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subterranean stock of fossil fuels, were the energy limits towards modern economic
growth
nally removed. A structural change in the whole resource base of a pre-
industrial organic economy was required.
As Joan Mart
nez Alier and Marina Fisher-Kowalski have reminded us, the
history of these basic ideas on the socio-metabolic foundations of long-term eco-
nomic growth is quite long,
33
extending back from Georgescu-Roegen through
Frederick Soddy, Wilhelm Ostwald, Otto Neurath, Stanley Jevons, Leopold
Pfaundler, Edward Sacher and Sergei Podolinski, all the way to Karl Marx who was
the
í
.
34
However, until very
recently these ecological-economic insights have been ignored by a mainstream
approach to either Liberal or Marxian economics which placed all the limits or
stimulus for modern economic growth almost exclusively in institutional settings.
Backwardness became the standard answer to the question as to why some regions
lagged behind the world economic growth race.
The socio-metabolic approach can be very helpful to overcome this backward-
ness paradigm, and also in understanding why economic historians must deal with
three different types of economic growth, labelled by Jan De Vries as
rst social scientist to coin the term
'
social metabolism
'
'
Malthusian
'
,
'
(in the terminology previously suggested by
William Parker).
35
Although Adam Smith shared the same pessimistic outlook as
Malthus and Ricardo for long-term economic growth based on an organic resource
base, the term
'
Smithian
'
can be used to describe the type of growth that exploited
all existing possibilities, stimulating growth through a better allocation of available
organic resources, thus temporarily escaping the
Smithian
'
and
'
Schumpeterian
'
'
Malthusian fate
'
and giving rise
to different
'
advanced organic economies
'
. What has been called a
'
consumer
revolution
in some European or Asian countries
during the 17th and 18th centuries may be understood from this point of view.
36
The term
'
or an
'
industrious revolution
'
coined by Wrigley could also be used to
characterize the different paths taken by agrarian development in a wider range of
European regions and countries during the 18 and 19th centuries, before the full
industrialization of agriculture under the so-called
'
advanced organic economy
'
'
green revolution
'
paradigm
became widespread from the 1950s onwards.
37
This approach also seeks to relate
growth with the increasing
burning of fossil fuels during the onset of the Industrial Revolution
'
Schumpeterian
'
—
Sieferle
'
s
.
38
This entailed the introduction of a completely new socio-metabolic
regime, with a different energy and material
'
hidden forest
'
ow exchange with ecosystems based
on other types of land usage. But during this
fl
rst stage of industrialization, the
agricultural sector remained basically organic, at least until what Jan Luiten van
33
Mart
í
nez Alier (
1990
) and Fisher-Kowalski (
1998
).
34
n(
1992
) and Foster (
2000
).
35
De Vries (
2001
).
36
De Vries (
2008a
) and Sugihara (
2003
).
37
Kjaergaard (
1994
) and Krausmann et al. (
2008
).
38
Sacrist
á
Sieferle (
2001
).
