For a Social Metabolism to Traverse Extractivist End Times

Some form of social metabolism with non-human nature is unavoidable; human society’s last hope includes the chance that extractivism under capitalism is not. That chance holds, whether the violence of extractivism is justified in the service of social elites, of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed, or of an urgent and orderly retreat from fossil fuels and unlimited growth. This paper draws on the literatures covering critical logistics, value chains, and energy systems, as well as on the medieval and early modern histories of European staples. It critiques an emergent solution, merely substituting coal mines and oilfields with lithium and rare earth mines. But how would an organized metabolic complex transform itself or arise anew, adequate both to traverse and to abate the present ecological disaster and equally disastrous non-solutions? In particular, what would be conditions for a strategy, but also for a logistics, in a “war to end all wars”, if the war to be ended were the current “war against the wilderness” and against the poor and colonized? What is now available, and what must be organized, to shift energy provisioning to new and sustainable energetic requirements? We have before us the example of a transition to fossil capitalism: from the 14^th to the 17^th centuries, triggered by centuries of war, want, and disease, it turned on the dispossession of millions and the poisonous necromancy of power drawn from fossil fuels. Under what conditions could a second transition be organized otherwise, such that the “signs of autumn” (Huizinga, Braudel, Arrighi) disoriented and above all disempowered ruling elites, the coming “winter” drew out new forms of sociability, warmed by a different kind of fire, and the “spring” to come brought a shared growth with known and cherished limits?