The Social Metabolism of Spanish Agriculture, 1900–2008

Abstract

The series intends to act as a link for ongoing researches concerning the historical interrelationships between man and the natural world, with special regard to the modern and contemporary ages. The main commitment should be to bring together different areas of expertise in both the natural and the social sciences to help them find a common language and a common perspective. Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are needed for more and better understanding of the environment and its history, with new epistemological frameworks and methodological practices. The links between human activities and flora, fauna, water, soil, are examples of the most debated topics in EH, while established discipline like forest history, agricultural history and urban history are also dealing with it. The human impacts on ecosystems and landscapes over time, the preservation of cultural heritage, studies of historical trajectories in pattern and processes, as well as applied research on historical use and management of landscapes and ecosystems, are also taken into account. Other important topics relate to the history of environmental ideas and movements, policies, laws, regulations, conservation, the history of immaterial heritage, such as traditional knowledge related to the environment.

Nutritional Analysis of the Spanish Population: A New Approach Using Public Data on Consumption

“…In this study, we described a new exhaustive methodology to calculate the food consumption of the Spanish population. This technique allowed the correction of the values issued by official sources and explicated the gap between them and the apparent consumption data offered by sources such as FAOSTAT or other researchers [ 17 , 65 ]. In addition, we quantified the degree of compliance with healthy diet recommendations and provided a nutritional analysis of a typical man and woman with a healthy weight.…”

Agrarian Metabolism and Socio-ecological Transitions to Agroecology Landscapes

“…Manuel González de Molina and Víctor Toledo (2011Toledo ( , 2014 began this task in their books, and some SFS researchers have followed this approach Marco et al, 2020a, b). Finally, the socio-metabolic approach developed so far has started to combine environmental, social and economic dimensions in the recent book The Social Metabolism of Spanish Agriculture (González de Molina et al, 2020). There is a long way to go in making socio-metabolic calculations from these social and gender perspectives -an avenue for young scholars to advance.…”

Rural electrification in Spain: territorial expansion and effects on the agricultural sector (c. 1900–c. 2000)

“…After establishing the pace of the territorial expansion of rural electrification, what can we say about the electricity consumption of the agricultural sector and its effects? Until now, the only study that has made long-term estimates of the electricity consumption of the Spanish agricultural sector is that of González de Molina et al (2019), which uses the data of the INE (Spanish National Institute of Statistics), correcting them for the final stage with estimates of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first century. In our case, we also use data from the INE until 1957 and from then on, we used the Estadísticas de la Industria de la Energía Eléctrica (Electric Power Industry Statistics), as we consider them to be more reliable.…”