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Innovation: The EuropeanJournal of Social ScienceResearchPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ciej20

Linking Society to Nature,Past to FutureMarina Fischer-Kowalski , Eugene Rosa & RolfPeter SieferlePublished online: 14 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Marina Fischer-Kowalski , Eugene Rosa & Rolf Peter Sieferle(2001) Linking Society to Nature, Past to Future, Innovation: The European Journalof Social Science Research, 14:2, 101-102, DOI: 10.1080/13511610123357

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13511610123357

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Innovation, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2001

Editorial: Linking Society to Nature, Past to Future

MARINA FISCHER-KOWALSKI, EUGENE ROSAand ROLF PETER SIEFERLE

This special issue assembles some of the major contributions to a conference that tookplace in Vienna in autumn 1999, ‘Nature, Society and History. Long Term Dynamicsof Social Metabolism’. It was organized by the Vienna Team of Social Ecology(http://www.univie.ac.at/iffsocec), with Willi Bruckner, Helmut Haberl, BarbaraSmetschka and Verena Winiwarter as local organizers, and Marina Fischer-Kowalski,Eugene Rosa and Rolf Peter Sieferle as Scienti� c Committee. This conference succeededin bringing together different scienti� c communities—historians, social scientists, andsome natural and technical sciences1—to contribute to a common issue: the interrelationof global socio-economic and environmental change. If there is to be a sustainable future,we have to understand how society–nature interactions were moulded in the past, andwe have to generate more general theoretical insights and methodological tools for thedynamics of this interrelationship. ‘Societal metabolism’ seemed a good starting point,re� ected in the subtitle of the conference. The conference attracted 200 participants from27 countries worldwide2 and involved them in lively discussions that brought tothe surface both the ways in which various disciplines could and had to contribute to thesubject (and widened the horizon of each of them) and the major conceptual andmethodological divides that exist between them.

While the discussions are not re� ected in this issue, major contributions across severalpanels are well represented.3 Stephen Boyden (Canberra University) represents thehuman ecology (or, as he prefers to call it, the bio-history) approach. His contributionintroduces the paradigm that guided the overall philosophy placing socio-economicsystems within the biosphere. He became famous as one of the founding members of the� rst major international research programme linking social and natural science ap-proaches, UNESCO’s ‘Man and Biosphere’ (MAB) programme.

Helga Weisz and co-authors from the Vienna Team of Social Ecology continue witha broad view on human history in interaction with the environment. They depart froma social science perspective and seek to describe different modes of subsistence (huntingand gathering, agrarian mode and industrial mode) in terms of qualitatively differentsociety–nature interactions (and concomitant changes in the natural environment) on thebasis of the notions of ‘socio-economic metabolism’ and ‘colonization regimes’. Theyplead for a conceptual complexity accepting both natural and social systems as self-organizing entities co-evolving. Their empirical case studies extend from the Austrianenergy and land-use patterns 1830–1990 to a contemporary Thai village in transitionfrom an agrarian to an industrial mode of subsistence.

Richard Hoffmann’s (York University, Toronto) and Petra van Dam’s (Free Univer-sity, Amsterdam) contributions represent thoroughly historical approaches. Hoffman

ISSN 1351-1610 print/ISSN 1469-8412 online/01/020101-02Ó 2001 Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social SciencesDOI: 10.1080/13511610120062290

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102 Editorial

focuses on medieval and early modern European history and questions the commonprejudice of present-day environmentalists that environmental destruction is a uniquelymodern phenomenon. He discusses the interrelation of human diet, culture and socialstatus with its environmental consequences, such as the collapse of � sh populations anddeforestation. He concludes that the overexploitation of environmental carrying capacityoccurred much before ‘modern’ times.

Petra van Dam uses the introduction of rabbits into early modern Europe as a casefor demonstrating the effects of human-induced environmental and subsequent socio-economic change. The rabbit, imported as a domestic animal in substitution of wildanimals becoming extinct as a result of human foraging did not only serve speci� csocietal metabolic purposes, but also remoulded European landscapes.

Finally, Roldan Muradian and Joan Martinez-Alier (Barcelona University) presentan ‘ecological economics’ perspective. They question the widespread thesis of ‘de-materialization’ occurring as a free gift in the course of increasing af� uence. The pointthey make, based upon an empirical analysis of South–North trade � ows of non-renewable resources during the last three decades, is that some of the seeming environ-mental improvements of the ‘North’ are due to an externalization of environmentalimpact to the ‘South’. In discussing the literature and presenting their own materialthey provide both a methodological critique of studies dealing with socio-economicmetabolism on a national level only, and direction and guidance for taking sustainabilityas an issue of global inequality seriously.

The conclusions to be drawn from this wide array of approaches can be summarizedbrie� y as follows: even from a social science perspective, taking nature into account bearsfruit in understanding social and cultural change. And what appears to be a problem offuture sustainability is not a ‘contemporary’ phenomenon but deeply rooted in pasthistory. Socio-economic metabolism is one of the valuable conceptual guides that helpsto link much needed insights across various scienti� c traditions. All this, though, does notcontribute to light-mindedness towards the future.

Notes

1. In accordance with this, the conference was endorsed by the International Program on HumanDimensions of Global Environmental Change—Industrial Transformation (IHDP-IT), theResearch Committee 24 on ‘Environment and Society’ of the International SociologicalAssociation, and the European Concerted Action on Material Flow Accounting (ConAccount).

2. See website: , http://www.univie.ac.at/iffsocec/conference99 . .3. For further publications from the conference see the special issues of ‘Land Use Policy’ (2001)

and ‘Ecological Economics’ (2001).Dow

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