When social sciences meet the bio-physical sciences: energetics perspectives for socio-ecological sustainability

Department of Culture, Politics and Society – University of Turin

^* Corresponding author: dario.padovan@unito.it

Abstract

In this chapter, the author tries to suggest that social sciences can help the understanding of current critical socio-ecological dynamics. Social sciences have always been suspicious of idea that social phenomena can be investigated from a materialist point of view. Despite the idea that in every society there is a clearly determined group of phenomena separable from those that form the subject matter of other sciences of nature, this reflection suggests that social scientists developed significant analysis of the relationships between society and nature. Here the author tries to show that a social look could cast new lights upon the connections and interdependences between economic crisis and ecological crisis. The basic idea is that the decreasing natural fertility ofcapital is the cause of the decreasing global rate of profit of global economy and consequently the cause of theacceleration of new ways of nature appropriation, which can only deepen the current crisis.