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
In a recent post, a group of authors expressed their concerns that degrowth risks being lost in pluralism and argued for the need to co-produce a mix of context-sensitive strategies. I believe this re-stirring of the debate on strategy in the degrowth movement is both relevant and timely. While I agree with many of the authors’ concerns, and proposals, I would here like to propose a somewhat di...
Küche für Alle [Kitchen for all] from Marc Menningmann on Vimeo. Next to discussing and presenting, people also ate and cooked on the Degrowth Conference which took place in Leipzig last year. The "Kitchen for all" is a group of People's kitchens which cooked for and with the conference participants to provide food every lunch and dinner.
Deschooling as a Path to Social-Ecological Transformation By Fabian Scheidler and Andrea Vetter "Deschooling is at the root of any movement for human liberation", wrote Ivan Illich, today almost forgotten but once a world-renowned critical thinker, in 1971. With books like "Deschooling Society" and "Energy and Equity” he inspired in the 1970s both the emerging environmental movement and the r...
