Metabolic Rift - Metabolism and Environmental Governance

Metabolism and Environmental Governance

Despite Marx’s assertion that a concept of ecological sustainability was “of very limited practical relevance to capitalist society,” as it was incapable of applying rational scientific methods and social planning due to the pressures of competition, the theory of metabolic rift may be seen as relevant to, if not explicitly invoked in, many contemporary debates and policy directions of environmental governance.

There is a rapidly growing body of literature on social-ecological metabolism. While originally limited to questions of soil fertility—essentially a critique of capitalist agriculture—the concept of metabolic rift has since been taken up in numerous fields and its scope expanded. For example, Clausen and Clark (2005) have extended the use of metabolic rift to marine ecology, while Moore (2000) uses the concept to discuss the broader concerns of global environmental crises and the viability of capitalism itself. Fischer-Kowalski (1998) discusses the application of "the biological concept of metabolism to social systems," tracing it through several contributing scientific traditions, including biology, ecology, social theory, cultural anthropology, and social geography. A social metabolism approach has become "one of the most important paradigms for the empirical analysis of the society-nature-interaction across various disciplines," particularly in the fields of industrial metabolism and material flow analysis.