The Social Metabolism

Manuel González de Molina is Professor of Environmental History. Coordinator of the Agroecosystems History Laboratory. His work focuses on the contemporary rural world, the biophysical analysis of agroecosystems and food systems and the design of public policies from an agroecological point of view. He has directed a Master Degree Program on Agroecology at International University of Andalusia from 1996 to the present. Has been president of the Spanish Society for Agrarian History from 2016 to 2023. He is member of the editorial board of the ISI-refereed journals Historia Agraria [Agrarian History Review], Anthropoce, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, and Sustainability. Vice-president of the Spanish Society for Organic Agriculture (SEAE) since 2006 until 2014. Minister of the Department of Organic Agriculture of the Andalusia Government (Spain) from 2004 until 2007. Author of over a hundred papers published in high impact journals and several books, among the most recent: Energy in Agroecosystems: A Tool for Assessing Sustainability (CRC Press, USA, 2017);  Political Agroecology: Advancing the Transition to Sustainable Food Systems (CRC Press, 2019); The Social Metabolism of Spanish Agriculture, 1900-2008. The Mediterranean way towards Industrialization (Springer, 2020).
Víctor Manuel Toledo is a Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas y Sustentabilidad (UNAM, México). He is biologist and has both a master's degree and a doctorate from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and has published 200 professional papers and 20 books. He is a researcher in Ecology at the UNAM and a visiting professor at the International University of Andalucía, Spain.[2] In 2011 he founded the Red Temática del Consejo Nacional del Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Thematic Network of the National Council of the National Council of Science and Technology, Conayct). He has worked in nine different Mexican universities, the University of California, Berkeley; in addition to universities in Venezuela, Cuba, Spain, Ecuador, and Brazil. He was granted the Premio Nacional Medio Ambiente (1985), the Premio Mérito Ecológico from the governor of the State of Mexico (1989), and the Luis Elizondo Prize of the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (2000). He has served as Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) of Mexico from May 27, 2019 to September 2, 2020.

Foreword.- Note to the Second Edition.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Environmental history as sustainability science.- 3. Social metabolism: origins, history, approaches and main publications.- 4. A non-cybernetic theory of social metabolism.- 5. The basic model.- 6. Social metabolism at the local scale.- 7. Social metabolism at the regional scale.- 8. Social metabolism at the national scale.- 9. Global metabolism.- 10. The cinegetic or extractive mode of social metabolism.- 11. The organic metabolism.- 12. The industrial metabolism.- 13. Metabolic transitions: a theory of socioecological transformation.- 14. Epilogue: metabolisms, entropy and sustainable society.- References.