Humans, of course, sustain at least part of their metabolism not by direct exchanges with the environment (as, for example, in breathing), but via the activities of other humans. This is a matter of social organization. Any attempt to describe this organiza- tion in terms of a biological system – whether it be the organism, or a population in a habitat, or an ecosystem – draws on analogies and runs the risk of being reductionist.2On the other hand, the concept of metabolism in biology has valuable features: It refers to a highly complex self-organizing process which the system seeks to maintain in widely varying environments. This metabolism requires certain material inputs from the environ- ment, and it returns these materials to the environment in a different form.
METABOLISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Metabolism in Social Theory
It was Marx and Engels who first applied the term ‘metabolism’ to society. ‘Metabolism between man and nature’ is used in conjunction with their basic, almost ontological, description of the labor process.
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 . . . [the labor process] is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature imposed condition of human existence. (Marx 1976 [1867], pp.
283, 290)
According to Foster (1999, 2000), and in contrast to earlier interpretations (Schmidt 1971), Marx derived much of his understanding of metabolism from Liebig’s analysis of nutrient depletion of the soil following urbanization.
Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country. (Liebig 1842, as quoted in Marx 1981 [1865], p. 949; similarly in Marx 1976 [1867];
see also Foster 2000, pp. 155f)
According to Foster, the concept of metabolism and ‘metabolic rift’ provided Marx with a materialist way of expressing his notion of alienation from nature that was central to his critique of capitalism from his earliest writings on.
Freedom in this sphere [the realm of natural necessity] can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their own collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power;
accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appro- priate with their human nature. (Marx 1981 [1865], p. 959)
Thus Marx employed the term ‘metabolism’ for the material exchange between man and nature on a fundamental anthropological level, as well as for a critique of the capi- talist mode of production. But the accumulation of capital has nothing to do with the appropriation of the accumulated ‘wealth’ of nature (for example, fossil fuels); appropri- ation as a basis for capital accumulation is always and only appropriation of surplus human labor, as Martinez-Alier (1987, pp. 218–24) pointed out.
The writings of Marx and Engels are not the only reference to societal metabolism from the ‘founding fathers’ of modern social science. Most social scientists of those times were interested in evolutionary theory and its implications for universal progress (for example, Spencer 1862; Morgan 1877). Societal progress and the differences in stages of advance- ment among societies relate to the amount of available energy: societal progress is based on energy surplus. Firstly it enables social growth and thereby social differentiation.
Secondly it provides room for cultural activities beyond basic vital needs (Spencer 1862).
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald argued that minimizing the loss of free energy is the objective of every cultural development. Thus one may deduce that the more efficient the transformation from crude energy into useful energy, the greater a society’s progress (Ostwald 1909). For Ostwald the increase of energy conversion efficiency has the characteristics of a natural law affecting every living organism and every society. He stressed that each society has to be aware of the ‘energetic imperative [Energetische Imperativ]’: ‘Don’t waste energy, use it’ (Ostwald 1912, p. 85). Ostwald was one of the few scientists of his time who was sensitive to the limitations of fossil resources. According to him, a durable (sustainable) economy must use solar energy exclusively. This work pro- vided Max Weber (1909) with the opportunity for an extensive discussion. Weber reacted in quite a contradictory manner. On the one hand he dismissed Ostwald’s approach as
‘grotesque’ (Weber 1909, p. 401) and challenged its core thesis on natural science grounds:
‘In no way would an industrial production be more energy efficient than a manual one – it would only be more cost efficient’ (ibid., pp. 386ff). At the same time he rejected natural science arrogance towards the ‘historical’ sciences and the packaging of value judgments and prejudices in natural science ‘facts’ (ibid., p. 401). On the other hand, although he admitted that energy may possibly be important to sociological concerns (ibid., p. 399; see also Weber (1958 [1904]), he never elaborated such considerations.
Sir Patrick Geddes, co-founder of the British Sociological Society, sought to develop a unified calculus based upon energy and material flows and capable of providing a coher- ent framework for all economic and social activity (Geddes 1997 [1884]). He proclaimed the emancipation from monetary economy towards an economy of energy and resources.
In four lectures at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Geddes developed a type of economic input–output table in physical terms. The first column contains the sources of energy as
well as the sources for materials used. Energy and materials are transformed into prod- ucts in three stages: the extraction of fuels and raw materials; the manufacture; and the transport and exchange. Between each of these stages there occur losses that have to be estimated – the final product might then be surprisingly small in proportion to the overall input (Geddes 1885). Far ahead of his time, Geddes appears to have been the first scien- tist to approach an empirical description of societal metabolism on a macroeconomic level.
Frederick Soddy, another Nobel laureate in chemistry, also turned his attention to the energetics of society, but did so with an important twist: he saw energy as a critical limit- ing factor to society and thus was one of the few social theorists sensitive to the second law of thermodynamics (Soddy 1912, 1922, 1926). He thereby took issue directly with Keynes’ views on long-term economic growth, as appreciated by Daly (1980). In the mid- 1950s, Fred Cottrell (1955) again raised the idea that available energy limits the range of human activities. According to him this is one of the reasons why pervasive social, eco- nomic, political and even psychological change accompanied the transition from a low- energy to a high-energy society.
For the development of sociology as a discipline these more or less sweeping energetic theories of society remained largely irrelevant. Even the influential Chicago-based school of sociology with the promising label ‘human ecology’ (for example, Park 1936) carefully circumvented any references to natural conditions or processes. Before the advent of the environmental movement, modern sociology did not refer to natural parameters as either causes or consequences of human social activities.
Metabolism in Cultural and Ecological Anthropology
The beginnings of cultural anthropology (as in the works of Morgan 1877) were, similar to sociology, marked by evolutionism, that is, the idea of universal historical progress from more ‘natural’, barbarian to more advanced and civilized social conditions. Then cultural anthropology split into a functionalist and a culturalist tradition. The function- alist line, from which contributions to societal metabolism should be expected, did not, as was the case in sociology, turn towards economics and distributional problems, but retained a focus on the society–nature interface. In effect, several conceptual clarifications and rich empirical material on societies’ metabolism can be gained from this research tra- dition.
Leslie White, one of the most prominent anthropologists of his generation and an early representative of the functionalist tradition, rekindled interest in energetics. For White, the vast differences in the types of extant societies could be described as social evolution, and the mechanisms propelling it were energy and technology. ‘Culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita and per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means (i.e. technology) of putting the energy to work is increased’ (White 1949, p. 366). A society’s level of evolution can be assessed mathematically: it is the product of the amount of per capita energy times efficiency of conversion. So this in fact was a metabolic theory of cultural evolution – however unidimensional and disregarding of environmental constraints it may have been.
Julian Steward’s ‘method of cultural ecology’ (Steward 1968) paid a lot of attention to the quality, quantity and distribution of resources within the environment. His approach
can be illustrated from the early comparative study,Tappers and Trappers(Murphy and Steward 1955). Two cases of cultural (and economic) change are presented, in which tribes traditionally living from subsistence hunting and gathering (and some horticulture) com- pletely change their ways of living. The authors analyze it as an irreversible shift from a subsistence economy to dependence upon trade.
Several outright analyses of metabolism have been produced by the ‘neofunctionalists’:
Marvin Harris (1966, 1977), Andrew Vayda and Roy Rappaport (Rappaport 1971; Vayda and Rappaport 1968). The followers of this approach, according to Orlove (1980, p. 240),
‘see the social organization and culture of specific populations as functional adaptations which permit the populations to exploit their environments successfully without exceed- ing their carrying capacity’. The unit which is maintained is a given population rather than a particular social order (as it is with sociological functionalists). In contrast to bio- logical ecology, the neofunctionalists treat adaptation, not as a matter of individuals and their genetic success, but as a matter of cultures. Cultural traits are units which can adapt to environments and which are subject to selection.3In this approach, human populations are believed to function within ecosystems as other populations do, and the interaction between populations with different cultures is put on a level with the interaction of differ- ent species within ecosystems (Vayda and Rappaport 1968).
This approach has been very successful in generating detailed descriptions of food- producing systems (Anderson 1973; Kemp 1971; Netting 1981). In addition to that, it has raised the envy of colleagues by successfully presenting solutions to apparent riddles of bizarre habits and thereby attracting a lot of public attention (Harris 1966, 1977; Harner 1977).
There certainly are some theoretical and methodological problems in neofunctionalism which need to be discussed in greater detail. They entail the difficulty of specifying a unit of analysis: a local population? A culture? This is related to the difficulty of specifying the process of change, and to the difficulty of locating intercultural (or inter-society) interac- tions in this framework. These scientific traditions, however, have prepared cultural anthropologists to be among the first social scientists actively participating in the later dis- cussion of environmental problems of industrial metabolism.
Metabolism in Social Geography and Geology
In 1955 a total of 70 participants from all over the world and from a great variety of dis- ciplines convened in Princeton, New Jersey, for a remarkable conference: ‘Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth’. The conference was financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The geographer Carl O. Sauer, the zoologist Marston Bates and the urban planner Lewis Mumford presided over the sessions. The papers and discussions were published in a 1200-page compendium (Thomas 1956a) that perhaps documents the world’s first high-level interdisciplinary panel on environmental problems of human development.
The title of the conference honored George Perkins Marsh, who published the book, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, in 1864, and is considered the father of social geography. For Marsh, man was a dynamic force, often irrational in creating a danger to himself by destroying his base of subsistence. The largest chapter ofMan and Nature, entitled ‘The Woods’, advocated the recreation of forests in
the mid-latitudes. He was not, as the participants of the conference note, concerned about the exhaustion of mineral resources. He looked upon mining rather from an aesthetic point of view, considering it ‘an injury to the earth’ (Thomas 1956b, p. xxix).
The issue of possible exhaustion of mineral resources was taken up by the Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler in his book Man and the Earth(1905). In considering longer time series, he noted that ‘since the coming of the Iron Age’ the consumption of mineral resources had increased to a frightening degree. In 1600 only very few substances (mostly precious stones) had been looked for underground. But, at the turn of the 20th century, there were several hundred substances from underground sources being used by man, of essential importance being iron and copper. Shaler was concerned with the limits of the resource base.
This shift of focus from Marsh (1973 [1864]) to Shaler (1905) reflects the change in society’s metabolism from an agrarian mode of production (where scarcity of food pro- motes the extension of agricultural land at the expense of forests) to an industrial one, where vital ‘nutrients’ are drawn from subterrestrial sinks that one day will be exhausted.
In Thomas (1956a) the concern with a limited mineral base for an explosively rising demand for minerals is even more obvious. Such a ‘materials flow’ focus seems to have been strongly supported by wartime experiences and institutions: Samuel H.J. Ordway quoted data from Paley (1952) – an excellent source for longer time series of materials consumption – worrying about the ‘soaring demand’ for materials.4 The depletion of national resources becomes part of a global concern: ‘If all the nations of the world should acquire the same standard of living as our own, the resulting world need for mate- rials would be six times present consumption’ (Ordway 1956, p. 988). Ordway advanced his ‘theory of the limit of growth’, based on two premises:
1. Levels of human living are constantly rising with mounting use of natural resources. 2.
Despite technological progress we are spending each year more resource capital than is created.
The theory follows: If this cycle continues long enough, basic resources will come into such short supply that rising costs will make their use in additional production unprofitable, industrial expansion will cease, and we shall have reached the limit of growth. (Ordway 1956, p. 992) It is interesting to note that even the idea of materials’ consumption growing less than GDP because of increases in efficiency was taken up: in its projections for 1975 the Paley Report expected US GDP to double compared to 1950, but the materials input necessary for this to rise by only 50–60 per cent (data from Ordway 1956, p. 989).
McLaughlin, otherwise more optimistic than Ordway, stated in the same volume that by 1950 for every major industrial power the consumption of metals and minerals had exceeded the quantity which could be provided from domestic sources (McLaughlin 1956, p. 860).
Similarly, the 1955 conference participants discussed the chances of severe shortages in future energy supply. Eugene E. Ayres, speaking of ‘the age of fossil fuels’, and Charles A. Scarlott, treating ‘limitations to energy use’, emphasized the limits inherent to using given geological stocks. Ayres, elaborating on fossil fuels since the first uses of coal by the Chinese about two thousand years ago, was very skeptical about geologists’ estimates (then) of the earth’s reserves, suspecting them of being vastly understated. He neverthe- less concluded: ‘In a practical sense, fossil fuels, after this century, will cease to exist except as raw materials for chemical synthesis’ (Ayres 1956, p. 380). Scarlott (1956) demonstrated
the diversification of energy uses and the accompanying rise in demand and then elab- orated on a possible future of solar energy utilization and nuclear fusion as sources of energy.
In the 1955 conference materials flow considerations were mainly confined to the input side of societal metabolism. The overall systemic consideration that the mobilization of vast amounts of matter from geological sinks (for example, minerals and fossil energy car- riers) into a materially closed system such as the biosphere would change parameters of atmospheric, oceanic and soil chemistry on a global level does not appear there. Still, many contributions to this conference document the transformations of local and regional natural environments by human activity, both historical and current. These con- cerns were also explicitly addressed in The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years(Turner et al.1990), repre- senting the contemporary state of the art of social geography.
The global environmental change issue was taken up in a special issue of Scientific Americanin September 1970, devoted to the biosphere. One year later,Scientific American edited an issue on energy and socioeconomic energy metabolism. In 1969 the German geographer Neef explicitly talked about the ‘metabolism between society and nature’ as a core problem of geography (Neef 1969). But this already belongs to the post-1968 cultu- ral revolution of environmentalism we will treat next.