Metabolic Transitions: A Theory of Socioecological Transformation

Abstract

In the preceding chapters we made a detailed description of the concept of social metabolism which we synthesized in a basic model, we distinguished three main types of social metabolism along history, and we visualized a conceptual framework having as theoretical axis the concepts of entropy, evolution, sustainability, and cooperation (Chap. 12 ). What follows is to build a theory of transformations, which based on what we have said, should be classified as socioecological, given that the transformations derive from the interplay of social and natural mutations. The task is quite ambitious and even premature because, until the present, and due to the novelty of the approach, there is no full depth analysis of the empirical data available, nor enough field studies of metabolic transformations have been made—either for time periods or eras, or for regions and countries—to be compared in order to discover patterns or regularities.