A resourceful account of sustainability
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A resourceful account of sustainability Paul Warde: The invention of sustainability: nature and destiny, c. 1500–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 416pp, £34.99 HB Dagomar Degroot1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Today, and for the foreseeable future, the one concept that dominates discussions on the environment is expressed by the word “sustainability.” Where does it come from? Perhaps you assume that its origins are ancient, rooted in a pre-modern understanding that the natural world should be carefully husbanded and preserved for future generations. Or perhaps you imagine the concept as an outgrowth of modernity, a quintessential expression of today’s environmental crises. Whichever you choose, Paul Warde argues in this important book, you would be wrong. If you adhere to Warde’s definition of sustainability—“the idea that it was a problem that society may inadvertently undermine the ecological conditions for its own survival” (356)—then the concept’s roots lie in the writings and programs of scholars and states in sixteenth-century Europe. By the late eighteenth century, a concept of sustainability that we would recognize today had been articulated by a growing cadre of thinkers who identified unsustainable practices as urgent problems for societies to solve. The great irony of this history is that it locates the intellectual prerequisites for our notion of sustainability in an effort to expand the capacity for European states to exploit two resources (as we would now call them) prized above all others: grains for food and wood for just about everything else. First, grains: In the sixteenth century, strengthening states struggled to expand “tillage” in order to avoid the disorders that accompanied dearth. Meanwhile, growing populations and expanding opportunities for publishing fostered the development of intellectual networks that circulated compilations of best agricultural practices. Before long, elites concentrated on practices that would enhance the efficacy of whatever unknown agents were responsible for fostering the growth of plants. “Improvers” in the seventeenth century argued for a more empirical approach to agriculture that would discard old prejudices in favor of systematic experimentation, and they harshly criticized those too lazy * Dagomar Degroot [email protected] 1
Department of History, Georgetown University, Washington, USA
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or shortsighted to follow their prescriptions. By the eighteenth century, efforts to improve agriculture encouraged breakthroughs in the life sciences that revealed the flows of matter and energy that bound together all living things. These flows could, in theory, be quantified—and here we can turn to wood. Fears of wood shortages combined with existing forest laws encouraged governments across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe to develop new systems of forestry administration. By the seventeenth century, the growing institutional reach of European governments inspired new understandings of the st
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