Transcending the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist World-Ecology (original) (raw)
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Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective
Organization & Environment, 2000
This article proposes a new theoretical framework to study the dialectic of capital and nature over the longue duree of world capitalism. The author proposes that today's global ecological crisis has its roots in the transition to capitalism during the long sixteenth century. The emergence of capitalism marked not only a decisive shift in the arenas of politics, economy, and society, but a fundamental reorganization of world ecology, characterized by a "metabolic rift," a progressively deepening rupture in the nutrient cycling between the country and the city. Building upon the historical political economy of Marx, Foster, Arrighi, and Wallerstein, the author proposes a new research agenda organized around the concept of systemic cycles of agro-ecological transformation. This agenda aims at discerning the ways in which capitalism's relationship to nature developed discontinuously over time as recurrent ecological crises have formed a decisive moment of world capitalist crisis, forcing successive waves of restructuring over long historical time..
John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues have recently argued that the project of ecosocialism should be understood in terms of a “prefigurative” and “first stage” of red-green thinkers whose insights have largely been transcended by their own work on the metabolic rift. Rift scholars have further argued that “second-stage” ecosocialists should push back against “idealist” deviations occurring amongst historical materialists concerned with the production of nature, socionatures and “hybridity,” as well as more or less all engagements with literatures on eco-technological transitions, industrial ecology and the like, which are implicated in supporting “green capitalism.” This paper critically evaluates these claims. In each case, it is argued, rift scholarship is narrowing the possibilities for interdisciplinary engagement and for thinking in dynamic and reconstructive terms about red-green futures. It is our sense that an ecosocialist vision of just transitions has to be conceptualized as a diverse, dynamic, iterative and always incomplete affair. Anthropocene ecosocialisms are inevitably going to involve co-producing, making and remaking hybrid social ecologies on an irreducibly restless, turbulent and warming planet. We argue that what follows from this is the necessity to both critique and recuperate the better insights of hybrid political ecology and ecological modernities.
Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital
This article draws out the contradictions in the relationship between capitalism as a mode of production and our contemporary efforts to deal with the breaching of planetary boundaries or the ecological crisis. First, it looks at the theoretical developments in understanding the source of our current ecological crisis. The historical establishment of a metabolic rift and the shifts engendered as solutions to this problem within capitalism are discussed. Then, it focuses on the problem of perception of the ecological crisis in the contemporary world. An unequal world cannot be a sustainable world as standpoint influences even the perception of an impending precipice, and consequently any form of collective action. Given this inability to understand the crisis, the solutions that emerge are reductive and tend to spatially, temporally or socially shift the problem rather than resolve it. Finally, it argues that environmentalism—or efforts to ‘save the planet’—needs to be understood based on the understanding of the problem rather than on social location of its members.
Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology
American Journal of Sociology, 1999
This article addresses a paradox: on the one hand, environmental sociology, as currently developed, is closely associated with the thesis that the classical sociological tradition is devoid of systematic insights into environmental problems; on the other hand, evidence of crucial classical contributions in this area, particularly in Marx, but also in Weber, Durkheim, and others, is too abundant to be convincingly denied. The nature of this paradox, its origins, and the means of transcending it are illustrated primarily through an analysis of Marx's theory of metabolic rift, which, it is contended, offers important classical foundations for environmental sociology. CLASSICAL BARRIERS TO ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY In recent decades, we have witnessed a significant transformation in social thought as various disciplines have sought to incorporate ecological awareness into their core paradigms in response to the challenge raised by environmentalism and by what is now widely perceived as a global ecological crisis. This transformation has involved a twofold process of rejecting much of previous thought as ecologically unsound, together with an attempt to build on the past, where possible. This can be seen as occurring with unequal degrees of success in the various disciplines. Geography, with its long history of focusing on the development of the natural landscape and on biogeography (see Sauer 1963), was the social science that adapted most easily to growing environmental concerns.
The ecological rift – capitalism's war on the Earth
Environmental Politics, 2012
Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision-if we don't alter course.
Has (even Marxist) political ecology really transcended the metabolic rift?
Geoforum, 2018
Marx's concept of metabolic rift has emerged as an important category in ecological Marxism, but has received relatively little attention in political ecology. This appears to reflect a combination of confusion regarding the conceptual basis of metabolic rift and theoretical antagonisms between its materialist dialectic and dominant post-humanist approaches in hybridist political ecology. In this essay, we argue that stronger engagement with metabolic-rift scholarship in political ecology could strengthen work in both areas. We briefly outline the possibilities for such engagement by first clarifying some of the conceptual confusion regarding the metabolic rift and its material-dialectical approach to human alienation and the socio-ecological contradictions and crises of capital accumulation and human development within capitalism. We then briefly discuss some of the key points of contention between this approach and dominant hybridist paradigms in political ecology. We conclude that, despite these conflicts, the concept of metabolic rift could provide essential critical contributions to political ecology's explanatory and emancipatory efforts.
Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method (final)
In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This essay pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking, and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread – and reasonable – sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized – but inadequately internalized – understanding that humans are part of nature.
Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift: Classical foundations for environmental sociology
1999
This article addresses a paradox: on the one hand, environmental sociology, as currently developed, is closely associated with the thesis that the classical sociological tradition is devoid of systematic in-sights into environmental problems; on the other hand, evidence of crucial classical contributions in this area, particularly in Marx, but also in Weber, Durkheim, and others, is too abundant to be convinc-ingly denied. The nature of this paradox, its origins, and the means of transcending it are illustrated primarily through an analysis of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, which, it is contended, offers impor-tant classical foundations for environmental sociology.
Marx ' s Theory of Metabolic Rift : Classical Foundations for Environmental So ciologyl
2007
This article addresses a paradox: on the one hand, environmental sociology, as currently developed, is closely associated with the thesis that the classical sociological tradition is devoid of systematic insights into environmental problems; on the other hand, evidence of crucial classical contributions in this area, particularly in Marx, but also in Weber, Durkheim, and others, is too abundant to be convincingly denied. The nature of this paradox, its origins, and the means of transcending it are illustrated primarily through an analysis of Marx's theory of metabolic rift, which, it is contended, offers important classical foundations for environmental sociology.