Essays on Ecological Economics and The Metabolic Rift Theory

Ecological disruptions such as climate change, pollution, waste build-up and rapid biodiversity loss are generally seen as the result of human activity; economically, socially and culturally determined. When it comes to the economy, heterodox macroeconomic tools and models are becoming prominent. They provide assessments and scenarios which focus on the complex interactions between the economy and carbon emissions as well as the potential impact of climate policies on both the economy and climate change itself. At the same time, we witness the increasing recognition of the incompatibility between capitalism as a socio-economic system and ecological restoration among non-economic scholars. But the specific theories that criticize the ecological consequences of capitalism from a Marxist vantage point have yet to formally manifest themselves in the field of Economics, all whilst the opportunity to do so is fairly imaginable. This dissertation provides an introduction to the modern synthesis between Marx and Ecology. It discusses its historical on-set in the second half of the nineteenth century and highlights its key-theoretical concepts: the metabolic rift theory and the ecological surplus. One of the reasons behind the absence of the metabolic rift theory Ecological Economics is related to the asserted incompatibility between Marx and Ecology in the 1980s. By providing some insights that counter these accusations the dissertation sheds light on the conceivable benefit of these considerations in the realm of Ecological Economics. The main result of this dissertation is the formalization of the metabolic rift theory such as to provide the field of Ecological Economics with a more complete approach to the representation of economy-ecology configurations. Before laying out an alternative, the status-quo of current mathematical formalization practices in the field of Ecological Economics is discussed and reinterpreted by means of Marx’s labour process theory and the distinction between appropriated and capitalized contributions to production processes. The proposed alternative to the formal representation of economy-ecology configurations draws on methods belonging to social metabolism studies (MuSIASEM) and the neo-Ricardian surplus approach.