Manuel González de Molina is Professor of Environmental History. Coordinator of the Agroecosystems History Laboratory. His work focuses on the contemporary rural world, the biophysical analysis of agroecosystems and food systems and the design of public policies from an agroecological point of view. He has directed a Master Degree Program on Agroecology at International University of Andalusia from 1996 to the present. Has been president of the Spanish Society for Agrarian History from 2016 to 2023. He is member of the editorial board of the ISI-refereed journals Historia Agraria [Agrarian History Review], Anthropoce, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, and Sustainability. Vice-president of the Spanish Society for Organic Agriculture (SEAE) since 2006 until 2014. Minister of the Department of Organic Agriculture of the Andalusia Government (Spain) from 2004 until 2007. Author of over a hundred papers published in high impact journals and several books, among the most recent: Energy in Agroecosystems: A Tool for Assessing Sustainability (CRC Press, USA, 2017); Political Agroecology: Advancing the Transition to Sustainable Food Systems (CRC Press, 2019); The Social Metabolism of Spanish Agriculture, 1900-2008. The Mediterranean way towards Industrialization (Springer, 2020).

Foreword.- Note to the Second Edition.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Environmental history as sustainability science.- 3. Social metabolism: origins, history, approaches and main publications.- 4. A non-cybernetic theory of social metabolism.- 5. The basic model.- 6. Social metabolism at the local scale.- 7. Social metabolism at the regional scale.- 8. Social metabolism at the national scale.- 9. Global metabolism.- 10. The cinegetic or extractive mode of social metabolism.- 11. The organic metabolism.- 12. The industrial metabolism.- 13. Metabolic transitions: a theory of socioecological transformation.- 14. Epilogue: metabolisms, entropy and sustainable society.- References.