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
Growth-critical authors and advocates of a post-growth society are often criticized on the grounds that some of their arguments appear open to appropriation by authoritarian nationalist and nativist racist forces. As such objections are often made in a polemical and overly generalised manner, often ultimately aiming to delegitimize growth-critical ideas as a whole, those being criticised often ...
By Ted Trainer The Transition Towns movement, and related initiatives such as Eco-village, Permaculture and Voluntary Simplicity movements, are taking the first steps that must be taken if we are to solve global sustainability and justice problems. But I want to argue that unless they (eventually) undertake significant change in their focus and goals they will [...]
Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition Movement. We interviewed him for the Stream towards Degrowth during the launch of his new Book “The Power of just doing Stuff - How local Action can change the World” in Bielefeld. Watch the video to hear more about the connections and differences between the Degrowth and the Transition Movement.
