7 Meta Questions About Our Global Metabolism
Frankly #59
Based on this week’s podcast episode with Geoffrey West, which covered how biological scaling applies to human economies, this week’s Frankly are some questions brought up for me on what this might mean for the future of our societies. Throughout history and up to today, there are scaling patterns driving our social and infrastructural metabolism - potentially shedding light on some long debated questions about the limits of our ability to design our societies.
Do we as humans have the agency to create different paths towards less resource consumption, or are we trapped within a previously hidden law of nature? Will the resource and waste limitations of our biosphere force us to live differently, regardless of our choices? More hopefully, can understanding we have a metabolism change our metabolism, and steer futures away from the current default?
In case you missed it…
This week, I was joined by physicist Geoffrey West to discuss his decades of work on metabolic scaling laws found in nature and how they apply to humans and our economies. As we think about the past and future of societies, there are patterns that emerge independently across cultures in terms of resource use and social phenomena as the size of a city grows. Can an understanding of social metabolism impact our social metabolism?
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You ask, "Does the presence of energy surplus create the exosomatic economic social organization, or does the social organization create the incentives and the discovery and the methods to access more energy?" You guess the former.
I conjecture that both are true, existing in a positive (reinforcing) feedback loop. If that is so, then the "burning" question (pun intended) is where to find a leverage point to either break one of those flows or to convert it into a balancing loop.
I wonder how Guyana is tracking ~ https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1773782655546618202