Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology
1999/09/01 by John Bellamy Foster · 1,330 citations
Engineering · Environmental Science · #Economics #Ecosystem dynamics and resilience #Environmental sociology #Epistemology #Philosophy #Positive economics #Social science #Sociology #Sustainability and Ecological Systems Analysis #Sustainable Industrial Ecology
paper · doi:10.1086/210315
published in American Journal of Sociology 105(2), 366-405 (University of Chicago Press)
openalex publication_date 1999/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Abstract
This article addresses a paradox: on the one hand, environmental sociology, as currently developed, is closely associated with the thesis that the classical sociological tradition is devoid of systematic insights into environmental problems; on the other hand, evidence of crucial classical contributions in this area, particularly in Marx, but also in Weber, Durkheim, and others, is too abundant to be convincingly denied. The nature of this paradox, its origins, and the means of transcending it are illustrated primarily through an analysis of Marx's theory of metabolic rift, which, it is contended, offers important classical foundations for environmental sociology.
Cited by
- Contested territorialization and biophysical expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia
- Metabolic ecology
- Law’s quick fix? Ecocide, social transformation and the pitfalls of criminalisation
- De-Carbonization in Former Soviet Republics, 1992–2000: The Ecological Consequences of De-Modernization
- The Agrarian Question as an Ecological Question: An Introduction
- No farm is an island: constrained choice, landscape thinking, and ecological insect management among Wisconsin farmers
- Deepening, and repairing, the metabolic rift
- From extractivism to global extractivism: the evolution of an organizing concept
- A green new deal for agriculture: for, within, or against capitalism?
- Environment, Society, and Machine Learning
- Ecocide in Peru: Repsol and the colonial regime of permission
- Extimate nature: Environmental crisis and the Excluded
- MST's Arvoredo app: Family farmers and grassroots environmental data-driven governance in Brazil
- The Temporal Turn in Social Movement Studies: Political Readings of Temporality
- Guns versus Climate: How Militarization Amplifies the Effect of Economic Growth on Carbon Emissions
- The carbon intensity of well-being and presidential politics in the United States, 1960–2023
- The concept of metabolism in ocean biogeochemistry: departures, consistencies, and implications
- The ultimate learning outcome of transformative sustainability education: A case for ecocentric dispositions
- Environment and the racialization of space in US cities
- Working the Waste Commodity Frontier: Metabolic Value and Informal Waste Work
- The Anthropocene Interregnum: Ecological Marxism and the Social Metabolism of the Present
- Degrowing alternative agriculture: institutions and aspirations as sustainability metrics for small farmers in Bosnia and India
- Markets, Nature, and Society
- The moderating role of post-materialism in the relationship between income and red meat consumption
- Eric Walrond’s Anti-patriarchal Modernism
- Agroecology Now!: Transformations Towards More Just and Sustainable Food Systems
- Historicizing food sovereignty
- Metabolic rift or metabolic shift? dialectics, nature, and the world-historical method
- Pre-paradigmatic status of industrial sustainability: a systematic review
- Toward a Sociology of Oceans
- Rural Conservatism or Anarchism? The Pro‐state, Stateless, and Anti‐state Positions
- Coupled Human and Natural Systems
- Transcending the metabolic rift: a theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology
- Capitalism as World-Ecology
- An Environmental Sociology for the Twenty-First Century
- The Treadmill of Production
- Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective
- Sustainable Development
- Nature, Class, and Crisis: Locating the State in Ecological Marxism
- Extra-metabolic energy use and the rise in human hyper-density
- "Buried in Guano": Race, Labor, and Sustainability
- A Microeconomic Application of the Metabolic Rift Theory: Working Conditions, Income and Consumption-Based Emissions
- Environmental sociology [wikipedia]
- Ecology of a widespread large omnivore, Homo sapiens , and its impacts on ecosystem processes. [europepmc]
- Digging our own grave: A Marxian consideration of formal education as a destructive enterprise. [europepmc]
- A review of GIS methodologies to analyze the dynamics of COVID-19 in the second half of 2020. [europepmc]
- The Political Economy of Australia's Waste Crisis: From Neoliberalism to the Circular Economy Agenda. [europepmc]
- The Effect of Non-Cognitive Ability on Farmer's Ecological Protection of Farmland: Evidence from Major Tea Producing Areas in China. [europepmc]
- One Health in the consciousness of veterinary students from the perspective of knowledge of antibiotic therapy and antimicrobial resistance: a multi-centre study. [europepmc]
- Limited Attention to Climate Change in U.S. Sociology. [europepmc]
- Life in the hole: practices and emotions in the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence [europepmc]
Related