Metabolic rift or metabolic shift? dialectics, nature, and the world-historical method

Abstract

In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism's troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread-and reasonable-sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized-but inadequately internalized-understanding that humans are part of nature.Dialectics does not consider fixed artifacts, formations and objects, the entire complex of both the material world of things and that of ideas…, to be something original and autonomous. It does not accept them in their ready-made form, but subjects them to investigation in which the reified forms of the objective and the ideal worlds dissolve, [and] lose their fixed and natural character.

How International Relations Scholars Explain the World: A World-Ecological Critique

“…According to Moore (2017b), capitalism is a system that doesn't develop itself parallel to nature, but through nature -it is a system of organizing nature. He also states that only by abandoning the Cartesian dualism of Society + Nature and embracing new dialectical categories, like Humanity-in-Nature and Nature-in-Humanity, we can truly understand the ongoing process of multilayered transformation of nature in order to create power and capital (Moore, 2015).…”

Relocating obesity with multiauthor ethnography

“…In contrast, critical accounts by anthropologists and geographers Gálvez (2018), Solomon (2016), Yates-Doerr (2015), and Guthman (2011, 2012; Mansfield and Guthman 2015) locate obesity's causes beyond the body proper. These authors identify 'metabolic shifts' both within the bodies of their interlocutors and in the societies that they study (Moore 2017).…”

Environment in the lives of children and families

“…The way forward they argue is through a more coherent narrative of climate change to make it a 'universal social drama that would compel decisive public action and institutional reform'. From a different perspective, Moore (2017) suggests that the conceptual problem is treating nature and culture as binary opposites when they mutually constitute each other in the 'web of life' within specific historical and geographical contexts. Both these formulations are compelling.…”

“…Our book has shown why a holistic perspective is central to addressing climate change. Working with a common world approach, we have built on a 'humanity-in-nature' conceptualisation as advocated by Moore (2017) in the epigraph above and set diverse experiences in conversation. Our aim has been to move beyond social drama to examine the complex ways in which environmental affordances, socioeconomic resources and opportunities shape understandings and practices.…”