The Future Earth Pathways Initiative is organizing a new webinar, as part of their Pathways Forum series, which will focus on practical applications of social metabolism. On October 22nd, we will be looking into what it means to weigh cities, how we can use material footprints to assess transition scenarios, and how social metabolic approaches uncover unequal ecological exchanges on a global level.
Classical approaches to economic theory are built on a fatal omission: that of the material cost of the extraction and disposal of resources and the environmental impacts that come with them. When focusing on the relationship between production and consumption, classical economists are forgetting sources, sinks, and the whole infrastructure needed to condition fluxes. Social and socio-ecological metabolic approaches allow us to understand economic processes more comprehensively than an analysis in monetary terms. Understanding the economy as embedded in a web of material and social relationships that are constrained by the boundaries of the environment, such approaches can account for the material footprint of all of these exchanges, from extraction to transformation and disposal.
What can these approaches contribute to social transformations? What are the limitations we have due to ecological limits? What underlying patterns can be identified at different levels of analysis? What scale is appropriate for such methods?
After exploring the foundational concepts of social metabolism and how it can be applied to sustainability issues in our 12th Pathways Forum, we will focus here on its applications at various scales and for various uses. We will be looking into what it means to weigh cities, how we can use material footprints to assess transition scenarios, and how social metabolic approaches uncover unequal ecological exchanges on a global level.
Speakers:
Sabine Barles, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Cristina Madrid López, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Juan Infante Amate, Universidad de Granada
Previous global ‘efforts’ to tackle climate breakdown have failed dramatically, because they have been based on a fundamentally flawed economic paradigm: growth. The concept of growth is an altar at which economists, politicians and businesspeople across the political spectrum have worshipped for decades. Unfortunately, where the planet’s long-term habitability is concerned, it is this obsessi...
Shortly before the start of the Climate Camp and the Degrowth Summer School, we are changing the venue of our camp. We have found an even better place in close proximity to the open cast mine Garzweiler. Further information is available here
By Jamey Ellis Each of us has given without the expectation of receiving. Each of us knows the rewards of doing so. Sometimes the joy felt by those giving can even seem to outweigh that of the ones receiving. We’ve all taken part in a gift exchange, be it birthdays, holidays or anniversaries. But do we actually need to wait until a specific moment to find that joy of giving? Could such giving...
