Metabolic rift

Soil exhaustion and agricultural revolutions Marx's writings on metabolism were developed during England's "second" agricultural revolution (1815–1880), a period which was characterized by the development of soil chemistry and the growth of the use of chemical fertilizer. Foster argues that Liebig's work became more critical of capitalist agriculture as time went on. From the standpoint of nutrient cycling, the socio-economic relationship between rural and urban areas was self-evidently contradictory, hindering the possibility of sustainability: If it were practicable to collect, with the least loss, all the solid and fluid excrements of the inhabitants of the town, and return to each farmer the portion arising from produce originally supplied by him to the town, the productiveness of the land might be maintained almost unimpaired for ages to come, and the existing store of mineral elements in every fertile field would be amply sufficient for the wants of increasing populations. Human labor and nature Marx rooted his theory of social-ecological metabolism in Liebig's analysis but connected it to his understanding of the labor process. In Capital, Marx integrated his materialist conception of nature with his materialist conception of history. Fertility, Marx argued, was not a natural quality of the soil, but was rather bound up with the social relations of the time. By conceptualizing the complex, interdependent processes of material exchange and regulatory actions that link human society with non-human nature as "metabolic relations," Marx allowed these processes to be both "nature-imposed conditions" and subject to human agency, a dynamic largely missed, according to Foster, by the reduction of ecological questions to issues of value. == Writers since Marx ==

The central contribution of the metabolic rift perspective is to locate socio-ecological contradictions internal to the development of capitalism. Later socialists expanded upon Marx's ideas, including Nikolai Bukharin in Historical Materialism (1921) and Karl Kautsky in The Agrarian Question (1899), which developed questions of the exploitation of the countryside by the town and the "fertilizer treadmill" that resulted from metabolic rift. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have drawn on Marx's metabolic approach and the concept of metabolic rift in analyzing the relation of society to the rest of nature. With increasing amounts of carbon dioxide being released into the environment from capitalist production, the theory of a carbon rift has also emerged. The metabolic rift is characterized in different ways by historical materialists. For Jason W. Moore, the distinction between social and natural systems is empirically false and theoretically arbitrary; following a different reading of Marx, Moore views metabolisms as relations of human and extra-human natures. In this view, capitalism's metabolic rift unfolds through the town-country division of labor, itself a "bundle" of relations between humans and the rest of nature. Moore sees it as constitutive of the endless accumulation of capital. Moore's perspective, although also rooted in historical materialism, produces a widely divergent view from that of Foster and others about what makes ecological crisis and how it relates to capital accumulation. Nine months after Foster's groundbreaking article appeared, Moore argued that the origins of the metabolic rift were not found in the 19th century but in the rise of capitalism during the "long" 16th century. The metabolic rift was not a consequence of industrial agriculture but capitalist relations pivoting on the law of value. Moore consequently focuses attention on the grand movements of primitive accumulation, colonialism, and the globalization of town-country relations that characterized early modern capitalism. There were, in this view, not one but many metabolic rifts; every great phase of capitalist development organized nature in new ways, each one with its own metabolic rift. In place of agricultural revolutions, Moore emphasizes recurrent agro-ecological revolutions, assigned the historical task of providing cheap food and cheap labor, in the history of capitalism, an interpretation that extends the analysis to the food crises of the early 21st century. == Environmental contradiction under capitalism ==

Town and country Up until the 16th or 17th century, cities' metabolic dependency upon surrounding countryside (for resources, etc.), coupled with the technological limitations to production and extraction, prevented extensive urbanization. Early urban centers were bioregionally defined, and had relatively light "footprints," recycling city nightsoils back into the surrounding areas. Future socialist society The concept of metabolic rift captures "the material estrangement of human beings within capitalist society from the natural conditions which formed the basis for their existence." == 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, while Moore uses the concept to discuss the broader concerns of global environmental crises and the viability of capitalism itself. A social metabolism approach has become "one of the most important paradigms for the empirical analysis of the society-nature-interaction across various disciplines," Sustainable cities In city planning policy circles, there has been a recent movement toward urban sustainability. Hodson and Marvin discuss a "new eco-urbanism" that seeks to integrate environment and infrastructure, "bundling" architecture, ecology and technology in order to "internalize" energy, water, food, waste and other material flows. Unlike previous efforts to integrate nature into the city, which, according to Harvey, were primarily aesthetic and bourgeois in nature, This takes place within actually existing conditions of neoliberalization, suggesting that healing metabolic rifts will be a process that requires both social and ecological transformations. However, critics link these efforts to "managerial environmentalism," and worry that eco-urbanism too closely falls into an "urban ecological security" approach, echoing Mike Davis' analysis of securitization and fortress urbanism. A Marxist critique might also question the feasibility of sustainable cities within the context of a global capitalist system. == See also ==