The following is an excerpt from The Three Deaths of Cerro de San Pedro: Four Centuries of Extractivism in a Small Mexican Mining Town, by Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, available now wherever books are sold. Social Metabolisms As the rate and scale of precious metal mining increased with each cycle of extractivist mining, its demands on local environments and people rose proportionally. The social metabolism concept helps clarify these links. The concept entered into social theory in the nineteenth century with Justus Von Liebig’s and Karl Marx’s critiques of how trade and capital drove the exhaustion of...