Metabolic rift

Urban Farm DB summary

This Wikipedia article on 'metabolic rift' explains that German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig, in his 1840 'Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Physiology,' argued that if all solid and liquid excreta of city inhabitants were returned to farmers, land productivity could be maintained for centuries virtually unimpaired. Marx, combining his understanding of the labor process with Liebig's analysis, wrote in Capital Vol. 1 that capitalist production, by concentrating population in cities, 'disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth' and prevents the return of soil constituents consumed by humans as food and clothing — defining this as 'an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism.' John Bellamy Foster, in his 2000 book 'Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature,' reassessed Marx's ecological perspective, arguing the metabolic rift concept enabled the development of a critique of environmental degradation. The article notes that as food and fiber were transported over long distances, soil nutrients moved to cities as agricultural produce but were not returned as human and animal waste, producing 'a one-way flow of materials' — a plundering of the soil to sustain society's reproduction.

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• Compost / nutrient cycleContradicts