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Metabolic Capture From Trophic Closure and Prion Propagation to Vital Extraction, Plastic Persistence, and the Mineralization of Life
Summary
This is a philosophical essay, not a lab study, that proposes a single idea—"metabolic capture"—to explain how different systems (from burnout at work to plastic pollution) all work the same way: they drain a person's or ecosystem's ability to rest, regenerate, and change, leaving behind rigid, hard-to-undo structures instead. For everyday health, the takeaway is that chronic exhaustion, overwork, and plastic buildup in our bodies and environment may be more connected than they seem—all forms of something's future potential being locked up to keep another system running. It's a conceptual framework rather than new experimental evidence
This paper develops the concept of metabolic capture as a general operator for understanding how living capacities are appropriated, redirected, and transformed into the persistence of structures that progressively restrict the future availability of life. Cannibalism serves only as an initial boundary case. The argument moves from trophic closure and prion propagation to broader forms of capture in which another human being is treated not merely as labor, but as a reservoir of time, attention, care, regeneration, and unrealized possibility. Plastic is examined as a form of post-metabolic persistence: matter extracted from organic history, mobilized for accelerated consumption, and returned to the environment as a durable constraint. Mineralization is then defined as the displacement of living variability by infrastructures, procedures, and material formations whose stability increases as the field of possible transformations available to living systems contracts. Using the Possest–PQF framework, the paper interprets these processes as reorganizations of accessibility rather than as isolated instances of exploitation, pollution, or institutional dysfunction. The central ethical claim is that violation begins not only when life is damaged or destroyed, but when its capacity for regeneration, transformation, and future openness is treated as metabolic infrastructure for another system. The paper also argues that academic specialization often neutralizes this problem by separating burnout, plastic pollution, precarious labor, platform extraction, and environmental degradation into distinct domains, thereby obscuring the common operator that links them. Metabolic capture is proposed as a concept prior to exploitation: a description of how systems appropriate the very capacity of life to renew and reorganize itself. Keywords: metabolic capture, trophic closure, prion propagation, living availability, plastic persistence, mineralization, Possest–PQF, accessibility, regeneration, exploitation, ethics of the Other, institutional metabolism, environmental persistence, academic neutralization