Podolynsky and the Ecological Turn in Social Theory An Interview with Joan Martínez-Alier

Serhii Podolynsky (1850-91) is one of the most original Ukrainian social scholars of the nineteenth century. His impact has been as influential as it is understudied. Was he first and foremost a revolutionary agitator, a profound researcher, or a madman? Drahomanov collaborated with Podolynsky while simultaneously distancing himself from the emotional anarchist. Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Mykyta Shapoval included him among the founders of Ukrainian sociology. His ideas were popularized by the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Volodymyr Vernadsky. They inspired writers and were also crucial for Joan Martínez-Alier, a world-renowned Catalan social scholar who is one of the founders of ecological economics and political ecology and whose ideas laid the foundation of the so-called Barcelona School. Prof. Martínez-Alier has been awarded the Balzan prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the social sciences and humanities in Europe, and the Holberg prize, which is often compared to the Nobel Prize in social sciences. In both the lectures he delivered when receiving these awards, Martínez-Alier mentioned Serhii Podolynsky.

Prof. Martínez-Alier was planning to present a report dedicated to Serhii Podolynsky, but circumstances did not allow that to happen. This interview, conducted by Volodymyr Shelukhin, from the Department of Social Structures and Social Relations at Kyiv University (Ukraine), took the place of that report. The interview was prepared within the framework of the Conference “Potential Classics: Superseded, Forgotten, and Uncovered in the History of Ukrainian Sociology” (June 5-6, 2024) organized by the Ukrainian sociological journal SVOIE and the Faculty of Sociology at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (alma mater of Serhii Podolynsky). The conference, which brought together researchers from Ukraine and abroad, was the first of its kind in Ukraine, with a special focus on the history of Ukrainian sociology.

Volodymyr Shelukhin (VS): Your awareness of Serhii Podolynsky started with a book by Volodymyr Vernadsky, but how did this book come to your attention? It’s somewhat unexpected for a social scholar to read a book on geochemistry.

Joan Martínez-Alier (JMA): Between 1979 and 1982, I published with the Spanish ecological economist José Manuel Naredo (in Spanish, in Catalan, and then in English in The Journal of Peasant Studies) an explanation of Podolynsky’s agricultural energetics. I made a table summarizing the numbers (kilocalories as inputs and outputs) in Podolynsky’s article. I read Vernadsky’s La Géochimie (1924) later, in 1986, when I was preparing my book Ecological Economics (1987). My friend Jacques Grinevald, a French philosopher and epistemologist, ecologist, and historian of science, called my attention to this book by Vernadsky, and to the pages of Vernadsky writing about energy and entropy, and his half page of eulogies for Podolynsky.

VS: What sources did you use when studying Podolynsky’s legacy alongside Vernadsky’s book? Podolynsky was largely forgotten in the 1970s, and his most important article was only published in English in 2004.

JMA: Podolynsky’s 1880 article on agricultural energetics was published in Italian, in German, which I can read, and also in Russian in the journal Slovo, and probably in Ukrainian, which I cannot read unless I get help. And much later it was translated into English. There are slightly different versions of the same article.

VS: Were you aware of Roman Serbyn’s study on this topic when you began your research on Podolynsky’s legacy?

JMA: Yes, I was aware of Roman Serbyn’s work. We corresponded many years ago. Podolynsky wrote, of course, about Ukrainian economic history: he belonged to a group of Ukrainian intellectuals opposing Tsarist Russia. In Russia he was close to Piotr Lavrov, who was a “Narodnik”: a political tendency favoring the peasantry and against Tsarism. Podolynsky also met Marx in person, briefly. In 1880, he was living in exile in Montpellier. He had studied medicine in Breslau (Wroclaw) and in Zurich. It is really a pity that he was ill and died young. He was friendly with the Narodnaya Volya group. But he was, I would say, a Ukrainian nationalist. Ukrainian universities in Kyiv, in Lviv, bear the name of Mykhailo Drahomanov, of Ivan Franko – these were Podolynsky’s friends and sources of inspiration.

VS: In some sense, Serhii Podolynsky was an unusual thinker for the nineteenth century. His focus on nature and agrarian relations in the age of industrialization, railroads, and steam engines seemed somewhat old-fashioned.

JMA: Podolynsky had an outstanding education in sciences. This is why he could write his article on agricultural energetics. He followed closely the research on energy, and in his work he quotes Moleschott, Clausius. So, he could calculate the amount of energy from the sun converted into photosynthesis, and how this amount increased (in his view) when the work of humans and animals was applied in agriculture. The surplus increased (the Mehrarbeit he wrote in German to Marx in 1880). But a lot of the production was produced naturally, without human work (production in the physical sense, measured in kcal). All this was still rather new in 1880. Podolynsky’s articles were published in several languages in Europe, including in the Marxist journal Die Neue Zeit, but Marxist authors were not very interested. Marxist authors did not write on agricultural energetics. Some ecologists, much later (David Pimentel and Howard T. Odum in the 1970s) started to write on the ecological energetics of the human economy, and on the EROI of agriculture (the ratio between the energy coming into a field and the energy of the crop). Today this is of interest in ecological economics.

VS: Some Orthodox Marxist authors have received your interpretation of Podolynsky’s legacy and its relation to Marxian views skeptically. Their main argument is that we cannot explain Podolynsky in terms of an ecological turn in the social sciences because he saw nature merely as a complex of resources. He had a consumerist view of nature. How do you respond to this criticism?

JMA: Marx and Engels in 1880-82 (Marx died in early 1883) read copies of Podolynsky’s articles on the energetics of agriculture. They did not think that this was interesting for the study of society and economy. As Engels wrote to Marx, Podolynsky had tried to analyze the economy from a physical point of view, and this was wrong. There are some Marxist scholars who seem to believe that Engels could himself not be wrong. I disagree.

VS: What contemporary theories in economics, sociology, and related fields might be aligned with Podolynsky’s approach?

JMA: Podolynsky was ahead of his time because he developed a model of biomass production based on realistic figures from the production and the inputs of agriculture, expressed in energy units, i.e. kilocalories per hectare. Kilocalories are relevant on the input side (photosynthesis plus human and animal work, also the seeds, the fertilizer and nowadays the petroleum, etc.) and on the output side. Adult humans eat approximately between 1800 and 2500 kcal per day. As Vernadsky wrote in 1924: “Podolynsky understood the energetics of life and tried to apply his findings to the study of the economy”. In other words, he looked at the social metabolism of agriculture, and his model could be applied to the whole economy. He has been recognized as a precursor of agricultural energetics and also of ecological economics. The field of energy research and social sciences, and also energy research and economic and social history, developed to some extent separately from his insights (because he died relatively young, and also because Marxist scholars knew his work but did not appreciate it because of Engels’ negative remarks in his correspondence with Marx, first published in 1919). But he was not forgotten. My 1982 article with Naredo in The Journal of Peasant Studies and my 1987 book made him well known to the new school of ecological economists, and also to ecological anthropologists. For instance, Roy Rappaport published in 1968 a book on the agricultural energetics (and also the social system and the religion) of a group of people in New Guinea, the Tsembaga Maring. I read it in 1972, before I knew about Podolynsky’s article and Engels’ reaction. In fact, I taught about energy and agriculture even before Howard T. Odum and D. Pimentel published their articles and books on this topic after 1971.

My conclusion is that Podolynsky’s approach is very relevant for the growing fields of environmental social sciences and environmental history. One must be aware, however, that terms like “agricultural energetics”, “social metabolism”, “the energetics of life”, “the entropy law” and the “economic process” are still almost unknown to mainstream economists and sociologists.

VS: I agree, they are still unknown, but the concept of entropy is used by a limited group of social scholars inspired by synergetics. Were they aware of Podolynsky’s ideas?

JMA: I do not know about synergetics. You should read The Entropy Law and the Economics Process (1971) by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. He mentioned Podolynsky, not in this book but later in his 1986 article, “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in Retrospect”.

By 1986 Georgescu-Roegen, whom I had met in 1979 for some days in Barcelona, had read my work with Naredo on Podolynsky and also knew the first drafts of my 1987 book, Ecological Economics. This is where he learnt about Podolynsky. By the way, much of the information on Podolynsky’s agricultural energetics, Marx and Engels reactions, and Vernadsky’s reception, are explained in my book Ecological Economics (1987, new edition: 1990).

VS: Your current research project focuses on ecological conflicts around the globe. The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine also has a tremendous ecological dimension. Although you have not yet studied the Ukrainian context, could you offer some general advice for Ukraine on how to address these new ecological challenges? Is it possible to build a growing economy in harmony with nature and ecological thinking?

JMA: Yes, with the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), which is a collective endeavor, we try to show that there are many local struggles for environmental justice. Economic growth sometimes means the destruction of the environment, such as by pollution. In these movements, the people have similar enemies (for instance, big mining firms). I was recently reading about complaints in Serbia against the Chinese company Zijin for copper mining and smelting in Bor. There are hundreds of similar conflicts. Often, the companies are transnational companies. Also, in Serbia, there was recently a complaint by the common people, the ordinary people, against the company Rio Tinto for lithium mining. Economic growth, in all countries, should not imply the destruction of the environment. The same will apply to Ukraine when peace comes back.

Volodymyr Shelukhin <volodymyr.shelukhin1991@gmail.com>