Juri Auderset*
In 1992, in the final volume of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (“Basic Concepts in History”), Reinhart Koselleck, the doyen of German-language conceptual history, took stock of this mammoth project. Among other things, he self-critically noted that the concepts of a largely still unwritten “ecological history” had received little attention in historical research.
One can easily imagine that the concept of sustainability would take centre stage in the endeavour to fill this gap. However, anyone setting out to trace the concept’s history would need strong nerves. Particularly in view of our current debates, we must note – entirely without polemical intent – that the concept has seen a semantic proliferation in recent years that’s enough to drive anyone actually serious about sustainability to despair. When airlines make grand promises about “flying sustainably”, commodity traders extol the virtues of their “sustainability reports” year after year, and even the petrochemical industry and the rare-earth dependent Silicon Valley tech giants boast about their contributions to sustainability, it raises serious doubts as to whether this word has been completely drained of meaning.
Have the popular marketing strategy of “greenwashing” and the discursive power of capitalist tech companies diluted the semantics of the term “sustainability” to the extent that it’s become unsuitable for informed discussion? In Switzerland, such nagging doubts are further fuelled by the fact that openly xenophobic and worker-disempowering policies will be put to the vote under the name of “sustainability initiative”. (This is the short title of the popular initiative “No to 10-million Switzerland”, which aims to keep the Swiss population below 10 million until 2050 by restricting immigration.)
The history of a concept as the history of a contemporary problem
The German environmental historian Frank Uekötter once wrote pointedly that, against the backdrop of such semantic confusion, recourse to history is like “wanting a terminological defibrillator”. Given the arbitrary use of language today, we begin to yearn for a historically verified firm footing: Couldn’t a walk through the conceptual history of sustainability reveal firm and stable core meanings that would tell us what we should “actually” understand by this concept?
This desire for history to provide clarity is perfectly understandable – but it’s rooted in a purist misunderstanding. Conceptual history, just like history in general, doesn’t provide insights into core characteristics or essences that remain unscathed and unchanged through the course of time. Instead, it allows us to explore when and under what conditions terms are created, why they gain traction in certain contexts, and why their increasing popularity is often accompanied by a loss of conceptual precision. Understood in this way, a search for clues to the history of the sustainability concept turns into a history of a contemporary problem.
In the beginning, it was about wood
In German usage, the concept of sustainability is commonly traced back to the book Sylvicultura oeconomica, published in 1713 by the Saxon cameralist Hans Carl von Carlowitz. At that time, Saxony had a flourishing mining industry. But extracting silver, ore, lead, and zinc from the earth required fire and therefore wood. The forests were not growing fast enough to meet demand. In a way, Carlowitz addressed a dilemma of resource history that remains relevant to this day: The promise of lasting prosperity through the exploitation of mineral resources eventually ends up on a collision course with the slower reproduction rhythms of biotic resources. It’s the anticipation of future shortages that necessitates action in the present – or, in Carlowitz’s words: “Where damage comes from labours unperformed, there grows poverty and wretchedness.” And from this perception of the problem, he ultimately derived the need for “a continual, constant and sustainable use” of the forest.
So, this is where the idea of “sustainability” first appears, still as an adjective and somewhat casually and as an afterthought. Carlowitz “just lets the term slip out,” as Joachim Hamberger, editor of the new edition of Carlowitz’s book, aptly remarks. Nevertheless, the phrase sums up a problem that permeates the subsequent history of the sustainability concept: The accelerated consumption of natural resources, oriented towards short-term expectations, undermines the long-term ecological conditions of a sustainable society. It’s an irony of history that Carlowitz’s fears did not materialize: Coal was discovered as an alternative fuel before the dreaded wood shortage became widespread. And with the use of coal came the age of fossil fuels, the consequences and implications of which we are still grappling with today.
Growing awareness of the dark side of industrial modernity
At first, the concept of sustainability remained closely tied to the silvicultural and agricultural contexts that had shaped its beginnings. But industrialization and urbanization, the ongoing technological and industrial revolution, and the integration of global trade through the expansion of fossil-fuelled transport infrastructure drove social, economic, and environmental change in the 19th century. This lent Carlowitz’s use of the term, once closely related to forestry, a plausibility that extended far beyond its original context.
The second half of the 19th century saw the spread of coal mines and oil derricks, skies blackened by dust, waters contaminated by industrial waste, poor sanitary conditions in the working-class districts of sprawling cities, and fears of resource depletion and declining soil fertility in agriculture – all of which spurred an awareness of the dark side of industrial modernity and its extractive relationship with nature.
In 1864, George Perkins Marsh published his then widely acclaimed book Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Marsh believed that although industrial civilization had greatly increased humanity’s “destructive agency”, the exhaustion of natural resources would force people to acknowledge “the necessity of preserving what is left, if not restoring what has been wantonly wasted.” Confrontation with the limits of nature’s malleability and with the consequences of environmental destruction, according to Marsh’s optimistic interpretation of progress, would trigger a cathartic process that would eventually force people to use natural resources more sustainably.
Growth, resource depletion, and intergenerational justice
Marsh subsequently became a key point of reference for the North American environmental and conservation movement. It is therefore hardly a coincidence that, some ninety years later, he hovered like a ghost over an interdisciplinary symposium in Princeton in June 1955 that discussed “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth”.
At that conference, which, in a sense, provided a contemporary diagnosis of what is now referred to as the “Great Acceleration in the Anthropocene”, human geographer Carl O. Sauer stated that “increase of ‘output’” had become the unquestioned “goal of society”. “What we need more perhaps,” Sauer warned, “is an ethic and aesthetic under which man, practicing the qualities of prudence and moderation, may indeed pass on to posterity a good Earth.” In the face of intensified depletion of raw materials by industrial mass production and the consumer society of the post-war period, Sauer set in motion the momentum of intergenerational justice in the then nascent environmental debate.
The hour of the “limits to growth”
It was this perception of the problem that was increasingly captured by means of the sustainability concept in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period in particular, the concept developed enormous potential for integration. It merged the previously largely separate debates on the different threats to nature to form the perception of an overarching “environmental problem” and bundled together what environmental historian Patrick Kupper refers to as the “1970s diagnosis”.
This process was accelerated not least by a remarkable surge in international committees and reports, which can be seen as an indicator of the urgency of global environmental policy interventions: In 1972, the Club of Rome pointed to the “limits to growth”, and in the same year, the United Nations organized its first international conference on the human environment in Stockholm. Also in the same year, Switzerland saw the foundation of the interdisciplinary working group “New Analyses for Growth and Environment” (Neue Analysen für Wachstum und Umwelt, abbreviated as NAWU), which a few years later concluded in its “NAWU Report” that the capitalist economy’s “growth imperative” was incompatible with sustainable development.
Entry into the global environmental policy discourse
1987 finally saw the publication of the report by the United Nations “Brundtland Commission”, which boiled down previously circulating sustainability concepts into a catchy and since then widely cited formula. According to this, sustainable development was “development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” and “to satisfy their aspirations for a better life.”
The impact of this definition lay less in its precision, as it failed to consider that neither needs nor aspirations are historical constants, and that the reasons for social conflict surrounding environmental issues may lie precisely in diverging ideas about needs and lifestyles.
Far more important for the Brundtland Report’s considerable resonance was its historical context: The year before, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster had highlighted the dangers of large-scale technical projects, and the Schweizerhalle chemical accident had raised public awareness of such environmental hazards in Switzerland as well. With the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and the subsequent establishment of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, sustainability had now fully entered the global environmental policy discourse, and it has remained there ever since.
Conceptual history provides orientation
However, the success of the sustainability concept is in danger of becoming a Pyrrhic victory when one considers the recent developments presented somewhat capriciously at the beginning of this blog post. When sustainability risks degenerating into a stock phrase – used to feign serious concern about the environment while blithely continuing to worship the fetish of growth and accumulation – then historical objection, orientation, and clarification become imperative.
The same applies in view of recent efforts to reframe and reduce the complex root causes of the current environmental and climate crisis to migration – in the (misguided) belief that this will eliminate the need to talk about capitalism, land grabbing, social justice, and global inequality.
The struggle for interpretative hegemony regarding sustainability will most likely accompany us for some time yet. The attempts to hijack the term, deflect attention, and dilute its meaning may be frustrating, but the term’s conceptual history provides important orientation in at least three respects:
- First, the very fact that the concept of sustainability is being contested and that no political movement can afford to ignore it any longer is a clear indicator that it has become a fundamental concept in political debate.
- Second, a look back at the history of the term makes it clear that the material issues that have been addressed by means of the sustainability concept in recent decades have a far longer history, dating back to the beginnings of the modern era. Seeking to understand these precursors also means resisting the fallacy that sustainability has become a societal challenge only in recent decades. The widespread use of the term may be fairly recent, but the problems it addresses are far older and have been discussed repeatedly and in a nuanced manner since the beginning of the modern era and throughout industrialization.
- Third, awareness of the historical depth of the sustainability concept encourages critical and persistent questioning. With this history in mind, at least we won’t be fobbed off with empty phrases.
* Dr. Juri Auderset teaches 19th- and 20th-century history at the University of Bern’s Institute of History.
