Abstract In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic
rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured
the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s
troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and
reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian
perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing
metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not
merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of
metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social
sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and
reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of
deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately
internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature.