One of the fundamental features of life is that change is constant. The universe is constantly expanding. Our galaxy is hurtling through space at an enormous speed while our solar system travels around it every 230 million years. Planets, including the Earth, orbit the Sun while simultaneously rotating around their own axes. Entropy will, over time, disperse all forms and structures. Everything is transient. Nothing ever remains the same.

Observing the natural phenomena around him, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus expressed this idea as Panta rhei, everything flows.

Flow is a fundamental feature of energy, information and life itself. The energy of the Sun passes through the entire ecosystem from one organism to the next. Genetic information flows from one generation to the next. The finely orchestrated processes that make up life are characterized by a state of flow. Without constant flow, life would not exist.

Since our intention is to design a better system using principles articulated by natural science, what fundamental insights should our designs be based on? Out of all the processes we can observe on our planet, it is the metabolic flow and transformation of energy that makes life possible in the first place. To put it succinctly, metabolism is the organizing principle of life. Upholding our body’s metabolic process constitutes the most fundamental imperative any living creature has to observe.

Where the constant flow of energy keeps the engine of life going, it is the constant flow of information that directs how that energy/matter is used. Any system we create has to incorporate this fundamental understanding into its structure. Ignoring it can only lead to a dead end. The task of delivering a steady supply of energy to every part of the body is so essential that it sets physical constraints on every living organism’s size, shape and existence. Metabolic imperatives dictate the morphology of all living organisms.

The metabolic rate refers to the amount of energy a living organism needs to keep up its homeostasis. To maintain our body weight and life in general, every human needs to consume an average of about 2000 calories or 8400 kilojoules of energy every day. In addition to food, water and oxygen, our metabolism can be seen to include other physiological needs such as warmth, rest and safety.

Metabolism isn’t just a phenomenon we observe in plants, animals and ourselves. Our societies, cities and corporations have their own socioecological metabolisms that help them endure. These organizations require a steady supply of energy/matter that maintains their homeostasis and allows them to grow.

Cities, for example, depend on a steady supply of food, electricity and raw materials just to stay as they are. If repairs aren’t made and a road is not repaved, over time, entropy will set in, and it will disintegrate and cease to be a road. A corporation’s metabolism, on the other hand, turns human labor and natural resources into goods and services.

When we look at our own metabolism, it doesn’t just happen within the boundaries of our own skin, but stretches out to include energy production that keeps us warm, agriculture and the complex supply chains that keep us fed, and the waste treatment facilities that absorb our refuse.

Metabolism is what sets all living beings in motion, forcing us to procure the energy we need day in and day out until we die. A failure to secure enough energy will quickly result in deprivation. In humans, this will first lead to hunger and then starvation. Deprived of food, we are willing to do almost anything to be fed. Hunger will turn honest men into thieves.

In cities, the inability to maintain metabolic needs results in electricity blackouts, crumbling infrastructure and long lines outside stores with little to sell. So fundamental are these physiological needs that if they are not met, people will flood the streets and topple governments if necessary.

A hungry belly not only forces us into desperate deeds but will also make us fall prey to vicious forms of exploitation. If we are honest, a large part of our economy depends on just such coercion. We hear a lot of talk about the free market, but our market is far from free. Often it relies on the coercive force of our own metabolism to wring out concessions we would not ordinarily submit to. This coercion profoundly distorts how supply meets demand in the marketplace and enables the formation of highly exploitative economic relationships.

When we view our economy from the perspective of natural science, we can see that it is made up of metabolic nodes and exchange nodes. Humans and human organizations are complementary metabolic nodes, whereas the consumer market and the labor market are the exchange nodes that supply them respectively.

The human metabolic output of labor is the metabolic input of an organization. The organizational outputs of goods and services become, in turn, metabolic inputs for the human customers, who need them to survive. The exchange nodes represent the marketplaces that traffic in the metabolic inputs and outputs. A constant flow of information–money and the supply and demand signals from the marketplace–organizes how all the energy/matter will be allocated between the nodes.

Seen from this perspective, all human production is just a complex form of photosynthesis in which we use the Sun’s ATP energy to organize energy/matter into more complex forms. This makes human consumption analogous to the combustion process. The building process is thus an anabolic process and the consumption process is a catabolic process.

Metabolism is not just a feature of living organisms: the process can be observed all around us. Or perhaps we should word this differently: since our corporations, cities and societies all have metabolic processes, we should view them as living organisms, only on a larger scale. Eventually, we should see the entire planet as a single living organism.

When we understand how fundamental metabolism is to our existence, it is quite stunning that neither our politics nor our economics accounts for it. It seems life and its vital processes are something that happens outside our politics and economics. Their omission is nothing but egregious.

This book seeks to understand our political and economic system from the metabolic perspective as a constant flow of energy/matter and information. This requires us to shift our understanding of society from it being an organization to an organism. Such a shift in perspective is profound and can offer concrete steps forward in solving our impending crises.