The Weekly Planet #12: Metabolic Sovereignty Revisited

This week, I am back to metabolic sovereignty after a deepish dive into energy and compute sovereignty in the previous two weeks. My main goal is to show that the Anthropocene is:

Willy-nilly an exercise in metabolic sovereignty for all humans

Unfortunately, that human-wide metabolic sovereignty has justified an enormously unequal metabolic pyramid.

And even if we could ensure distributional justice for all humans, we would still be mistaken, because we can’t ensure metabolic stability until we expand the scope of sovereignty to include non-humans as well.

The Age of Metabolism

We are living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. The term, popularized in 2000 by Paul Crutzen , named a stark reality: human activity has become a dominant force shaping the planet, rivaling the power of ice ages and asteroid impacts. This force is metabolic at its very core. The Anthropocene is the result of a planetary metabolic revolution, a staggering acceleration in the flows of matter and energy commandeered by a single species.

Consider the sheer scale.

In the last three centuries, the human population has swelled tenfold, while our cattle herds have reached 1.4 billion. Our industrial output skyrocketed forty-fold in the 20th century alone. We now appropriate more than half of all accessible freshwater and harvest up to 35% of the life in our most productive ocean regions. We are consuming the deep past by burning fossil fuels that took millions of years to form. Through technology, industry, and sheer numbers, humanity has asserted a form of “metabolic sovereignty” over the planet’s life-support systems, redirecting the flows of carbon, water, and energy to suit our purposes.

This perspective reframes our civilization. Society is not just a collection of cultures, economies, and political systems; it is a biophysical entity with a colossal metabolism. But framing this as the work of “Anthropos”- humanity as a whole - is misleading. The engine of this change was not some abstract, unified species, but a specific economic order rooted in industrial capitalism and colonial expansion. The crucial question is not that we have seized control of the planet’s metabolism, but how this control is wielded, for whom it works, and who is left behind.

The Metabolic Pyramid

While humanity may have collectively seized the reins of the planet’s metabolism, that power is distributed unequally. We live within a metabolic pyramid, where a tiny fraction of the global population commands an outsized share of the world’s energy and resources, while billions subsist on the scraps.

Energy consumption provides a stark illustration . The richest 1% of people consume roughly 14% of the world’s energy, and the top 10% devour nearly half. By contrast, the poorest 50% of humanity—billions of people—use only about 13%, an amount comparable to the top 1% alone. A citizen in a wealthy nation may command 100 times more energy than someone in the poorest countries.

770 million people have no access to electricity at all, and billions more rely on burning wood and dung for cooking, with devastating consequences for their health and local environments. Energy poverty is a trap; it cripples access to clean water, education, healthcare, and economic opportunity. It cements the very inequality it stems from.

The tragedy is that the climate crisis, overwhelmingly caused by the emissions of the high-consuming few, will inflict its most severe damage on the energy-poor. Those who have benefited least from the fossil fuel era are the most vulnerable to the droughts, floods, and famines it is unleashing. This is the moral and ecological failure of our current metabolic order.

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The Great Entanglement

Our metabolic dominion has shattered the foundational concepts that once ordered our world. For centuries, we maintained a clean division between “human history” and “natural history.” Nature was the static backdrop against which the drama of human culture, politics, and freedom unfolded. Climate change has obliterated this distinction. Human and natural history have violently converged.

Every flip of a switch is a geological act, altering the atmosphere and melting glaciers. Conversely, a drought-fueled wildfire is a political event, capable of toppling governments and sparking migrations. As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, we can no longer tell our story as if it were separate from the planet’s. The history of industrial capitalism is inseparable from the history of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Our political freedoms have always depended on the unspoken foundation of a stable Holocene climate—a gift of deep time we took for granted and have now broken.

Darwin told us almost two hundred years ago that we are a species among species, but so far we have only assimilated that insight into the ‘order of nature’ not into the ‘order of society,’ which would make us realize that our fate deeply enmeshed with the health of the biosphere. The mass extinction event we are causing is not a tragedy happening “out there” in nature; it is a direct threat to the complex web of life that sustains us. We depend on the metabolic work of forests, pollinators, and soil microbes for our own survival. The climate crisis has revealed, as Chakrabarty notes, the biophysical “conditions for the existence of life in the human form,” conditions that have far more to do with the co-evolution of life on Earth than with our economic theories. We are not masters of a separate domain, but participants in a living, breathing web of metabolism that meshes human and non-human together.

The Geopolitical Metabolism: Petrostates vs. Electrostates

As the world awakens to these stakes, a new geopolitical contest is taking shape, defined by the struggle for energy sovereignty. In the 20th century, oil meant money and power. In the 21st century, renewable energy and electric infrastructure are poised to do the same. We are witnessing a global metabolic chess match between the fossil-fueled powers of the old order and the rising “electrostates” of the new.

China provides the most dramatic example of a nation strategically pursuing this new form of sovereignty. Recognizing its dependence on imported fossil fuels as a profound vulnerability , Beijing launched an all-out industrial revolution to dominate the technologies of the green economy. Today, China leads the world in nearly every clean energy metric: solar panel manufacturing, wind turbine production, battery supply chains, and electric vehicle adoption. In 2024, its clean energy sector contributed a staggering 10% of the country’s GDP. This is a deliberate bid for metabolic independence—an attempt to power its future with domestic sun and wind rather than foreign oil and gas. In the process, China has positioned itself as the central supplier for the global energy transition, giving it immense leverage.

On the other side stands a coalition of petrostates and fossil-fuel interests determined to prolong the age of hydrocarbons. From Russia to Saudi Arabia, these nations’ economies and political identities are deeply tied to oil and gas extraction. They have often resisted the green transition, framing it as a threat to their national sovereignty. This clash between the electrostate model and the petrostate model is now a defining feature of our world. The United States and Europe find themselves caught in the middle, attempting to accelerate their own transitions while grappling with their deep-rooted fossil fuel dependencies and the need to catch up with China’s manufacturing might. Sovereignty is being redefined in metabolic terms: it is the ability to power one’s society securely and sustainably.

However, the very idea of a smooth “energy transition” is a dangerous myth . History teaches us a sobering lesson: we have never truly transitioned from an energy source, we have only ever added new ones. Coal did not replace wood, and oil did not replace coal; each new source was piled on top of the last, fueling an ever-greater accumulation of total energy consumption. Our civilization’s history is one of “more and more and more.”

This means that our current goal—to deliberately and rapidly phase out our dominant energy source—is historically unprecedented. We are attempting to leave immensely powerful resources in the ground, voluntarily, because we understand their consequences. Believing in a natural, seamless transition lulls us into a false sense of security, suggesting that market forces and technology will save us without the need for disruptive political action. The reality is that renewables are often being added to the global energy mix, not displacing fossil fuels one-for-one. The so-called transition is not a gentle slide into a green future; it is a political fight that requires actively dismantling the old system, not just building a new one alongside it.

The Shock to the System

No event revealed the fragility and interconnectedness of our global metabolism more starkly than the COVID-19 pandemic . Overnight, the frenetic flows of people, goods, and energy that constitute the world’s economic bloodstream seized up. It was a forced downshift, a moment when the planet-spanning human enterprise held its breath.

The pandemic exposed the fiction of national sovereignty in the face of a borderless biological threat. While nations scrambled to hoard masks, ventilators, and vaccines in a display of “vaccine apartheid,” the virus itself was a lesson in our profound interdependence. A microscopic agent, likely originating from a wild animal (or was it a lab?), hitched a ride on the vectors of globalization and brought the world to its knees. It was a violent reminder that the wall between “civilization” and “nature” is an illusion. Our health is inextricably linked to the health of ecosystems.

The global response demonstrated both our greatest strengths and our deepest flaws. We witnessed an astonishing capacity for collective action, as billions changed their behavior to protect public health. Yet this came at a cost, and the burdens were distributed unequally, with essential workers bearing the greatest risk. The crisis also opened the door to a new paradigm of biosecurity and surveillance, a “reflex of control,” as writer Charles Eisenstein called it, that threatens to permanently curtail personal freedoms in the name of safety. The pandemic was a mirror reflecting our societal priorities, forcing us to ask what we value more: individual liberty or collective wellbeing, short-term economic activity or long-term resilience. It revealed how un-sovereign we truly are in the face of nature’s smallest agents and gave us a glimpse of the global coordination required to face the slower, more complex pandemic of climate change.

Towards a Multispecies Sovereignty

This journey through the Anthropocene, from its metabolic engine to its geopolitical fractures, leads to a radical conclusion: sustainable and just metabolic sovereignty cannot be a purely human affair. Our attempt to assert absolute dominion - let’s call it Anthropic Sovereignty - over the planet’s material flows has backfired, destabilizing the very systems that support us. The only viable path forward is to expand the circle of sovereignty to include the more-than-human world.

What does a multispecies sovereignty look like? It begins by recognizing that other species and ecosystems—forests, oceans, pollinators, rivers—are not mere resources but active participants in planetary metabolism. They perform essential work, and their health is a precondition for our own. This recognition is already taking root in the “Rights of Nature” movement, where countries from Ecuador to New Zealand have granted legal personhood to rivers and forests, allowing legal guardians to defend them in court. It means shifting our view of nature from property to a partner in our moral and legal community.

It also means honoring and empowering the indigenous cultures that have long practiced a form of metabolic reciprocity , managing lands and waters in ways that sustain them for generations. Indigenous-managed lands consistently show better conservation outcomes, demonstrating that true sovereignty is found not in domination, but in stewardship.

Expanding sovereignty in this way is not about giving a tree a vote in parliament. It is about embedding ecological reality into our governance. It means establishing firm, science-based limits on our metabolic activity—like a planetary carbon budget—and making biodiversity impacts a central consideration in all major decisions. It requires us to institutionalize a voice for the non-human world and for future generations.

Ultimately, this is a shift in values, from the modernist dream of separation and control to an embrace of our role as co-members of a living community. The age of separation is over. We are all—humans, animals, microbes, forests—swirling together in a shared metabolic soup. Our fates are intertwined. A multispecies sovereignty is therefore not an act of charity, but of enlightened self-interest. Ensuring the “sovereignty” of pollinators is essential for our food security. Protecting the “sovereignty” of rainforests is vital for stabilizing our climate.

This is the great task of our time: to reinvent our societies as embedded in the Earth, not sealed off from it. It requires new economic models that value the well being of all beings, and a new politics that represents the common interests of all life. The choice is between retreating into fortress societies on a dying planet, and embracing a higher form of cooperation with each other, and with the rest of the planet.