The Invention of Sustainability
Nature and Destiny, c.1500–1870

A groundbreaking study of how sustainability became a social and political problem, and how to think about it today.

Paul Warde (Author)

9781107151147, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 July 2018

416 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.8 cm, 0.75 kg

'… a beautifully written, deftly argued, and richly nuanced book … It is accessible for students, enlightening for scholars, and necessary reading for both.' Dagomar Degroot, Metascience

The issue of sustainability, and the idea that economic growth and development might destroy its own foundations, is one of the defining political problems of our era. This groundbreaking study traces the emergence of this idea, and demonstrates how sustainability was closely linked to hopes for growth, and the destiny of expanding European states, from the sixteenth century. Weaving together aspirations for power, for economic development and agricultural improvement, and ideas about forestry, climate, the sciences of the soil and of life itself, this book sets out how new knowledge and metrics led people to imagine both new horizons for progress, but also the possibility of collapse. In the nineteenth century, anxieties about sustainability, often driven by science, proliferated in debates about contemporary and historical empires and the American frontier. The fear of progress undoing itself confronted society with finding ways to live with and manage nature.

1. Living from the land, c.1500–1620
2. Governing the woods, c.1500–1700
3. Ambition and experiment, c.1590–1740
4. Paths to sustained growth, c.1650–1760
5. Nature translated, c.1670–1830
6. Theories of circulation, c.1740–1800
7. Political economies of nature, c.1760–1840
8. History and destiny, c.1700–1870
Conclusion: ends and beginnings.

Subject Areas: Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], History of ideas [JFCX]