The Metabolic Rift in Radical Geography: Massimo Quaini and the Territoriality of the Ecological Crisis

ABSTRACT This article relocates Marx's theory of the metabolic rift within a broader geographical genealogy, recovering Massimo Quaini's contribution and showing how his work anticipates; in territorial terms, several theoretical components were later systematized by Foster. Drawing on historical–geographical materialism, the manuscript conceives the metabolic rift as a process of territorial disarticulation of social reproduction, produced by the subsumption of territory under the logic of value and manifested in the structural separation between producers and the inorganic conditions of their existence. Building on this framework, the article develops a critique of relational ontologies in world ecology and of eco‐territorialist perspectives, highlighting both their limits and their potential for understanding the ecological contradictions of capitalism. The concept of metabolic deterritorialization is introduced to describe the processes through which the socio‐natural metabolism is reorganized, at the territorial scale, into spatial forms functional to capitalist accumulation.