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
Degrowth is a movement that explores another direction for society, one where ecological and social justice become possible, along with more meaningful lives. While there is no single definition for degrowth, this entry attempts to offer some guidance for understanding degrowth in all its diversity. First, degrowth is a variety of challenges to the current status quo. Secondly, degrowth ...
Self-limitation is not about constraining, but about defining collectively as societies our limits. Political ecology ‘has made strong arguments against natural limits’ and is in friction with ‘degrowth’s .. urgency of less’, writes Paul Robbins. Indeed, political ecologists developed the field as a response to 1970s neo-Malthusianism. Nancy Peluso, Lyla Mehta or Betsy Hartmann have exposed ...
Leben im Bauwagen [Life in a Bauwagen (construction trailer)] from Marc Menningmann on Vimeo. During the Degrowth Conference in Leipzig in 2014 the photographer Niko Baumgarten opened his Bauwagen for passers-by. Anyone interested was invited to get some impressions and to look at his picture series "Welcome Home", which deals with alternative ways of housing.
