Jeremy L. Caradonna - Sustainability: A History

We must aim for a continuous, resilient, and sustainable use [of forests]....

Hans Carl von Carlowitz, 1713

Sustainability is a lifestyle designed for permanence.

Chris Turner, 2010

As hard as it might be to believe, the world once made do without the words sustainable and sustainability. Today theyre nearly ubiquitous. At the grocery store we shop for sustainable foods that were produced, of course, from sustainable agriculture; ministries of natural resources in many parts of the world strive for sustainable yields in forestry; the United Nations (UN) has long touted sustainable development as a strategy for global stability; and woe be the city dweller who doesnt aim for a sustainable lifestyle.

Sustainability first emerged as an explicit social, environmental, and economic ideal in the late 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, it had become a familiar term in the world of policy wonkeryPresident Bill Clintons Council on Sustainable Development, for instancebut the embrace wasnt universal. Bill McKibben, perhaps the most prominent environmentalist of the past 30 years, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 1996 in which he dismissed sustainability as a buzzless buzzword that was born partly in an effort to obfuscate and which would never catch on in mainstream society. In McKibbens view, sustainability never made the leap to lingoand never would. Its time to figure out why, and then figure out something else. (McKibben preferred the term maturity.) Many others have since accused sustainability and sustainable development of being superficial terms that mask ongoing environmental degradation and facilitate business-as-usual economic growth. Those are debatable points that will be discussed in this book. But one thing is clear: McKibben was quite wrong about the quick decline of sustainability.

One way to demonstrate this growing interest is to look at book titles that bear the word sustainable or sustainability. Its difficult to find books published before 1976 that employ these words as titles or even as keywords. shows, no book in the English language used either term in the title before 1970. But since 1980 there has been an explosion of books and articles that not only use those words as titles but also deal with the many facets of sustainability. Indeed, thousands of books make up this growing body of literature. Whats more, a quick Google search for sustainability returns around 150 million hits.

Figure 1. Books with the word sustainable or sustainability in the title, 19002012.

Is sustainability a buzzword? Absolutely. But is it also buzzless? Assuredly not. Governments, communities, organizations, and individuals all over the world have sought to align themselves with the basic principles of what they call sustainabilitya desire to create a society that is safe, stable, prosperous, and ecologically minded. The practices inspired by the concept of sustainability could give rise to the worlds third major socio-economic transformation, after the Agricultural Revolution that took place 10,000 years ago, and the Industrial Revolution(s) of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is not only a buzzword but also a galvanizingly powerful term whose application subsumes a number of other movements, environmental perhaps most of all.

Sustainability is, first and foremost, used as a corrective, a counterbalance, and directly tied to climate change (a term that most governments would like to avoid). Those who use it argue that we are 250 years into an unsustainable ecological assault on the planet that was triggered by industrialization and that has left us with a lot of soul searching and cleaning up to do. Sustainability therefore is a way of acknowledging how humankind has created an imbalance. According to Jeffrey D. Sachs, we now live in the Age of the Anthropocene, in which human activity has become the dominant driver of the natural environment. We