism that would be decisive in the transition towards industrial agrarian metabolism. The only way out of the end-of-century crisis, based on production specialization and yield increase per land unit, was, as argued elsewhere (González de Molina and Pouliquen 1996; González de Molina and Guzmán Casado 2006), by overcoming the structural fertilizer shortages through the manufacturing of synthetic, fossil fuel-based chemical fertilizers. We can draw an important conclusion from the above research: the end-of-century crisis can be explained not only by the entry of cheaper grain into Europe, but also by the frictions between two farming systems with different soil fertility replacement mechanisms. European agricultural land costs, especially in Mediterranean regions, were higher than in America and Australia. In the absence of chemicals fertilizers, the replacement of soil fertility needed land devoted to manure or green manure production. Since European agriculture had cultivated soil continuously for hundreds of years, agrarian growth could not be based on the soil nutrient reservoir for much longer. Moreover, European agriculture’s production intensification during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries decreased the capacity to replenish all harvested nutrients. Hence, the possibilities of production specialization and yield increase achieved during the first Agricultural Revolution were progressively exhausted. This was not the case in other countries such as the US or Australia, where the soil nutrient reserves of recently cultivated arable lands were high. The land cost of replacing soil fertility in these regions was much lower. The end-of-century crisis reflected in cheaper overseas agrarian products unfolded as the maritime transport revolution confronted two types of agricultural systems based on rather different land costs. Therefore, relative nutrient scarcity, exacerbated by a failed land equilibrium (itself resulting from Europe’s nineteenth-century production growth) was a major reason for the end of century crisis. It triggered the second wave in the agrarian socio-ecological transition.

13.7 Industrialization First Comers and Late Joiners In the late eighteenth century, the UK presented the two essential conditions for a coal-based economy to develop: sufficient subsoil coal reserves, and a network of channels for its transportation. In the early nineteenth century, the annual per capita use of energy reached 60–70 GJ. Coal contributed 50%, firewood was already of minor importance and provided less than 5%, and biomass supplemented the consumption of primary energy providing 45% of the total. Coal use nearly doubled the energy obtained per surface area unit to 50 GJ/ha, thus demonstrating how the UK had already crossed the threshold of the agrarian metabolic regime (Krausmann et al. 2008a, b, 189–191) (Table 13.1).

13.7 Industrialization First Comers and Late Joiners

329

Industrialization processes spread throughout Europe, North America, and Asia, and in some countries earlier than in others. A classic distinction has been made between first comers, i.e., countries that had developed a large industrial sector by the 1830s—including Germany, Belgium, the United States, France, and Switzerland— and the late joiners, i.e., countries that would become industrialized several decades later, such as Mediterranean countries and eastern European countries, together with Japan. This diversity in industrialization pace has a convincing socio-ecological explanation. During that period, the implementation of the industrial metabolic regime depended on each country’s capacity to adopt the technological innovations that led to the UK’s industrial revolution (path dependency). Countries needed to gather a number of factors as well as a similar institutional framework to that of the UK’s, together with minimal demand capacity. In other words, in the early nineteenth century, a country that had abolished feudalism, implemented economic liberalism, and possessed coal at affordable prices was likely to become industrialized. Such characteristics can be appreciated when comparing the UK to Italy, two countries with similar sized economies and both belonging to the G-8. Table 13.2 shows the UK’s economic physical expansion until World War I, assessed in terms of coal consumption, the main source of energy during the Industrial Revolution. Consumption multiplied by 3.5 between 1853 and 1912, reaching a coal peak just before World War I. In contrast, in Italy, the contribution of traditional energy sources— mainly biomass—to primary energy consumption did not fall below 50% until the late 1930s. In fact, Italy lacked domestic fossil fuel sources, making the country dependent on imports. In 2009, Italy’s energetic dependence was still 84% (Bartoletto 2013). Energy scarcity determined Italy’s industrialization that thus followed a different path than that of British industrialization. Italy specialized in high labor intensity industries. Between 1903 and 1912, the UK consumed an average of nearly 260 million tons of coal while Germany consumed 150 over the same time period, and Italy only 3. In 1911, 58% of Italy’s industrial power derived from hydraulic energy and only 29% from steam. The lack of coal led the country to import coal from the early nineteenth century mainly from England. It also generated energy Table 13.1 Indicators of industrialization in the United Kingdom between 1750 and 1910 United Kingdom

1750 (In/km2 )

1830

1870

1910

34

76

99

143

1478

1779

3205

4611

Agricultural population (%)

54

28

16

8

DEC/cap (GJ/cap/year)

63

68

122

148

DEC/area (GJ/cap/ha)

19

52

122

212

Population density

GDP/per capita ($/capita)

% biomass Coal consumption (kg/cap/year) Source Krausmann et al. (2008a, b, 192)

81

54

26

19

417

1100

3175

4505

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costs that were three to five times greater than that of most competitive economies of northwestern Europe. Austria is a similar late joiner case. Surprisingly, Austria’s annual per capita use of energy in 1830 was similar to the UK’s, though coal amounted to only 1%, and agricultural biomass to 45%—about 35 GJ per capita—of the primary energy. As in the UK, the amount of biomass used in Austria was about 30 GJ and was within the limits of energy renewal. Coal consumption also increased in Austria but at a slow pace. After 1850, when the railroad connected Austria to the coal mines of the Northern provinces, consumption grew quickly, peaking at 50% of the supply of energy in 1900. Coal was used in Austria mainly as domestic fuel and in certain industries. Wood abundance in rural zones and for the metals industry explains why firewood remained a significant source of primary energy for house heating until the second half of the nineteenth century. Per capita use of energy increased only by 2% between 1830 and 1930, while the use of energy per hectare more than doubled, reaching 70 GJ/ha. The Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, and Spain, four countries studied by Gales et al. (2007), followed that same pattern despite their diverse climates, differing amounts of natural resources, and industrialization trajectories. Traditional sources of energy persisted in these four countries for a long time. In the Netherlands, it was only in 1863 that the total input of traditional energies fell to less than 50% of the total. In Sweden, it was in the late 1920s, and in Italy and Spain, it was just prior to World War II. In Sweden, firewood was the main source of energy (75%) in 1850, while human and animal foodstuffs comprised the remaining part except for hydraulic energy that accounted for less than 1%. By that year in Spain, human and animal foodstuffs represented 50% of the total energy supply, firewood 46%, coal 1.7%, and hydraulic Table 13.2 Historical availability and coal consumption between 1853 and 1952 (millions of tons) Year (*)

Total domestic consumption

Overseas shipments and bunkers

Total consumption and shipments

1853–18,632 = 100

1853–1862

65

6

72

100

1863–1872

96

10

106

148

1873–1882

120

20

140

194

1883–1892

139

33

173

240

1893–1902

158

48

207

287

1903–1912

181

77

258

358

1913–1922

187

58

245

333

1923–1932

171

68

239

331

1933–1942

185

40

225

312

1943–1952

197

12

208

289

Source Historical coal data: coal production, availability, and consumption 1853–2012. Department of Energy & Climate Change, UK Government

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331

energy 2%. Spain, therefore, used more animal traction and less thermal energy than Sweden. Coal reached these countries late, even the Netherlands where fossil fuels were already significant because of the use of turf. Coal was used mostly in the twentieth century, its relevance varying considerably. At its peak, in 1913, coal provided 82% of the energy consumed in the Netherlands, but in Sweden, in 1909, that proportion was only 45%, in Italy, 40% from 1935 to 1940, and in Spain, coal provided 46–47% of the total energy consumption between 1927 and 1930 (Fig. 13.1). Overall, the development and rapid diffusion of a series of manufacturing innovations and production organization adaptations led to an unprecedented productivity increase of the major industries during the industrial revolution. Cotton, steel, machinery, and transportation industries supported this growth phase. From

Fig. 13.1 Total energy consumption (PJ) of the United Kingdom’s economy. Source Warde (2007); http://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/history-sust/energyconsumption/

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13 Industrial Metabolism

its earliest stages (1760–1800), production innovations multiplied in less strategic industries but opened the door to a whole new level of modernity, for example in the ceramics or paper industries. The cotton industry is a good illustration of this shift from a dispersed, putting-out system of manual biomass-based work, to a centralized process within a factory, housing large-scale steam engines that powered the spinning jennies and were fueled by inert fossil energy. The utterly novel production feature worth emphasizing was the accumulative nature of the innovations and of economic growth. By the mid-nineteenth century, England was the world’s workshop. It had become the richest nation in terms of per capita income, the fastest-growing economy, and the technological paradigm of access to industrialization. The model was a global technological proposal that gave comparative advantages or disadvantages to participating countries regarding education, innovation, natural resources, and other key factors.

13.8 The Subterranean Forest Effect Sieferle (2001) coined the term subterranean forest to refer to the energetic transition process in which the production of goods was decoupled from the goods territorial origins. The relatively low energy density of firewood and charcoal hampered the continued economic growth of primary productivity within British lands. By 1850, the UK’s economic activity had already exceeded the provision of firewood that could be extracted from a forest the size of its territory. In 1900, a forest three times larger than the UK’s surface area was needed to cover biomass energy demand. In Austria, that trend was less pronounced, but despite a slower and late industrialization, the subterranean forest consumed by the Austrian economy surpassed the size of its own territory by the early twentieth century. The metaphor graphically reflects the physical impossibility for economies to sustain incipient industrialization processes without resorting to fossil fuels contained in the subterranean forests. But subterranean forest sourcing did not totally decouple economic activity from the land. The main segments of the energetic system continued to rely on the land in socioeconomic terms during the coal transition phase. In fact, 54% of British energy consumption in 1830 came from biomass (see Table 13.3). First, coal released forests from pressure and provided mechanical energy that decreased the relevance of animal work and of human labor itself. But the steam engine was useful only for mechanical processes requiring big power inputs, so most downstream processes depended on large amounts of human labor. The new steam engines boosted the industrial output, but despite the spectacular increment in productivity, absolute human labor demand also increased. Similar effects could also be observed in transportation. The transport network expansion drastically lowered the costs, increasing the volume of payload and transported passengers. But even at a density of 100 m of railroad per square kilometer, the nineteenth-century railroad network continued to be a cumbersome web of interconnections, as animal traction was still used to ensure transport to and from the

13.8 The Subterranean Forest Effect

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stations. The railroad did not replace carriages but growing economic activity reproduced the demand for draft animals. Therefore, contrary to what the subterranean forest metaphor may suggest, biomass use did not drop inversely proportionally to coal consumption increase. As demonstrated by Iriarte Goñi and Ayuda (2008, 2012) for England and Spain, the consumption of lumber as a raw material for different industrial processes—including railroad ties—continued to grow more than firewood consumption. In fact, the first coal-based wave of industrialization considerably fostered the use of human labor and animal power, and this growing demand had significant consequences: on the one hand, it stimulated demographic growth and urbanization, favoring the demographic transition; on the other, it generated the proletariat as a social group and created favorable conditions for the labor movement to emerge together with its subsequent politicization. Globally, over 50% of the total energy consumed came from fuelwood in 1820. From that year on to 1913, energy consumption multiplied by 4.2 and per capita consumption by 2.5. The population only increased 1.7 times over this period, so energy consumption rose faster than the population. Table 13.4 shows this world trend in energy consumption as estimated by Malanima (2020). According to the data gathered in the table, the ratio between endosomatic and exosomatic consumption was 1–5.6 in 1820. In less than a century, i.e., by 1913, the ratio doubled (from 1 to 11.3). In a recent publication, Christopher Kennedy calculated the energy embodied in the UK economy, in other words, how much coal was embodied in capital assets from 1760 to 1913. According to the author’s estimates, around 1.1 billion tons of coal (34,000 PJ) were used to build the UK’s capital assets between 1760 and 1913 (Kennedy 2020, 893). Almost half of total energy embodied in capital was coal embodied in plant, machinery, and equipment. Table 13.3 Energy consumption in Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain between 1850 and 1900 (%) Sweden Food (human and animals)

The Netherlands

Italy

1850

1900

1850

1900

1850

1900

Spain 1850

1900

25

17

28

15

41

39

50

31 26

Firewood

73

45

13

2

51

34

46

Wind, water