Material throughput is a means of measuring the so-called social metabolism, or physical dimensions of a society’s consumption, and can be taken as an indirect and approximate indicator of sustainability. Material flow accounting can be used to test the dematerialisation hypothesis, the idea...

We employ the concepts of socio-ecological regime and regime transition to better understand the biophysical causes and consequences of industrialization. For two case studies, the United Kingdom and Austria, we describe two steps in a major transition from an agrarian to an industrial...

This study presents a national level analysis of changes in land use and land cover in New Zealand from 1860 to 2005. We employ the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) framework to assess land use induced impacts on ecological energy flows by accounting for socioeconomic...

India's economic growth in the last decade has raised several concerns in terms of its present and future resource demands for materials and energy. While per capita resource consumption is still extremely modest but on the rise, its sheer population qualifies India as a fast growing giant with...

This paper applies the method of 'Land-time-budget analysis' to a rural subsistence community and to the national economy of the Lao PDR. The analysis is conducted to meet two ends: to identify the community's/the nation's resource use profile in terms of land and time use - the analysis...

This paper shows the potential of the Social Metabolism approach to study the industrialization of the agriculture. It provides information about the physical functioning of agrarian systems over time and their spatial differences. It also sheds light on how the industrialisation of agriculture...

Over the last two million years, humans have colonized almost the entire biosphere on Earth, thereby creating socio-ecological systems in which fundamental patterns and processes are co‐regulated by socio‐economic and ecological processes. We postulate that the evolution of coupled...

In 2002, the year it was published, The Environmentalism of the Poor was one of the first books examining in a multidisciplinary perspective three parallel environmental movements around the world. Eleven years later, we re-examine these movements – the Cult of Wilderness, the Gospel of...

Understanding the replacement of the nutrients removed by harvests helps us understand the influence of humans on fertility. In this paper we compare two previous studies on the nutrient balance of the cropland area in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, which run circa 1860 and 1920....