Sustainability and Resilience in Past and Present Populations (SuRP+)

Human impact on the environment has never been greater than today. The enormous drive of technological innovation and economic growth has fuelled the development of our modern-day society. The energy and resources needed to sustain these dynamics are derived from the natural environment. As our ecological footprint increases, we are now increasingly confronted with the downsides of this insatiable thirst for growth. However, the limits to energy and resources setting the boundaries for the development of social life have run as a common thread throughout human history. Ever since the 19th century, historians and archaeologists have been interested in studying the carrying capacity of societies and their environment, to varying degrees of success. The research group SuRP+ brings together young scholars from the humanities, environmental, earth and social sciences to develop new methodologies to understand the sustainability and resilience of past and present human populations. The group seeks to re-assess past and current approaches through the concept of social metabolism, encompassing the entirety of biophysical analysis of exchanges in energy and resources between society and nature. We will use historical data on, inter alia, foodways, dietary habits, production output, heating infrastructure, caloric needs, and agricultural and extraction technologies, to test newly developed methodologies. The basic premise of SuRP+ is that insight into the resilience strategies of past populations offers a suitable prism for comparing and interpreting contemporary issues in human-environment interactions.