Energy–Landscape Integrated Analysis: A proposal for measuring complexity in internal agroecosystem processes (Barcelona Metropolitan Region, 1860–2000)

Landscape Agroecology. The Dysfunctionalities of Industrial Agriculture and the Loss of the Circular Bioeconomy in the Barcelona Region, 1956–2009

“…We use the flow-fund approach, as proposed by Georgescu-Roegen [32] and developed, adopting the concept of social metabolism, by [9,33]. According to Gerber and Scheidel [34], analysis of social metabolism is fundamental towards substantive economics and the approach by [10,11]-which we undertake in this paper-represents an interdisciplinary development that combines it with other methods such as landscape ecology.…”

“…The general hypothesis is that the land-cost of sustainability [1], which is an environmentally extended example of the social costs of business enterprise [8], is not being recognized in current policies and market dynamics. Our specific hypothesis is that sustainability can be assessed by the use of flow-fund models and the related energy and landscape efficiency indicators [9][10][11]. In particular, when the modelled agro-industrial practices and land uses break certain flow-fund relationships between the agricultural flows and the funds from which they originate, multiple losses in ecosystem services, in energy and in landscape efficiency, are observed.…”

“…The current state of research in landscape agroecology is set in the outcomes of the Sustainable Farm Systems research project, which has focused on an innovative development of Energy Return on Investment (EROI) analysis [6,[11][12][13] also merging it with MuSIASEM [14], on nutrient cycles [15,16] and on the original development of Energy-Landscape Integrated Analysis [10,17,18], which in turn draw from previous work on social metabolism [9,19,20] and EROI analysis [21]. As well, these novel methods applied in landscape agroecology can bridge with and contribute to the land sharing/sparing debate [22], which is still a controversial issue [23,24].…”

Agroecosystem energy transitions in the old and new worlds: trajectories and determinants at the regional scale

“…(3) Biomass reused includes local reinvestments into the agroecosystems, such as livestock feed and litter, local seeds, and stubble burned or buried in soils (Guzmán and González de Molina 2015;Tello et al 2016). Recycling biomass flows within the agroecosystem entails different environmental impacts than using external inputs and may, below a certain level, even contribute to ecosystem complexity (Marull et al 2016). This energy flow is not considered in most studies accounting for agroecosystem energy efficiencies and offers new insights on the transformation of agroecosystems in the course of industrialization.…”

Manuel Sacristán at the Onset of Ecological Marxism after Stalinism

“…In 1924 Vernadsky (2007, 212) praised it precisely because of its having stressed the thermodynamic differences between living and inert matter, and contributing to the foundations of the energetics of life. Podolinsky's idea of the capacity of human labor to temporarily increase non-dissipative energy storage in the biosphere is particularly pertinent to understanding agro-ecosystems (Ho and Ulanowicz 2005;Marull et al 2016). Indeed, energy analysis is a subject that still remains methodologically debated and partially unsolved in ecological economics 130 years later (Giampietro, Mayumi, and Sorman 2012;González de Molina and Toledo 2014;Tello et al 2016).…”