Metabolic Rifts Research Articles

Motofish and Trashfish: Food values and rifts at the agrarian frontier

At the resource frontier of Prey Lang Forest in Cambodia, a new food regime marks multiple rifts in the social fabric. As the forest gives way to rural road development, migrant incursions, and cash cropping, long-term residents lament the paucity of available food. At the same time, new migrants suggest that there is now more food than ever. Based on how food is defined, we find one food, motofish, that emerged as a significant semiotic sign. It is a fish, regardless of species, that is farm-raised and carried from the market to the village by motorbike. It is opposed to a real fish that grows by itself in a river or stream. Long-term Kuy and Khmer residents of the forest see the fish as a sign of destruction and loss, because there are so few fish in the rivers and streams. New migrants see motofish as part of a new abundance coming to this remote corner of the world where there used to be no food. This abundance is facilitated by Cambodia's growing fish farming industry, fed by wild-harvested 'trashfish' and subsidized soy pellets. Motofish is more than a sign of gastropolitics, as it marks a rift in the semiotic landscape through which individual and collective worlds emerge. We use this worldmaking fish to launch a discussion of both the epistemic and metabolic rifts of agrarian transformation and how these rifts are interpreted by different actors in the same landscape: One that recognizes the metabolic rift and the other that carries with them its epistemic cleansing.

Thinking with soils: Can urban farms help us heal metabolic rifts in Aotearoa?

AbstractIn this commentary, we reflect on our work with an urban youth farm where young people (re)connect to the food system. Participating in everyday soil creation and care activities nurtured new relationships with more‐than‐human ecologies and beings at an urban farm called Cultivate Christchurch. In this farm, participants engaged with soils and the process of making and regenerating soil from food waste via composting. We ask whether such activities can begin to help participants thinkwithsoil rather thanaboutit, and to heal the ‘metabolic rift’, the socioecological disconnect from food growing and nutrient cycles.

Chapter Six: Dignity and Misery of Labor

Abstract In the post-socialist and market reform era, the power of the market and the developmental imperatives are creating metabolic rifts between humans and nature, between producers and the land. The film The Piano in a Factory tells a story of the working class trying to rekindle, amid new alienations, past pride and solidarity. Chinese documentary films have proven an effective medium in critiquing ecological rifts and disasters, staging a stringent critique against eco-destructive economic trends. Against a visual landscape dominated by billboards, glamorous stars, and images, documentary filmmakers expose the conditions of alienated labor and the environmental and human costs of unfettered development.

Chapter Eight: Toxic Colonialism, Alienation, and Posthuman Dystopia in Chen Qiufan

Abstract Chen Qiufan's sci-fi novel Waste Tide attests to the dual alienation of nature and humans. Global capitalism, geopolitical conflict, the scramble for natural resources, and rash development have destroyed the rural community, ruined the health of local populations, and eroded the natural environment. Technical advances—artificial intelligence, brain-computer interface, biochemical technologies, and cyborg construction—aggravate metabolic rifts in the human-nature relations, threatening human bodies, regional culture, and local traditions. Driven by profit motives and the desire for power, the advanced technologies are accelerating the alienation of humans from their bodies, from one another, and from nature.

Marx on the Reciprocal Interconnections between the Soil and the Human Body: Ireland and Its Colonialised Metabolic Rifts

AbstractMarx’s writings on Ireland are widely known, but less appreciated is their centrality to the formation of his ecological thought. We show how Marx’s understanding of metabolic rift evolved in line with his writings on colonial Ireland, revealing a concept more holistic than the “classic” metabolic rift of the soil. We recover and extend this concept to the corporeal metabolic rift, showing how both are inherent in Marx’s various writings on Ireland. Whilst the rift of the soil concerns the extraction and consumption of organic soil constituents, the corporeal rift describes processes of depopulation, and their effects on demography and family formation. These “rifted” processes are interconnected such that depleted soil impacts on the health of those who consume food grown on those “rifted” soils. We argue that the presence of these rifts substantiates Ireland’s inability to sustain itself both economically and organically, which determined its persistent post‐Famine underdevelopment.

Dialectical Materialisms, Metabolic Rifts and the Climate Crisis: A Lacanian/Hegelian Perspective

Metabolic rift theory has been accused of assuming an untenable ontological dualism between nature and society. In response, two of its leading advocates, John Bellamy Foster and Andreas Malm, have tried to argue that the approach is not dualist but rather rigorously realist, nonreductively naturalist, and dialectically materialist. According to Foster and Malm, metabolic rift theory is essential because it enables eco-Marxism to make an analytic distinction between nature and society while nevertheless grasping their complex interrelation. From a Lacanian and Hegelian perspective, Foster and Malm are right to preserve the dialectical distinction between nature and society but their respective accounts of this dialectic are insufficiently materialist. Foster falls into a pre-Marxian contemplative materialism. Malm hesitates between his intended realism and Kantian idealism. For metabolic rift theory to be put on a firmer materialist footing, nature must be thought along Lacanian and Hegelian lines as incomplete, thwarted, or shot through with antagonisms out of which emerge the subject and society. To put this in dialectical terms: ontologically there is only nature, out of which society and the subject emerge as an effect of nature's failure to be fully natural.

In what style should we terraform? Geoengineering, planetary gardening and the creation of flourishing ecologies of practice

Reflecting on the myriad practices involved in the production of landscapes and the ways these can result both in local metabolic rifts and aggregate in a planetary carbon rift, this essay offers a model for the interaction of spatial practices on the land, and asks how these confluences of practices might be tuned towards a flourishing planet. In the contemporary Western context, these practices can be broadly organized into manifestations of either modern or counter-modern sensibilities. Linked with these sensibilities, two categories of planet-minded practices are identified that are argued to reflect these two sensibilities, geoengineering and planetary gardening, respectively. The latter, it is argued, is a more imaginative, pluralistic and effective approach to governing climate action. The work of planetary gardening affords landscape architects new opportunities and challenges, but also new allies, human and nonhuman, and techniques for landscape care, old and new.

Soil as a site of struggle: differentiated rifts under different modes of farming in intensive commercial agriculture in urbanizing China

ABSTRACT The metabolic rifts resulted from the rural urban divide and agricultural commodification require remedy with synthetic fertilizers, multiple labour practices and other methods of repair in urbanizing China. The case study in North China shows that the metabolic rift unfolds in an uneven way in different farmer groups with differential labour patterns and livelihood strategies. Simple commodity producers have generally greater potential than capitalized family farmers to ameliorate soil by internalizing external squeeze. This implies contradictory processes and a complex dialectic of destruction and replenishment which makes soil a site of struggle and metabolic rift an increasingly ambivalent notion. This contradiction between intensive ‘modern agriculture’ and its complex material base will ultimately limit the sustainable development of agriculture, which requires a fundamental change of the productivist paradigm and a return to ecological principles.

Data and oil: Metaphor, materiality and metabolic rifts

‘Data is the new oil’ is a phrase that is frequently employed to indicate that digital technologies and data extraction have supplanted fossil fuels and geological extractivism as the central driver of the global economy. While this metaphor has been subject to discursive and ideological critique within media, communication and cultural studies, this article conducts a materialist analysis of the connections between data and oil. While claims that data is the new oil typically assume digital technologies to be clean, renewable and sustainable, an infrastructural approach reveals the vast quantities of oil and other fossil fuels necessary for digital capitalism, therefore repudiating claims that data can grow exponentially with no material costs. Consequently, the article explores how metabolic rifts and degrowth offer productive frameworks for outlining the contours of a sustainable and equitable digital future.

What grows from a pandemic? Toward an abolitionist agroecology

ABSTRACT COVID-19 has exposed racialized vulnerabilities in the dominant agrifood system and granted opportunities to build anew. In this paper, I explore a series of breakdowns, from pandemic ecologies to uncontrolled infection among meatpacking workers. Agroecology has the potential to heal manifold metabolic rifts through which these problems arise. Ecologically, it offers biodiversity-based agriculture to maintain landscape complexity and buffer viral spillovers. Socially, intentional work is needed to center racism in the original accumulations through which metabolic rifts emerge. Specifically, agroecologists can mobilize lessons from abolition, a strategy premised on dismantling exploitative systems through growing relationships and institutions that affirm life.

Sustainability and Metabolic Revolution in the Works of Henri Lefebvre

Humanity’s present social–ecological metabolic configuration is not sustainable, and the need for a radical transformation of society to address its metabolic rifts with the rest of nature is increasingly apparent. The work of French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, one of the few thinkers to recognize the significance of Karl Marx’s theory of metabolic rift prior to its rediscovery at the end of the twentieth century, offers valuable insight into contemporary issues of sustainability. His concepts of the urban revolution, autogestion, the critique of everyday life, and total (or metabolic) revolution all relate directly to the key concerns of sustainability. Lefebvre’s work embodies a vision of radical social–ecological transformation aimed at sustainable human development, in which the human metabolic interchange with the rest of nature is to be placed under substantively rational and cooperative control by all its members, enriching everyday life. Other critical aspects of Lefebvre’s work, such as his famous concept of the production of space, his temporal rhythmanalysis, and his notion of the right to the city, all point to the existence of an open-ended research program directed at the core issues of sustainability in the twenty-first century.

Pathogenic Metabolisms: A Rift and the Zika Virus in Mato Grosso, Brazil

AbstractThe Zika virus in Brazil is often portrayed as emerging in and more severely inflicting the country’s impoverished coastal urban areas. However, the virus also impacted residents in wealthier and more rural areas. To understand how the Zika virus moved to seemingly less likely places, I bring political ecological approaches to health and disease into conversation with scholarly accounts of metabolic rifts. Making an incorporated comparison of the ways in which global finance and the Brazilian state shaped the relationship between urban and rural areas, I demonstrate how the era of modernist urban industrialisation resulted in the creation of more traditional spaces of Zika emergence in the country’s urban impoverished areas and the shift towards neoliberal agricultural extractivism resulted in the creation of seemingly more unusual spaces of Zika emergence in the wealthier less populated interior.

Humans, nature and dialectical materialism

Capitalist relations are the crucial object of social critique due to their innate tendency to accelerate the metabolic rift and alienation, yet, I argue, our focus should stretch beyond capitalist relations. Indeed, both ecocidal and conservationist tendencies have occurred in multiple historical forms of social relations, including socialist societies, for example, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These are phenomena that reiterate the social, rather than purely capitalist relations as the driver of environmental destruction. Metabolic rifts occur due to malfunctioning of the human–human/human–nature relationships and it is the elimination and prevention of that malfunctioning that must be the aim of radical environmental politics and policies, not merely (the necessary) elimination of capitalist relations. This article contributes to the symposium in three complementary ways. First, it critiques the application of dialectical reading of human–nature relations as articulated in the Foster–Moore debate in its own right. Second, it rearticulates that reading through the lens of the dialectical biospheric analytics of late Soviet ecology. And third, it invokes the dialectical thought of Evald Ilyenkov.

Henri Lefebvre’s Marxian ecological critique: recovering a foundational contribution to environmental sociology

ABSTRACTFrench Marxist sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, was one of the foremost social theorists of the twentieth century, celebrated for his critiques of everyday life, urban revolution, and the production of space. We argue here that his mature work also encompassed a theory of ecological crisis, drawing directly on Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. In this conception, the dialectics of nature and society were subject to alienated capitalist accumulation, giving rise to metabolic rifts, epochal crises, and new historical moments of revolutionary praxis aimed at the metamorphosis of everyday life. Lefebvre thus ranks as one of the foundational contributors to environmental sociology, whose rich theoretical analysis offers the possibility of a wider social and ecological synthesis.

Metabolic fractures: How household livelihood practices differentiate agricultural input use in southwest China

As smallholders in the global South engage in new ways with agricultural markets, they change their farming strategies and use of agricultural inputs. In many locales, heavy use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides gives state authorities figurative headaches and farmers actual health hazards and soil degradation. It has been argued that agricultural commercialization and urbanization generate metabolic rifts—gaps in nutrient cycling that impoverish soils and accumulate wastes. Replacement of organic with synthetic inputs is central to this dynamic. We join metabolic rift theory with livelihood analysis to examine how varying livelihood strategies differentiate input use in an area of southwest China where farming is partially commercialized. We draw on household survey data to identify five household clusters with distinct on-farm activity patterns. Regression analyses show that these farming strategies mediate effects of household and community attributes on use of synthetic fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, and organic manure fertilizer. Strategies associated with diverse on-farm crop rotations are associated with greater use of manure. Emergent tree-borne crops are associated with greater pesticide use, but new high-elevation cash crops are linked to less use of both synthetic and organic inputs. These variations have gendered impacts: women's work around compost fertilizer gives way to male-dominated synthetic input management. Our theoretical synthesis and empirical results enrich both livelihoods and metabolic rift scholarship by showing how livelihood strategies mediate political economic forces, generating heterogeneous input use. This study demonstrates the uneven processes through which metabolic rifts tear open and the necessity for soil enhancement efforts to address farmers' variegated practices.

Oil and Calories: Energy Paradigms in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and ‘The Calorie Man’

This article applies an energy lens to Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2010) and ‘The Calorie Man’ (2005), relying on contemporary environmental readings of Marx to explore their unsustainable metabolic relationship with nature. Situating these texts as critical dystopias, this article maps the dystopian and utopian extrapolations Bacigalupi deploys in his future post-oil society, specifically relating to the infrastructure of late energy transport and energy-related commodities. While Bacigalupi utilises ecologically-oriented genetic and industrial technologies in these texts, his work emphasises that technological solutions alone will not be able to heal our unsustainable metabolism of nature. Bacigalupi enters into cultural debates on the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration by cognitively estranging animal and human labour, ecological ships, and genetically modified crops, while simultaneously highlighting the exploitation of both people and the environment in late capitalism. This article also explores the resultant metabolic rifts evident in both texts, drawing specific attention to the destabilised aspects of nature that elude capitalistic control and trouble spaces of production and profit, including genetically modified creatures like cheshires, and more ‘natural’ elements like storms and sea-level rise due to global warming. The article ultimately seeks to prove that Ship Breaker and ‘The Calorie Man’ mobilise a dystopian framework to highlight the imbalanced metabolism of energy production under capitalism, moving the reader towards a more realisable social, as opposed to technological, change.

Metabolic Rifts, Temporal Imperatives, and Geographical Shifts: Logging in the Adirondack Forest in the 1800s

ABSTRACTDistinct land-use patterns can radically transform ecological conditions. In the following historical study, the authors employ Marx’s metabolic approach, nested within a political-economic perspective, to assess the ecological and temporal contradictions that emerged between the capitalist logging industry in New York State and the Adirondack forests in the 1800s. They present the environmental, socioeconomic, and technological changes that accompanied the consolidation and intensification of timber operations, expanding the harvesting of trees and the realm of ecological degradation. The authors highlight how the temporal demands of capital conflict with those of trees in the forest and how the social metabolism of capitalist logging violates the universal metabolism of nature, resulting in distinct ecological rifts and geographical shifts in production.

Metabolic Rifts and Restoration: Agricultural Crises and the Potential of Cuba's Organic, Socialist Approach to Food Production

We employ Karl Marx's metabolic approach—via the concepts of metabolic rift and metabolic restoration—to study the dynamic relationships of interchange associated with distinct agricultural systems. First, we offer an assessment of contemporary capitalist agriculture, including organic agriculture in the United States. We address how the organization of capitalist agriculture inherently generates ecological problems and metabolic rifts in the soil nutrient cycle. Second, we discuss the promise for a socially and ecologically just food system. We examine Cuba's model of organic agriculture, highlighting the potential for metabolic restoration.

The Need to Feed: Urban Metabolic Struggles of Actually Existing Radical Projects

Cities are a locus for struggles over the ability for historically marginalized groups to feed themselves. These stratified spaces represent a distinct expression of the conventional agrifood system: the undernutrition/malnutrition paradox. By investigating the food politics of two organizations – Food Not Bombs in Orlando, FL and People’s Grocery in West Oakland, CA – this article advances scholarship on how activists are working to heal and prevent further individual and social metabolic rifts tied to urban food systems. Particularly regarding food access, strategies to resist and transform the conditions producing experiential and cognitive alienation and the commodification of land and labor often emerge from interstitial spaces. Yet, radical food politics is embedded within ongoing processes of neoliberalization that complicate and oftentimes blunt their transformative potential. In short, this article investigates the potential for and challenges faced by ‘actually existing radical projects’ working to lessen/end hunger and diet-related health problems.

Tearing Down Mountains: Using Spatial and Metabolic Analysis to Investigate the Socio-Ecological Contradictions of Coal Extraction in Appalachia

Mountaintop removal is the most profitable and efficient way to extract the low-sulfur, bituminous coal found in Appalachia. This form of mining involves the blasting and leveling of entire mountain ranges, which dismantles integrated ecosystems and communities. We employ a political-economy perspective in order to assess the uneven capitalist development and socio-ecological contradictions of mountaintop removal. In particular, we use theorization on spatial inequalities to employ and extend a metabolic analysis to coal extraction. This approach reveals how metabolic rifts are created in the nutrient, carbon, and water cycles, producing a myriad of social and ecological problems in the Appalachian region. Mountaintop removal embodies the unsustainable characteristics of an economic system predicated on the constant accumulation of capital.