With its theoretical concepts and empirical studies, Social Ecology has established an understanding of industrialization that has become influential in various academic communities. The idea of a socio-metabolic regime transition based on fossil fuels forms the core of this socio-ecological understanding of industrialization. In my research at the KLI, I want to reconcile this socio-ecological approach with concepts and terms from the evolutionary sciences and reformulate it on a co-evolutionary basis. My starting point is to conceive of social-metabolic industrial regime shifts as a new mode of structural coupling of natural and social systems and thus as a genuinely co-evolutionary process and to analyze it systematically. This project aims to argue for a historically informed, long-term and co-evolutionary perspective in the current debate on socio-ecological transformation. Its originality stems from this novel combination.
My project for KLI has a clear focus on theory development. As an environmental historian, I can also draw on previous debates in my field, e.g., on "evolutionary history". As an environmental historian, it is important to me to bring such theoretical considerations down to earth by reconstructing very specific processes of historical change. Therefore, I see my work at the KLI embedded in two of my current, FWF funded research projects on the industrialization of Austrian forests and rivers from the late 18th century onwards. My work at the KLI aims to update and strengthen the theoretical basis of this ongoing research, including that of the doctoral students I supervise.
During my stay at KLI, I plan to mainly work on two journal articles. A conceptual paper arguing for a co-evolutionary understanding of socio-ecological “industrialization”, which shall become the core outcome of my stay at KLI, hopefully to be developed in collaboration and co-authorship with other people at the institute. Secondly, an environmental history paper analyzing how rivers and forests from the late 18th c. onwards changed their role in social metabolism during industrialization in terms of society-nature co-evolution.