Core Concepts and Heuristics

This chapter outlines the basics of our socioecological theory. It starts with the question of why entities such as ‘culture’ have been so successful that an evolving species like humankind could become the dominant power on the planet. It explains social systems as ‘hybrids’, a structural coupling between a (cultural) communication system and interconnected biophysical elements. In what sense are humans, domestic animals and artifacts hybrids? In what sense do these elements ‘belong’ to a certain cultural (communication) system? The constitutive operation is ‘colonization’. Human beings are culturally ‘colonized’, as are their livestock and their artifacts. These hybrid elements and the metabolic flows required to maintain them determine the social system’s impact upon the ‘rest of nature’. This influence happens through the metabolic exchange of energy and materials (which in part occurs unintentionally, such as breathing or evaporation) and through ‘labor’, or culturally guided human action. The sociometabolic model is described in the following section as an interrelation of stocks (human population, territory, livestock and artifacts) and flows (energy and materials). It has systematic similarities with national accounting and is thus useful for addressing many research questions, such as the resource productivity of a national economy or its energy intensity. To some extent, it is the description of an economy, at any time in history, using biophysical instead monetary parameters.