Routledge Handbook of the History of Sustainability

Jeremy L. Caradonna, Jeremy L. Caradonna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134866557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Economia ambientale

The Routledge Handbook of the History of Sustainability is a far-reaching survey of the deep and contemporary history of sustainability. This innovative resource will help to define the history of sustainability as an identifiable field. It provides a unique resource for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars, and delivers essential context for understanding the current state and future path of the sustainability movement.

The history of sustainability is an increasingly important domain within the discipline of history, which draws on an interdisciplinary set of fields, ranging from energy studies, transportation, and urbanism to environmental history, economics, and philosophy. Key sections in this handbook cover the historiography of sustainability, resilience and collapse in historical societies, the deep roots of sustainability (seventeenth century to nineteenth century), the recent history of sustainability (twentieth century to present), and core issues and key debates in sustainability.

This handbook is an invaluable research and teaching tool for those interested in the history and development of sustainability and an essential resource for the many sustainability studies programs that now exist in the world's universities.

 

PART I

Introduction

1
INTRODUCTION

Jeremy L. Caradonna

 

 

 

 

 

It is my great pleasure to introduce this captivating and engaging volume to readers. The Routledge Handbook of the History of Sustainability will become a foundational work in both the historical study of sustainability and in the many interdisciplinary “sustainability studies” programs that are now found in universities across the globe. It brings together some of the leading scholars who study the history, theory, and practice of sustainability, and introduces students and a general readership to historical trends, core issues, and key debates in the field. It can be considered the “state of the art” on the deep roots and recent history of sustainability, which, as a movement, will continue to have a major impact on twenty-first-century global society.

In some ways, this volume will serve as a reference work that is meant to complement the recent research in the field, including the edited volume Understanding Sustainable Development (2014) and the multi-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability (2009–12), but also more focused monographs, such as Ulrich Grober’s Sustainability: A Cultural History (2012) and my own Sustainability: A History (2014).¹ The chapters in this volume are argument-driven essays, not neutral-sounding textbook entries, that touch on a wide range of subjects, with the intention of introducing readers to the complex, global heritage of sustainability. In putting together a team of contributors, we have sought broad coverage in terms of subject matter, timeframes, and geographies. Thus, readers will find chapters on subjects as diverse as sustainable design, economics and critiques of growth-based capitalism, climate change, water and irrigation, urbanism, agriculture, transportation, sustainability metrics, theoretical approaches to the concept, and more. In terms of the timeframe, this volume includes chapters on ancient civilizations, pre-contact indigenous societies, and early modern Europe, in addition to many chapters on recent and contemporary history. Geographically, the volume covers aspects of Aboriginal and colonial North America, Western Europe and the Mediterranean, the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the Ancient Maya, the Islamic Middle East, India, and various aspects of international and world history. Despite the wide coverage of this volume, it should not be considered “complete.” We would have liked to include more chapters on Asia, Africa, Aborigine Australia, Amazonia, and the history of sustained-yield forestry in Japan and China, in addition to other subjects. There simply is not enough space to cover it all. But our hope is that readers will use these chapters as entryways into subjects and geographical areas that interest them.

The present volume operates with three assumptions. The first is that multiple societies, especially indigenous and pre-industrial ones, lived sustainably for very long stretches of time, and that societal resilience merits more in-depth analyses. Understanding why and how historical societies absorbed disturbance and thrived for millennia is as important as understanding why some historical societies collapsed. The second assumption is that the modern sustainability movement has multiple points of origin. In a sense, the ideal of “living sustainably” was a standard feature of many world societies that co-existed with neighbors and “earth-others” and who fruitfully shaped ecosystems to meet their own needs. But in a more concrete sense, the sustainability movement has origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when societies as diverse as Japan and the Germanic states developed new approaches to “resource management.” For instance, Europeans came to understand that the industrially driven economy had wiped out forest resources and that a “sustained yield” of timber was a precondition for a prosperous society. The fact that our modern word for sustainability – the German Nachhaltigkeit – was coined in the eighteenth century, in the context of a timber crisis, is really no coincidence. The third assumption is that sustainability cannot be reduced to simply one set of principles, one set of institutions, or one legacy. In this volume, sustainability is treated as a discourse, an objective, a philosophy, a historical process, a cultural movement, a critique of industrial society, and a presumed historical state of being. The historiographical essay that I have written lays out a basic definition of sustainability, but the full breadth and complexity of the concept is evident in these pages.

The volume is divided into six sections. In addition to this Introduction (Part I), the sections are entitled “Historiography of Sustainability” (Part II), “Sustainability, Resilience, and Collapse in Historical Societies” (Part III), “The Roots of Sustainability” (Part IV), “The Recent History of Sustainability” (Part V), and “Core Issues and Key Debates on Sustainability” (Part VI). Part II includes one chapter, an overview of the historiography of sustainability – that is, the way in which sustainability now constitutes an historical field. Part III comprises three chapters, each of which focuses on different pre-industrial or indigenous societies. The chapters in this section address what I call “historical sustainability,” which is the attempt to understand long-term resilience and/or demographic collapse (that is, unsustainability) in historical societies. This approach has been developed by Jared Diamond and Jospeh A. Tainter, the latter of whom is a contributor here, and often contains insights about how the demise of certain pre-industrial societies relates to our own unsustainable, industrialized world. Part IV consists of four chapters that address, in historicist terms, the roots of the modern sustainability movement. The chapter by Tarik M. Quadir assesses the role of environmental sustainability in the history of Islamic thought, while the remaining chapters argue that a concern for sustainability derives, in part, from Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution Europe. Part V features nine chapters that bring the analysis up to the present day. These works should be considered “contemporary history” and deal principally with the development of sustainability from the 1970s to the present. They reveal the ways in which sustainability has affected everything from transportation, design, analytical metrics, and urbanism to higher education, water management, economic thought, social movements, and international institutions and policies. Finally, the eight chapters in Part VI are generally focused on concepts, debates, and interpretations surrounding sustainability: problems with fossil-fueled economic growth, the concept of “degrowth,” climate change and its human dimensions, rethinking sustainable agriculture, and theoretical reconceptualizations of the concept of sustainability.

This volume is both timely and important. As I write this, the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere approaches 410. The momentous Paris climate accord was signed by most of the world’s countries, and all of the major emitters, but must be ratified or approved by individual states, and then implemented according to self-determined national plans (to limit global warming to below 2°C). The recent right-wing political backlash in many countries threatens to derail not only the accord but positive climate action more generally. Despite the unprecedented growth in renewable energies, finite and pollutive fossil fuels still supply the vast majority of the world’s energy needs. The population of Homo sapiens approaches 7.5 billion, and much of the demographic growth is occurring in countries that aspire to Western (high-impact) levels of consumption. Cities are sprawling, species are going extinct, and plastics now choke the world’s marine species, which in any case have to cope with increased ocean acidification. Climate refugees are fleeing drought, dwindling resources, and war. Their suffering has sparked a severe humanitarian crisis with no end on the horizon. And so on. The world’s socioecological problems are severe and overwhelming, which is why it is important that a robust and critical scholarship on sustainability exists. Our approach is historical because we believe that knowledge of the deep and recent history of sustainability provides essential wisdom about how we got to where we are and where we should go from here. Thus, ultimately, the hope is that this volume will do its part to empower students, voters, activists, members of faith communities, and political actors to take positive steps toward creating a more sustainable world.

Note

1John Blewitt, ed., Understanding Sustainable Development, 2nd edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Berkshire Publishing, Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group, 2009–14); Ulrich Grober, Sustainability: A Cultural History (Totnes: Green Books, 2012); Jeremy L. Caradonna, Sustainability: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

References

Berkshire Publishing. Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group, 2009–2014.

Blewitt, John, ed. Understanding Sustainable Development. 2nd edition. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

Caradonna, Jeremy L. Sustainability: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Grober, Ulrich. Sustainability: A Cultural History. Totnes: Green Books, 2012.

PART II

Historiography of sustainability

2
SUSTAINABILITY

A new historiography

Jeremy L. Caradonna

Sustainability has become a ubiquitous buzzword in our society. We now see the concept publicized in grocery stores, on university campuses, in corporate headquarters, in governmental departments of environmental management, in natural resource management, and in numerous other domains. Indeed, sustainability has been a standard feature of public and political discourse ever since the United Nations adopted the concept in a series of conventions and reports in the 1980s. By the 1990s it had become a familiar term in the world of policy wonkery—we might think of President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, for example—but sustainability had also garnered its first criticism. In 1996, the environmentalist Bill McKibben called sustainability a “buzzless buzzword” that was “born partly in an effort to obfuscate” and which would never catch on in mainstream society: “[It] has never made the leap to lingo—and never will. It’s time to figure out why, and then figure out something else.” (McKibben, for his part, preferred the term “maturity.”)¹

Sustainability has certainly been, at times, misused and greenwashed, but it is quite clear that McKibben was incorrect about its decline. Since the year 2000, over 5,000 published books have included either the words “sustainable” or “sustainability” in the title, compared to zero such books before about 1976.² A quick Google search for the word “sustainable” returns nearly 150,000,000 hits. Moreover, the sustainability movement, as we should now call it, has gained a level of respect and legitimacy that is difficult to dispute. The scholarly fields associated with sustainability have expanded dramatically, new tools and methods have appeared, such as Ecological Footprint Analysis, the Triple Bottom Line, and the Genuine Progress Indicator, which help define, measure, and assess sustainability, and a broad range of governments, businesses, NGOs, and communities have embraced the principles of sustainable living. Virtually every major institution in the industrialized world has either a department or office of sustainability. In a sense, this environmental discourse has won out over rival conceptions of humanity’s relationship to the natural world, even if industrial society remains, by any measure, far from sustainable.³

A growing consciousness about the pitfalls of industrialization has stimulated interest in sustainability. The so-called developed world is 250 years into an ecological assault on the planet that was triggered by the Industrial Revolution and which has forced a serious reappraisal of the values of industrialism and growth-based capitalism. According to several influential scholars, we...