Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
2. What happened when these socio-ecological agrarian regimes started to change?
Which were the major drivers of change? Which pressures upon the environ-
ment gained momentum with industrialization and urbanization based on
burning cheap fossil fuels, and which pressures receded? Which changes within
natural systems could be observed during the socio-ecological transitions?
3. How much did the course of the socio-ecological transitions depend on the
historical context, either local, regional or worldwide? Do common patterns
exist?
4. How does the interplay between different spatial scales and levels of society
work and interact with nature? Does globalization matter?
This approach has led to detailed quantitative studies of the energy and bio-
physical
ows that link human economic activities with their ecological founda-
tions, opening new ways of accounting: Material and Energy Flow Analysis
(MEFA), the reconstruction of energy balances of economic systems and sectors,
the estimation of energy returns on energy inputs (EROI), the study of nutrient and
water cycles, the extent of the human appropriation of the ecological net primary
production (HANPP) or the historical evolution of ecological footprints. These have
established themselves as leading lines in current research.
17
There have also been
attempts within the European Union to standardize these methods of ecological-
economic accounting in established systems of National Accounts (EUROSTAT
2001).
As Fridolin Krausmann, Heinz Shandl and Rolf Peter Sieferle have written,
“
In
this way, industrialization appears as a process of continuous increases in labour
productivity and energy ef
fl
ciency as well as growing industrial output resulting in
continuous economic growth. Besides impelling social change and creating material
wealth it has fundamentally changed the human domination of the Earth
s eco-
systems and brought along a plethora of environmental problems. A major claim of
ecological economics is to broaden our understanding of economic processes and
how they are embedded in nature by taking a biophysical perspective which con-
ceptualizes economic processes also as natural processes in the sense that they can
be seen as biological, physical and chemical processes. [
'
] In this context, a
historical understanding of the long-term development of society-nature interac-
tions is of vital importance. [
…
] We understand the industrialization process as a
qualitative transition which transforms the agrarian socio-ecological regime into an
industrial regime thereby establishing a distinct and fundamentally new pattern of
society-nature interaction and material and energy use
…
.
18
The following scheme (Fig.
2.4
) summarizes the key features of the two last main
socio-ecological transitions from a solar land-based socio-metabolic regime (a)
towards the coal stage of industrialization, combined with a set of
”
'
advanced organic
'
agricultures
which optimised traditional low-input agrarian systems (b); and then to
a new stage of the oil and electricity driven technologies of the second Industrial
17
Martinez-Alier (
2011
) and Krausmann et al. (
2012
).
18
Krausmann et al. (
2008
), pp. 187
-
188.
