The editors (both of the Institute of Social Ecology, Klagenfurt U., Austria) present a series of six studies examining transitions from agricultural to industrial socioecological regimes in case studies varying in geographic and temporal focus, but uniformly adopting a "material and energy flow accounting" framework that seeks to analyze biophysical aspects of society and link them to socioeconomic variables discoverable in the system of national accounts. The work is motivated by the belief that transition to sustainability will require as great a shift as from agriculturalism to industrialism and it therefore seeks to provide preliminary answers to questions concerning whether there is a characteristic metabolic profile of agrarian societies in terms of energy and materials use, what are the drivers of socioecological change, the level and nature of historical variance in agrarian-industrial transition, and the nature of the interplay between different spatial scales and levels of society. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)