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Revolution that fuelled mass production and consumption, together with a reversal
in the traditional relationship between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors
(c), by means of massive fossil energy subsidies for all economic activities and
transport which fostered a boom in worldwide trade.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of this socio-metabolic approach is that it
establishes a clear and accountable link between local and regional environmental
problems with regards to the input side of nature-society interaction, based on
resource-use together with related land-use changes; and from the output side, with
local and global environmental problems derived from polluting emissions along
the economic throughput chains. As Krausmann, Schandl and Sieferle have put it,
“
Taking a biophysical view it becomes evident that it will not be possible to
accomplish global industrialization without an alternative pathway for the meta-
bolic transition. Scarcity of oil and gas will increasingly become an issue and
declining energy prices, a major precondition for the industrialization of the
industrial core, are unlikely to prevail for latecomers. Before energy scarcity and
rising energy prices become a major problem, the world is faced with rising
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contributing to global warming and destabi-
lization of the world climatic system to a large and unknown extent. [
] In the light
of the historical process, the need for a new, sustainable, industrial socio-ecological
regime with lower per capita material and energy turnover and a lower share of non-
renewable energy and materials becomes a vital need for the global system
…
.
19
One of the aims of this broader ecological-economic perspective is to explore the
connections, on all levels, between value-added
”
fl
ows in the market sphere, and
the biophysical and energy
ows or climatic suitability that sustain them from their
ecological base. Measuring the energy and material dimensions of what GDP
growth actually means for natural systems can provide us with new answers to
previous questions regarding what triggers economic growth, what growth in fact
involves, and what consequences it has for both social and natural environments.
This standpoint connects the understanding of economic growth with the new
studies on Global Warming and Climate Change which, during the last thirty years,
have enhanced the focus on climate history. The IPCC concern about Global
Warming has led to a development of new indicators and methodologies that have
had a dramatic impact on all areas of knowledge, especially in a long-term historical
perspective. Many recent studies have broadened the methodological possibilities
open to climate historians, aimed at understanding the evolution of climate and its
impacts on past and present times.
20
Moreover, the analysis of biophysical
fl
ows linking economic performance with
the carrying capacity of ecosystems necessarily leads to the study of changes in
terrestrial land covers by human land-uses. Together with pollution and bio-invasions,
this changing face of the Earth by human landscapes is precisely the main origin of
the crisis of biodiversity at present. Putting together biophysical
fl
fl
ows moved by
19
Krausmann et al. (
2008
), p. 199.
20
Br
á
zdil et al. (
2005
) and Costanza et al. (
2007a
).
