Changes in the United Kingdom's natural relations in terms of society's metabolism and land-use from 1850 to the present day

Abstract

In this paper we present our understanding of how society and nature have interacted in the course of history in terms of society's metabolic interchange with the biophysical environment. Presenting a theoretical model, we begin by focusing on the interface between society and nature (society's natural relations) as conceptualized by the idea of metabolism, which draws upon Marxist theory complemented by a systems approach. The concept of metabolism portrays society as a system, which has to establish and maintain a permanent throughput of energy and matter to produce and maintain society's material components. The amount of resource flow is operationalized by using material and energy flow accounting methods. Empirically, these methods are applied to the UK's economy in a time-series approach from 1850 to the present day. We discuss different aggregates of inputs such as domestic material extraction, foreign trade of materials, energy input and, additionally, give an account of land-use change. Obviously, these changing natural relations are linked to socio-economic activities. Hence, we make a first attempt to discuss different periods of socio-economic development by drawing from a regulation approach and try to link them to physical indicators such as direct material and energy input and domestic material consumption (DMC). Thereby, we hope to contribute to a historical understanding of socio-economically driven environmental change within the framework of ecological economics.