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Sustainability
SUSTAINABILITY

A History
Revised and Updated Edition

Jeremy L. Caradonna
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Jeremy L. Caradonna 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932800
ISBN 978–0–19–762503–3 (pbk)
ISBN 978–0–19–762502–6 (hbk)
ISBN 978–0–19–762505–7 (epub)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197625026.001.0001
To my family, my friends, and all the changemakers
courageous enough to take risks.
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. Sources of Sustainability in the Early Modern World
2. The Industrial Revolution and Its Discontents
3. Eco-Warriors: The Environmental Movement and the Growth of
Ecological Consciousness, 1960s–1970s
4. Eco-Nomics
5. From Concept to Movement
6. Sustainability Today: 2000–Present
7. The Future: 10 Challenges for Sustainability

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks goes, first and foremost, to my wife, Hannah, for her love
and tireless support. Our daughters, Stella and Mia, inspired every
step of the research and writing of this book. I am hopeful that the
world they leave behind one day will be more sustainable than the
one they inherited. My parents and in-laws provided much-needed
encouragement throughout the writing process. Tim Bent, Keely
Latcham, Amy Whitmer, and the entire Oxford University Press
(OUP) staff were a pleasure to work with; their guidance
strengthened the manuscript immensely. The manuscript (or
portions of it) was also read, critiqued, and improved by numerous
colleagues, friends, and collaborators. I thank them all for their input
and support. This book is a revised version of the original, which
appeared first in 2014 in hardback, and then in 2016 in a slightly
revised paperback. I wish to express my continued gratitude to the
good people of OUP. The manuscript has been updated to reflect
new research and changes that have taken place in our world over
the past several years, as the sustainability movement has become
more prominent, more globally accepted, more diverse, and even
more devoted to urgent action.
SUSTAINABILITY
 Introduction

“We must aim for a continuous, resilient, and sustainable use [of forests]. .
. .”
—Hans Carl von Carlowitz, 17131

“Sustainability is a lifestyle designed for permanence.”

—Chris Turner, 20102

As hard as it might be to believe, the world once made do without

the words “sustainable” and “sustainability.” Today they’re nearly
ubiquitous. At the grocery store we shop for “sustainable foods” that
were produced, of course, from “sustainable agriculture”; ministries
of natural resources all over the world at least claim to produce
“sustainable yields” in forestry and fisheries; the United Nations (UN)
has long touted “sustainable development” as a strategy for global
stability; consumers increasingly care about “sustainable lifestyles.”
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 wonkery—
President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development, for
instance—but the embrace wasn’t universal. Bill McKibben, perhaps
the most prominent environmentalist of the past few decades, 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 McKibben’s view, sustainability “never made
the leap to lingo”—and never would. “It’s time to figure out why, and
then figure out something else.” (McKibben preferred the term
“maturity.”)3 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.” It’s difficult
to find books published before 1976 that employ these words as
titles or even as keywords.4 No book in the English language used
either term in the title before 1970. 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, and a
quick Google search for “sustainability” returns hundreds of millions
of hits. Another way to measure the prominence of sustainability is
to look at the growing number of sustainability thought leaders who
have captured global attention, including the intrepid and inspiring
Greta Thunberg.
Sustainability is no longer a buzzword because it has become so
normalized and institutionalized. Governments, organizations,
communities, and individuals all over the world have sought to align
themselves with the basic principles of what they call
“sustainability”—a 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 world’s third major
socio-economic transformation, after the Neolithic 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. Those who use
it argue that we are over 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, following Paul Crutzen, we now live in the Age of
the Anthropocene, in which “human activity” has become the
“dominant driver of the natural environment.”5 We are or have
become a kind of natural disaster.
The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), a network of scientists whose job it is to sort through and
summarize the state of climate science, has made it clear that
Earth’s climate system is warming steadily due to “anthropogenic
greenhouse gas concentrations,” such as carbon dioxide, methane,
and nitrous oxide, all of which trap heat (at infrared wavelengths)
that would otherwise escape from the Earth’s atmosphere. The
IPCC’s warnings over the past few years have become ever more
stark, disconcerted, and adamant. Here is the Fifth Assessment
Report (2014): “It is extremely likely that human influence has been
the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th
century,” the report concludes.6 A more recent “Special Report on
Global Warming of 1.5°C” confirms that “human activities are
estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming
above pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8°C to 1.2°C.
Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it
continues to increase at the current rate.”7 Even more disconcerting
is the fact that the rate of change is accelerated in certain parts of
the globe, including the arctic. According to the Government of
Canada, the annual average temperature in northern Canada has
increased by approximately 2.3°C, portending dramatic changes to
the flora, fauna, and humans who call the arctic home.8 The IPCC’s
Sixth Assessment Report (2022) has upped the ante by describing
climate change as inevitable and irreversible, with only the severity
and lasting consequences in question.9 It is not an “if” but a “how
bad” situation.
To be clear, climate change is a “now” problem and will likely
preoccupy our species for the rest of the century, if not indefinitely.
It has already begun to alter natural systems and the environment in
troubling ways: increasingly unpredictable temperatures and
weather patterns, changes in the hydrological cycle that generate
droughts and larger and more frequent storms, rising sea levels from
melting ice caps, the die-off of some species, and so on. Climate
change is also magnified by “positive feedback cycles” (the loss of
reflective ice cover, the release of natural stores of methane, etc.)
that act as a domino effect and accelerate the speed of global
warming. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow, average
global temperatures could rise by multiple degrees by 2100,
depending on the modelling assumptions and how humans choose
to face this crisis.10 Moreover, and sticking with Canada, a report
from 2020 called “Tip of the Iceberg” shows the mounting social and
economic costs of these climatic changes. The number of
catastrophic weather events in Canada has more than tripled since
the 1980s and in the 2010s there was over $14 billion in disaster
costs, weakening the overall economy.11 The diverse and mounting
costs of climate change is a theme in this book.
Our global footprint as a species continues to expand. When I
first wrote this book’s manuscript in 2013, the population of Homo
sapiens had just surpassed the 7 billion mark, in 2012. Now, writing
in 2021, the population is fast approaching 8 billion. The impact of
human beings on the planet is not shared equitably worldwide –
high-consuming, industrialized countries have a disproportionate
impact – but regardless, our cumulative impact exacts a heavy toll
on the planet. Human-generated pollutants, waste, and toxins have
accumulated to alarming rates, and our species now appropriates
over 30% of the net primary production (NPP) of organic material—
that is, we use or alter much of what nature has to offer—which has
resulted in devastating consequences for the world’s ecosystems.12
The overexploitation of fossil fuels is another theme in this book, as
a driver of climate change, a source of unsustainable development,
and the cause of a public health crisis. The burning of fossil fuels is
not only the main culprit for anthropogenic climate change, but it’s
also killing our species in a more immediate sense. A recent study
shows that, in 2018, 8 million deaths were caused worldwide from
fossil fuel pollution, or 18 percent of total global deaths.13
 This is what sustainability is meant to counteract: a moribund
economic system that has drained the world of many of its finite
resources, including fresh water and crude oil, generated a
meltdown in global financial systems, exacerbated social inequality
in many parts of the world, impaired public health, and driven
human civilization to the brink of catastrophe by unwisely advocating
for endless economic growth at the expense of resources and
essential ecosystem services.14
This book refers to “sustainists”—people ranging from scientists
and engineers to economists, educators, policymakers, and social
activists—who have taken on the many challenges listed above.
What they seek—and how—is always a subject of intense debate,
even among their own ranks, but the broad contours are simple
enough to articulate: safe and livable cities with abundant green
spaces and clean water; buildings with low embodied carbon that
produce or consume clean energy; public transportation networks to
decrease reliance on cars; agricultural systems that can produce
enough food to meet human needs without genetically modified
organisms (GMOs), agrochemicals, monocultures, or soil fertility
losses; a healthy environment with functional ecosystem services; an
economy that values human flourishing and wellbeing over
unequitable biggering. To sustainists, sustainability means planning
for the future and rejecting that which threatens the lives and
wellbeing of future generations. It means creating a “green,” “low-
carbon,” and “resilient” economy that runs on renewable energy and
does not support growth that would impair the ability for humans
and other organisms to live in perpetuity on the Earth.15 For many it
has a utopic dimension: decentralized forms of democracy that
support peace, equality, social justice, and an end to “environmental
racism.”16
In short, for those who embrace sustainability in the fullest sense
—as an environmental, social, economic, and political ideal—we’re at
a crossroads in our civilization. There are two potential paths ahead:
continue with business as usual, ignore the science of climate
change, and pretend that our economic system isn’t on life support,
or remake and redefine our society along the lines of sustainability.
This is a book about the making of the sustainability movement,
and to cover what is involved, I have to use the term “movement” in
the broadest sense of the word. Protesters marching and holding
signs or occupying public spaces are only part of it. Rather, it
encompasses the development and application of the concept of
sustainability in a broad range of domains: urbanism, agriculture and
ecological design, forestry, fisheries, economics, trade, population,
housing and architecture, transportation, business, education, social
justice, and so on. This book considers how sustainability went from
being a relatively marginal idea to being the centerpiece of
international accords; a top priority for governments, corporations,
and nonprofit organizations; and a philosophy of hope and resilience
with widespread appeal.
This book will give a historical account of the growth of this
movement: where it came from and how it took shape. While it is of
rather recent origin, the ideas that undergird it developed over long
periods of time. The UN conferences and commissions that have put
sustainability on the agenda of the international community since the
1990s were, in a sense, the result of three centuries of debate about
the relationship between humanity and the natural world. We cannot
understand the contemporary sustainability movement without first
understanding the historical events that made sustainability
thinkable.
The conceptual roots of sustainability stretch back at least to the
late seventeenth century. One of the main goals of this book is to
uncover the intellectual developments that have shaped the
movement.17
We should not assume that sustainability was a necessary
outcome or that industrial society was destined to embrace this idea
to the degree that it has, but the growing importance of the
“sustainability revolution” is tied to its historical development.18 Most
studies of the concept of sustainability, by contrast, dedicate less
than a paragraph to discussing its past, and many writers seem to
assume that the idea appeared, ex nihilo, for the first time in 1987,
when Gro Harlem Brundtland and the UN-backed World Commission
on Environment and Development released a hugely influential
document called Our Common Future, which offered the first well-
developed definition of “sustainable development.”
Yet the definition of sustainability has been a subject of intense
debate ever since the late 1980s. Is it an end point or a process?
What is considered sustainable versus unsustainable? Who gets to
make these determinations? It has become a commonplace in the
literature on the subject to suggest that the definition is too vague
and thus susceptible to exploitation and “greenwashing.”19 It is
certainly true that sustainability is a broadly conceived philosophy. In
this sense, it is a bit like “democracy,” “justice,” or “community,” all of
which are discursive fields that suggest a set of conditions rather
than a specific outcome. As we will see, in the marketplace of ideas,
breadth has been advantageous for sustainability.
A helpful place to begin is with etymology. Both “sustainable” and
“sustainability” derive from the Latin sustinēre, which combines the
words sub (up from below) and tenēre (to hold), and means to
“maintain,” “sustain,” “support,” “endure,” or, perhaps most
poignantly, “to restrain.” From Latin, the word passed to Old French
as sostenir and then to modern French as soutenir. (Similar linguistic
developments occurred in other Romance languages in the Middle
Ages.)20 From French, the word passed to English as the verb “to
sustain” and was in widespread usage by the Early Modern period; it
can be found in John Evelyn’s influential treatise on forestry called
Sylva (1664), for instance. The Oxford English Dictionary states that
the adjective “sustainable” entered common usage in 1965 via an
economics dictionary that used the phrase “sustainable growth.” The
noun “sustainability” entered English in the early 1970s. The coining
of these neologisms is an important indication that this verb (“to
sustain”) had developed by the latter part of the twentieth century
into an identifiable concept (maintaining human society over the
long term). It is also worth noting the parallel etymology of the word
in German: nachhaltig (sustainable) and Nachhaltigkeit
(sustainability) both entered the Saxon dialect of German in the
eighteenth century via Hans Carl von Carlowitz’s works on sustained
yield forestry.
Nearly all of the definitions of sustainability that have circulated in
recent years emphasize an ecological point of view—the notion that
human society and economy are intimately connected to the natural
environment. Humans must live harmoniously with the natural world
if they—or we—hope to persist, adapt, and thrive indefinitely on the
Earth. Rather than viewing society and the environment as separate
or even antagonistic spheres, the concept of sustainability assumes
that humans and their economic systems are indelibly linked. The
models that have been used to represent sustainability have
changed over time. From the 1980s to the early twenty-first century,
the main model was a fairly simple but powerful tripartite Venn
diagram that illustrated the interconnectedness of the “three Es”:
environment, economy, and equity or social equality (see Figure 1).
This model was endorsed by the 2005 UN World Summit and
appears in countless books, websites, and ecological models.
Sometimes a fourth “E,” education, is added to the diagram to reflect
the importance of education in establishing a sustainable society.
 Figure 1. The three Es of sustainability represented in a
diagram. A “sustainable” society requires a balance between and
equal concern for the environment, social equality, and the
economy.

A second model reconceptualizes the diagram as a series of

concentric circles, in which the environment is seen as the
foundation of sustainability, with society and the economy nested
inside (see Figure 2). The latter model reflects the critique by
sustainability economists, such as Peter Victor and Herman Daly,
who argue that society and the economy are supported by and could
not exist without the environment, and therefore that the
environment should take conceptual priority in any model of
sustainability. As Daly puts it, “All economic systems are subsystems
within the big biophysical system of ecological interdependence.”21
The most recent model to gain widespread recognition is the
“doughnut model” popularized by the sustainability economist, Kate
Raworth.22 It presents a more complex model for thinking about a
“safe and just space for humanity,” wedged between an “ecological
ceiling” and a “social foundation.” The ceiling is based on the nine
planetary boundaries identified by a team of scientists led by Johan
Rockström and was presented in an influential article from 2009. The
doughnut has been used extensively by the UN and has been
adopted as a vision and guide by numerous jurisdictions worldwide,
from Nanaimo to Amsterdam.
 Figure 3. The Doughnut Model

Many economists, ecologists, scientists, and organizations have

offered more precise definitions of sustainability, and a few are
worth mentioning here.23 In 1989, the Swedish oncologist Karl-
Henrik Robèrt founded a highly influential organization called the
Natural Step that is dedicated to promoting a sustainable society.
Robèrt and his colleagues have outlined “four systems conditions for
sustainability” that guide their consulting and advocacy efforts
around the world.

Figure 2. This diagram places the environment at the foundation

of the model. It emphasizes that human society and the
economy cannot exist without the environment, and therefore it
takes conceptual priority.

In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing (1)

concentrations of substances extracted from the earth’s crust (digging), (2)
concentrations of substances produced by society (dumping), (3) degradation
by physical means (destroying), and (4) people are not subject to conditions
that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.24

The Natural Step uses a scientific framework to help uphold the

integrity of ecosystems and is geared toward shaping the practical
decisions of businesses, organizations, and governments. As such, it
says rather little about the role of individuals in creating a
sustainable society, which stands in contrast to some of the
definitions put forth by others.
Richard Heinberg, perhaps the world’s leading expert on peak oil
and a senior fellow-in-residence at the Post Carbon Institute, has
proposed five axioms (“self-evident truths”) of sustainability:

(1) Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will
collapse. (2) Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of
resources cannot be sustained. (3) To be sustainable, the use of renewable
resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of
natural replenishment. (4) To be sustainable, the use of nonrenewable
resources must proceed at a rate that is declining, and the rate of decline
must be greater than or equal to the rate of depletion. (5) Sustainability
requires that substances introduced into the environment from human
activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.25

One can see here the obvious affinities to the conditions laid out by
the Natural Step. Both definitions emphasize the need for society to
conserve resources, protect ecosystems, and minimize pollution,
although Heinberg’s definition lacks the element of social equity that
the Natural Step includes in its fourth condition.26
The physicist Albert A. Bartlett has developed perhaps the most
elaborate definition of sustainability, which involves several laws,
hypotheses, observations, and predictions and appeared in an essay
from 1997–1998 called “Reflections on Sustainability, Population
Growth, and the Environment—Revisited.” His definition is far too
complex to summarize neatly but it focuses on the risks that
unchecked population growth, economic growth, and fossil fuels
pose to long-term human existence on the planet. Bartlett is best
known for arguing that the term “sustainable growth” is an
oxymoron—a belief shared by many sustainability economists—and
for his sardonic contention that “modern agriculture is the use of
land to convert petroleum into food.” He concludes his discussion by
reiterating the need to limit population growth, to “make [economic]
growth pay for itself” and to “improve social justice and equity.”
What’s noteworthy about Bartlett’s definition is that it focuses less
on “the environment” and more on economic growth, population,
agriculture, and energy principles.27
Finally, there is John Dryzek’s interpretation of sustainability. In
Politics of the Earth, Dryzek argues that there are several competing
discourses on the environment in current circulation. Dryzek borrows
the term “discourse” from the French philosopher Michel Foucault,
who used the word not in its ordinary meaning of “dialogue” or
“debate” but to signify a way of talking about a body of knowledge,
one that takes shape over time, generates categories and
terminology, and has, at least in theory, a very formative impact on a
culture’s (or an individual’s) sense of what is true, real, and
essential.28 Dryzek argues that there has been a shift in
environmental discourses over the past few decades, away from a
focus on wilderness, preservation, and population growth and
toward energy supply, animal rights, species extinction,
anthropogenic climate change, depletion of the ozone layer, toxic
waste, the protection of whole ecosystems, environmental justice,
food safety, and genetically modified organisms. In the course of this
shift, several relatively new discourses have taken shape, alongside
an older Prometheanism (the idea that natural resources are
unlimited and markets can solve all environmental problems): green
radicalism, survivalism, problem solving, and sustainability. Dryzek
defines the latter as an “imaginative and reformist” discourse that
attempts to eliminate the conflict between economic and
environmental values. He also demonstrates the pluralism of
sustainability and the deep-seated disagreements—on such topics as
economic growth—that take place within it.29
Dryzek thinks of sustainability as a broad debate rather than a
specific model, system, or idea. Nonetheless, there are a number of
common terms, categories, and principles that recur in discussions
about sustainability. The four main features or principles of these
discussions are set out below and form the intellectual foundation of
the sustainability movement. Identifying these four features is
therefore key to understanding what this book historicizes.
HUMAN SOCIETY, THE ECONOMY, AND THE NATURAL
ENVIRONMENT ARE INTERCONNECTED
This is the essential idea in the sustainability models shown above. It
has roots in the science of ecology, which, as Donald Worster has
shown in Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, stretches
back to the eighteenth century, even before the word “oecologie”
was coined in 1866.30 Ideas about “nature’s economy” have passed
through several stages of intellectual development since the 1700s.
The idea of an ecosystem, in which living organisms and nonliving
components are tied together by nutrient cycles and energy flows, is
a relatively new idea in ecology and one that has had a profound
impact on the “systems thinking” of sustainability. The three Es is
essentially an ecological idea that stresses the dynamic interaction
between human communities, the flow of resources, and the natural
environment. The doughnut is but a more complex framing of the
same basic idea.
Sustainability involves more than “the environment”; it is equally
inclusive of social sustainability (often summarized as well-being,
equality, democracy, and justice) and the economics of wellbeing,
but above all the interconnectedness of these domains.31 Indeed,
the field of sustainable development has generated overlapping
definitions of economic, environmental, and social sustainability. The
economic dimension requires, for instance, a system that can
produce goods and services on a continuous basis, avoid excessive
debt, and balance the demands of the different sectors of the
economy. The environmental dimension requires the maintenance of
a stable resource base, the preservation of renewable resources and
the “sinks” that process pollution, and the safeguarding of
biodiversity and essential ecosystem services. Finally, the social
dimension of sustainability involves a range of factors, including a
fair distribution of resources, equal opportunities for all citizens,
social justice, health, mental well-being and the ability to live a safe
and meaningful life, access to education, gender equality, democratic
institutions, good governance, and political participation.32 In short,
for a society to be considered sustainable, it must address not only
environmental but also social and economic issues.

A SOCIETY WILL RESPECT ECOLOGICAL LIMITS OR FACE COLLAPSE

The idea of limits is a direct response to the assumption in classical
economics and industrialism that nature is essentially a cornucopia,
that natural resources can never run out (or that market prices and
technology will always “save us”), that overconsumption is not a
problem, and that the human population can continue to grow
indefinitely. As economist Julian Simon put it in 1997, “The material
conditions in life will continue to get better for most people, in most
countries, most of the time, indefinitely.”33 Economists and ecologists
began to question economic and population growth in the mid-
twentieth century, but the work that is most closely associated with
these concerns is the Club of Rome’s 1972 bombshell, The Limits to
Growth. In that book, systems theorists Donella Meadows, Dennis
Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III argued that
the world’s growth-obsessed society was hitting a wall. “If the
present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food
production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to
growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100
years. The most probable result will be rather sudden and
uncontrolled decline in both population and industrial capacity,” they
wrote. Jared Diamond’s Collapse reminds us what happens to
societies that live beyond their means.34
The iconoclastic work of the Club of Rome, combined with the
writings of other ecological economists in the late 1960s and 1970s,
challenged conventional economic thinking and forced a global
debate on the drawbacks of growth.35 The basic idea that humans
need to live within limits is now a basic assumption for sustainists,
as well as ecologists, even though divisions on the question of
economic growth remain marked.36 In the 1990s, Daly laid out three
simple rules that define the limits to energy and material throughput
that are now common fare in the literature on sustainability:
 • For a renewable resource—soil, forest, fish—the sustainable
rate of use can be no greater than the rate of regeneration of
its source.
• For a nonrenewable resource—fossil fuel, high-grade mineral
ores, fossil groundwater—the sustainable rate of use can be
no greater than the rate at which a renewable resource, used
sustainably, can be substituted for it.
• For a pollutant the sustainable rate of emission can be no
greater than the rate at which that pollutant can be recycled,
absorbed, or rendered harmless in its sink.37

A SOCIETY THAT HOPES TO STICK AROUND LONG TERM NEEDS TO

PLAN WISELY FOR THE FUTURE
The intergenerational aspect of the sustainability movement takes its
inspiration, in part, from the Iroquois Confederacy’s thousand-year-
old oral constitution that requires chiefs to consider the impact of
their decisions on distant future generations: “In every deliberation,
we must consider the impact on the seventh generation.” The idea
that a society should plan for the future—that it should not
“mortgage its future” or create undue burdens on future humans—is
part of the ethical consciousness of sustainability. Sustainability
advocates argue that actions likely to create social, economic, and
environmental harm—unchecked deforestation, the creation of
radioactive waste, emitting large quantities of ozone-depleting CFCs
and GHGs, and so on—are unethical because they force upon future
generations (in addition to our own) problems that would not have
otherwise existed. It is unethical to benefit at the expense of our
yet-to-be-born descendants. Our Common Future famously used
intergenerational language in its definition of “sustainable
development”: “Humanity has the ability to make development
sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own
needs.”38 The industrial ecologist John Ehrenfeld argues that we
need to assume the “possibility that human and other life will
flourish on the planet forever.”39
 A literary variant of this idea appears in Alan Weisman’s The
World Without Us, which suggests that human society should be
considered sustainable only if, in the event that all humans were
suddenly to disappear from the Earth, the remnants of society
wouldn’t impede the ability of other species (flora and fauna) to
flourish.40 As it stands now, a mass die-off of Homo sapiens would
have devastating effects on global ecosystems. Think of, for
instance, the more than 440 nuclear power plants worldwide that
could explode or melt down. But, more prosaically, sustainability
demands more prudence, more foresight, less entitlement, and less
selfishness in socio-political, economic, and environmental planning.
The growing interest in resilience and adaptation reflects the need to
plan long into the future.

LOCALIZE, DECENTRALIZE
Sustainability, as an idea and a movement, is a reaction against the
perceived unsustainability of industrial society (or at least many of
its core features). The proposed idea of returning to small-scale
energy production, local economies and agriculture, decentralized
decision making, and low-impact practices is not directed at, say, the
highlanders of New Guinea, who have lived in harmony with their
surroundings for over 40,000 years.41 The idea that “small is
beautiful” is a radical notion only in the context of a massive
industrial society that concentrates power in the hands of elites,
centralizes and transports resources over long distances, and
operates with the assumption that energy production must come
primarily from dirty and nonrenewable fossil fuels. Similarly, the “buy
local” movement is a reaction to the growing dominance of
international agro-business and industrial conglomerates. The idea
of going small and local—it’s almost always conceptualized as a
“return” of sorts—stems from an awareness that the conventional
practices of industrialism cannot continue in their present form
forever.42 Thus reemphasizing the small and the local is a way of
rejecting one of the core assumptions of the Industrial Revolution
and modernity: the idea that a large and centralized society running
on dirty energy is basically an unstoppable juggernaut. By contrast,
sustainists see industrial society as weak and vulnerable to collapse,
while the reorientation toward the local is offered as a strategy for
societal resilience.
The concept of sustainability is here heavily influenced by E. F.
Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered,
which made a huge splash in political and economic circles when it
was first published in 1973. Schumacher, who was the chief
economic advisor to the United Kingdom’s National Coal Board,
made an about-face against classical economics and attacked the
developed world’s centralized energy production, overreliance on
fossil fuels, public disempowerment, and the fanatical faith in
unlimited economic growth. “The substance of man cannot be
measured by Gross National Product,” he wrote in one famous
passage. Elsewhere he noted:

The economics of giantism and automation is a left-over of nineteenth-

century conditions and nineteenth-century thinking and it is totally incapable
of solving any of the real problems of today. An entirely new system of
thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily
to goods—(the goods will look after themselves!). It could be summed up in
the phrase, “production by the masses, rather than mass production.”

Schumacher took issue with all forms of centralized “giantism”—

totalitarianism, command economies, and oligarchic capitalism—and
offered a framework for a new economic system that focused on
small-scale political units and technologies, local decision making
and energy production, self-sufficiency, and the humanization of
work. “It is moreover obvious that men organized in small units will
take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than
anonymous companies or megalo-maniac governments which
pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate
quarry.”
Schumacher’s philosophy of economics had a huge impact on the
sustainability movement. But even beyond the economic
considerations, a return to the small and the local defines an ethos
of duty and empowerment. As Dryzek reminds us, sustainability
assumes action on the part of individuals—a decentralization of
responsibility—rather than a passive attitude that expects
governments or “someone else” to solve our problems. The idea of
“powering down”43 our society—of simplifying, of reappreciating
local culture and resources—has a multiplicity of applications that
range from food consumption (e.g., the 100-Mile Diet) and energy
creation (e.g., Net-Zero homes) to localized decision making
processes (e.g., municipal sustainability action plans and
neighborhood land use committees) and support for local and small
businesses.
The small and the local have been applied and interpreted in a
number of ways over the past few decades. Consider the ninth of
Holmgren’s permaculture design principles: “Use small and slow
solutions.” Rifkin touts the benefits of a “distributed low-carbon era”
and “lateral power” that is already replacing “the traditional,
hierarchical organization of economic and political power.”44 Lester R.
Brown advocates for “greater local self-reliance.”45 This is not to say
that the big and the centralized could not have their place in a
sustainable society; rather, it is a repudiation of the idea that society
must always have the centralized and large-scale technologies as
default modus operandi.
The sustainability movement generally functions with all four of
these assumptions in mind, although, of course, there is broad
debate about the specifics. Indeed, there is a surprising range of
viewpoints and conflicts that occur within the umbrella concept of
sustainability, as even the small sampling of literature and theories
discussed above suggests. This book will examine the contours and
complexities of how these concepts evolved and the origin of and
relationship between historical ideas and the current sustainability
movement.
I offer two final points. First, sustainability is not just another
term for environmentalism, nor is the history of sustainability the
same thing as environmental history.46 Sustainists are trained to look
at complex systems and find relationships between society,
economy, and the natural world. Sustainability and environmentalism
share a common history to a certain point, but the sources of
sustainability go well beyond the canon of thinkers who have shaped
the environmental movement (John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel
Carson, Barry Commoner, etc.). The history of sustainability is as
much social, political, and economic as it is environmental history.
Second, though the idea of sustainability has taken shape in
many parts of the world and the sustainability movement is today
fully globalized, this book deals primarily with Europe and North
America. This is not quite a global history. Non-“Western” societies
such as the Highlanders of New Guinea, the Iroquois Confederacy,
China, and Japan appear, but the focus is on the way in which
sustainability emerged as a constructive reaction to unsustainable
European and colonial industrial society.47 As noted above,
sustainability presupposes an industrial present that cannot endure—
the realization that current approaches will not hold up over time. It
is essentially a response to perceived deficiencies within modernity
and industrialism—“progress” defined as consumption, the
population explosion, environmental degradation, economic growth
at the expense of ecosystems, the extinction of species, extreme
social inequality, unstable economic systems, pollution, a throwaway
society, and so on. An inherently sustainable society does not need
an explicit sustainability movement. This is a book for and about
societies that are looking to restore balance and create stability.
Industrial societies can never go back to some idealized, pre-
industrial ecotopia. But by studying the history and development of
the sustainability movement, we can chart a path to a more
sustainable future.
 Chapter 1

Sources of Sustainability in the Early Modern

World

This chapter begins in the period that historians of Europe and the
Atlantic world call “early modernity” (seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries). It could have begun in the Middle Ages, with the hunting
reserves and protected forests established by European rulers in
Venice and elsewhere. It could start with an analysis of indigenous
societies, from Easter Island to the Maya, that failed to live
sustainably and experienced some form of demographic collapse. It
could even begin in antiquity, with Pliny the Elder and his
encyclopedic Natural History that tells us so much about Roman
conceptions of the natural world.
But we begin in the early modern period because of the clear
linkages between the modern sustainability movement of the
twenty-first century and the consciousness and practices that
developed in early modernity. After all, the concept of “sustainability”
was given a name in the early eighteenth century by a Saxon
bureaucrat who coined the term “Nachhaltigkeit” to describe the
practice of harvesting timber continuously from the same forest.
Indeed, sustained yield forestry took shape at this time not only in
Western Europe but also in Japan, around other parts of Asia, and
on colonial islands in both the West and East Indies. The practice of
exploiting forests sustainably was but one indication of an incipient
awareness about the value of living within biophysical limits and the
need to counteract resource overconsumption. Many documents that
survive from this period demonstrate that it was possible to have at
least a rudimentary idea about the complex relationship between
social well-being, the economy, and the natural world. That is, the
“systems thinking” of sustainability—the method of studying
complex, interrelated systems—clearly has roots that stretch back to
this largely pre-industrialized world.
In 1700, the global population of Homo sapiens was somewhere
between 600 million and 650 million. Beijing might have approached
a population of 1 million, which would have constituted a megacity
at the time, but most “cities” had fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.
Paris had been the largest city in Europe for some time, but London,
with its 575,000 souls, surpassed Paris around this time and
continued to swell. Still, most people on the planet lived either in
rural areas or in small settlements, even in fairly urbanized areas
such as Europe. Countless peasants would never glimpse a city.
There was no electricity, no telephones, no internal combustion
engines, no synthetic polymers, no fossil-fueled flying machines, and
no mass media, although there were a few newspapers and journals
in Europe and elsewhere.
Certainly, the pastoralist, hunter-gatherer, and agricultural
societies that dotted the globe all impacted the environments in
which they lived and worked. But in a world before industrial
manufacturing, plastic, nuclear waste, and synthetic chemicals,
pollution rates and environmental degradation were, on the whole,
considerably less severe than they are today.1 Based on the
pioneering work of William Cronon and other environmental
historians, though, we know that even pre-industrial indigenous
societies altered the landscapes that sustained them. Nature was not
in a state of static perfection before the arrival of European axes and
industry. As Cronon writes, “There has been no timeless wilderness
in a state of perfect change-lessness.”2 Indigenous societies in the
Americas used strategic felling for hunting (and for agriculture) and
practiced widespread agroforestry and other forms of ecosystem
cultivation.3 Even pre-industrial, medieval Europe faced the growing
problem of woodland loss. England was overwhelmingly deforested
by the thirteenth century, and in fact deforestation was already a
problem in many ancient societies, including Greece and the Roman
Republic.4 One recent estimate places woodland at only 16% of the
total land in eighteenth-century France, a country that had once
been covered in thick forests.5 Most of the world, especially the
Northern Hemisphere, had to cope with the effects of the Little Ice
Age that lasted from the fourteenth century to the early nineteenth
century, which created erratic temperatures and affected agricultural
production.6
All of this is to say that the world before the Industrial Revolution
had its ecological problems, too, even if they paled in comparison to
the crisis faced by the planet today. Many societies before the
nineteenth century dealt with deforestation, desertification, soil
erosion, silted rivers, urban air pollution, drought, and intermittent
crop failure. As Jared Diamond has argued in his best-selling book,
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a whole series of
global societies collapsed as a result, in part, of overstressing local
environments. Diamond formulates a five-point framework to
understand the collapse of such historical societies as those living on
Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, and Henderson Island (all located in
the South Pacific), the Anasazi Native Americans who lived in
present-day New Mexico, the Maya civilization of the Yucatán and
surrounding areas, and the Vikings who populated southern
Greenland. The five factors that he identifies include environmental
damage, climate change (man-made or non-man-made), hostile
neighbors, friendly trade partners (or lack thereof), and the society’s
response to its environmental problems.7 The final point is an
important one because reacting to a problem requires that a society
or part of it first acknowledge its own faults. A certain consciousness
needs to develop before anything can be done to get off the path of
unsustainability.
It is the contention of this chapter that at least some early
modern pre-industrialized (or barely industrialized) societies—or
some elements within those societies—recognized the patterns of
what we would today call “unsustainability” and began to react to
those patterns with constructive criticism and innovative practices.
What’s so striking about the eighteenth century, especially in Europe,
is that it witnessed the genesis of an unsustainable, growth-based,
industrialized society as well as a powerful set of practices and
counter-discourses that charted a different path. To be clear, this is
not to imply that England, France, or the Germanic states were (or
are) sustainable societies simply because they began to recognize
and respond to some unsustainable practices. Although none of
those countries have collapsed in the way that Norse settlements did
in Greenland, they also shouldn’t be romanticized as ecotopias. Paris
and London both had terrible air pollution from the burning of wood,
and the rise of coal heating in the seventeenth century only made
things worse.8 Further, the French and English, after deforesting and
exhausting their own lands, simply seized and exploited untapped
resources in the colonial world.9 These complexities notwithstanding,
changing attitudes in early modernity toward humans and their
relationship to the natural world have served as intellectual sources
of the modern sustainability movement, even if they did not succeed
in placing “advanced” economies on the path to ecotopia.
In a sense, then, we have inherited from early modernity two
different yet sinuously interconnected cultural legacies. On the one
hand, the eighteenth century was the period that witnessed the birth
of the Industrial Revolution, modern growth-based economics, and
what has recently been termed the “consumer revolution.” Although
new machines and techniques had a limited impact on the economy
before the nineteenth century, modern manufacturing came into
being in the century before 1800, as steam engines and other
machines began to supplant animal labor and as factory-based wage
labor gradually replaced the long-tenured artisanal workshop
system. In England and America, inventors produced new machines
that would eventually revolutionize the global economy and change
the course of human history. The spinning jenny (1764), the steam
engine (1769), the water frame (1771), the power loom (1785), the
cotton gin (1794), and other inventions paved the way to modern
forms of transportation and industrial production. In economics, the
classical theory of capitalism took shape in the pages of Adam
Smith’s 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations and in the writings (and governmental policies) of the
French physiocrats, such as Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, who
defended the idea of free markets, economic growth, and a strict
division of labor that spurred productivity.
In terms of consumption, British historians have narrowed in on
the period after 1690 as the beginning of a “consumer revolution,” in
which Europeans grew rich off of colonial trade and began to
consume culture and products (coffee, tobacco, sugar, textiles, fine
goods) on a mass scale.10 Of course, much of this colonial wealth
and economic growth was rooted in slave labor, and perhaps 50% of
all the slaves taken from Africa in the early modern period left in the
eighteenth century, transported across oceans on French, British,
and Portuguese ships.11 Colonial capitalism also put on display the
animosity (or at least apathy) toward the natural world felt by many
Europeans, especially on tropical islands where forests were
wantonly “subdued” and cleared for the sake of planting valuable
cash crops. It was all part of the process called “ecological
imperialism” by Alfred Crosby.12
On the other hand, the eighteenth century is the source of many
of the embryonic ideas that today inform the sustainability
movement. This is the period in which abolitionism formed as a
powerful critique of slavery and the concept of human rights
circulated widely in the Atlantic world, taking center stage in what
are today called the Atlantic revolutions: the American Revolution,
the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and significant
uprisings in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), the Netherlands,
Ireland, and elsewhere.13 Where would the concept of social justice
be without abolitionism and these democratic revolutions? Moreover,
while the eighteenth century is remembered as the period in which
classical economics took shape, there were nonetheless critics of
economic liberalism in the later part of the century who were able to
correlate changing economic policies to social and “environmental”
problems. To be sure, a critique of economic growth did not appear
out of thin air in the late twentieth century (see chapter 4).
Furthermore, not everyone endorsed the new consumer society, and
many moralists in Europe took aim at the vanity and decadence that
came with materialism, greed, and consumption. There were even
those who connected greed and overconsumption to deforestation.
Indeed, this is the period in which forestry became a legitimate
science, woodland overconsumption became a widely recognized
problem, and sustained yield forestry became an official policy of
governments in many parts of the world. This is also the period in
which views of the natural world underwent a conceptual revolution,
at least in the Western world, as religious conceptions of a “created”
Earth gave way to a more secular Enlightenment perspective that
viewed the natural world as inert and in need of domination, but
ultimately useful, governed by natural law, and knowable in
measurable, systematic ways. Finally, this is the period in which
some critics of urbanism and scientific progress, such as the Swiss
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, took to the woods and began to
craft a kind of “natural religion” that valorized the natural world and
simple living.
These two legacies of early modernity are neither simplistic nor
even mutually exclusive. The period that we think of today as the
Enlightenment is fraught with contradiction, and it isn’t so easy to
determine what one might consider the “good” versus the “bad”
elements of this complex heritage. To be clear, there was no explicit
sustainability movement (or even environmental movement) in the
eighteenth-century Western world. Nor was there a holistic
conception of ecology, as there was in many of the indigenous
societies that were in the process of being brutalized by European
imperialists. Moreover, the people and documents studied in this
chapter exhibited an anthropocentrism typical of the period; few if
any Europeans wrote of the “rights of nature” or even cared about
nature on its own terms, exterior to the needs of humans, who were
still seen as separate from and dominant over nature. When
deforestation was criticized, it was on the grounds that it was bad
for mankind. But at the very least it was beginning to be seen as a
serious problem by some. Even though the views and needs of these
people differed from our own, we can locate in this period many of
the disparate “sources” that have contributed to the making of
sustainability, which in many ways is a conscious attempt to “return”
not to pre-industrial society per se, but to a time when humans
tread more lightly upon the Earth.
In Europe and its settler societies, the intellectual and cultural
movements today known as the Scientific Revolution (late sixteenth
to late seventeenth centuries) and the Enlightenment (late
seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries) ushered in a period of
intense interest in the natural world. There was no single event that
triggered this widespread curiosity in nature and “natural
philosophy,” as science was called at the time, but rather a gradual
development of disciplines gave shape and expression to that
curiosity: chemistry, physics, mechanics, hydraulics, natural history
(botany and biology), forestry, zoology, geology, anatomy, and so on.
The new ideas associated with these disciplines eventually displaced
the long-suffering Aristotelian paradigm of the natural world, which
was buttressed by Galen’s medicine and Ptolemy’s astronomy and
which had been endorsed and modified by the medieval Catholic
Church. The followers of Aristotle throughout the Middle Ages had
viewed the Earth as the center of the universe, assumed the
existence of different kinds of matter, projected anthropomorphic
meaning onto living organisms, and argued that the principles that
governed bodies in outer space differed from those that governed
the earthly realm.14 But during the Scientific Revolution, a new
paradigm came into existence that viewed the cosmos in mechanistic
terms as something made up of motion and a single kind of
matter.15 There was only one set of physical laws that applied to
both the earthly and heavenly spheres. And there was now a
heliocentric universe that displaced poor old Earth from the center of
it all.
This newfound interest in natural philosophy is evident in a wide
range of practices and events in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, from the paradigm-shattering books of the period,
including Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia
Mathematica (1687) that helped establish the new physics, to the
new academies of science that appeared throughout Europe and
even in the New World, the most important of which were the Royal
Society in London (1660) and the Paris Académie des sciences
(1666).16 It is also evident in the new journals dedicated to scientific
exchange that appeared as well as the menageries, natural history
cabinets (for anomalous and exotic specimens), and public displays
of scientific devices that delighted crowds in eighteenth-century
Europe.
An important aspect of this growing interest in science was that it
brought with it a reevaluation of human beings and their relationship
to the natural world. In Man and the Natural World: Changing
Attitudes in England, 1500–1800, Keith Thomas discusses the deep-
rooted Christian belief that the natural world had been created for
the benefit of humankind. Nature, in a sense, belonged to human
beings but needed to be pacified like a menacing enemy. However,
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “some long-established
dogmas about man’s place in nature were discarded [and] new
sensibilities arose towards animals, plants and landscape.”17 The
new worldview that developed largely did away with the idea that
humans were created and instead considered humans part of the
“economy of nature.” This is not to imply that anthropocentrism
suddenly disappeared or that secular views suddenly eradicated
religious ones. Even though humanity was now thought of, by many,
as a part of nature, humans still held an exalted and dignified place
within the natural order.18 Nor did it mean a sudden admiration for
nature on the part of most natural philosophers. René Descartes
wrote of the need for humans to become “masters and possessors
of nature.”19 Francis Bacon, the great propagandist of scientific utility
in the seventeenth century, rallied humans to “conquer and subdue”
nature, echoing the dictum in Genesis (1:28) to “replenish the earth
and subdue it.”20 Likewise, the academies that Bacon helped dream
up saw their role as creating knowledge that enabled the state to
dominate nature. Indeed, Bacon spoke often of the relationship
between “power” and “science.”
Another consequence of this changing worldview was that it
emptied the natural world of its magical or supernatural qualities and
engendered the common belief that nature was inert and soulless. It
was now an object of rational analysis rather than a source of awe
and spiritual reckoning. Nature was something to be poked at,
prodded, dissected, tortured for its secrets, and put on display. The
dominant view was that there was no harm in destroying the natural
world since it “felt” nothing and had no inherent rights, feelings, or
recognitions. Adam Smith, along with many others at the time, saw
nature as “no more than a storehouse of raw materials for man’s
ingenuity.”21 For the natural philosophers of the eighteenth century—
the remaining alchemists notwithstanding—the natural world was
not an obscure and magical thing but rather something mundane
and decipherable. For instance, the Baron d’Holbach, a radical
atheist based in Paris, characterized nature as a giant unfeeling
machine that could be understood through scientific analysis.22
The desire to study and make sense of nature is most apparent in
the many taxonomies and natural histories that were produced in
this period. The multivolume Histoire naturelle (1749–1789) of the
great French naturalist Buffon, a catalog of all known animals and
minerals, became the standard text for the biologists and geologists
of that era.23 The Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus
invented modern binomial nomenclature and taxonomy in a series of
publications between the 1730s and 1770s, and his system remains
the structural foundation of the life sciences today.24 The first
modern encyclopedia also came into being in this period. Denis
Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert edited a famous Encyclopédie
(1751–1772; 17 volumes of text and 11 of plates), which solicited
articles from dozens of contributing specialists and aimed to be a
cutting-edge repository of all known knowledge.25 By the end of the
century, it seemed clear to many Europeans that nature had been
fully exposed, categorized, and basically figured out.
From a certain perspective, then, it’s not hard to see how the
Enlightenment might have spurred on heartless environmental
destruction and the expansion of a slave-based colonial empire, and
that is certainly a reasonable argument to make. But the shift in
worldview in this period also created the possibility for dissenting
viewpoints. Many intellectuals and social observers used natural
philosophy to criticize waste, degradation, social injustice, and
illogical governmental policies. According to Richard Grove, “The
growing interest in mechanistic analysis and comparison actually
enabled rational and measured conservationist response.”26 Again,
the divided legacy of the Enlightenment is made apparent.
One place to follow this clash of values is in the pages of Donald
Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Worster
employs two categories to describe competing views of the natural
world in the eighteenth century: “Imperialism” and “Arcadi-anism.”
Linnaeus was the archetypal Imperialist who supported mankind’s
apparent domination over nature and viewed flora and fauna as little
more than objects of dispassionate analysis. This was the prevailing
view of the time. The Arcadians, by contrast, were exemplified by an
English parson-naturalist named Gilbert White, who sought a
“simple, humble life for man with the aim of restoring him to a
peaceful coexistence with other organisms.”27 White saw harmony
and complex systems within the natural world and clearly had a
deep reverence for all living beings.
What’s striking is that both the Imperialists and the Arcadians
contributed to the formation of ecological concepts—Linnaeus wrote
of an “oeconomy of nature” and Gilbert White argued that “nature is
a great economist,” and thus both factions used the circulation of
resources within human society as a metaphor for the cycles and
systems within the natural world.28 Moreover, both the Imperialists
and the Arcadians at times mobilized knowledge of the natural world
to counteract unsustainable environmental practices. Worster is
therefore correct in arguing that multiple ecological viewpoints
developed in the eighteenth century, well before “oecologie” became
a term in 1866. The great outpouring of ideas and perspectives
unleashed by the Enlightenment included many that valued the
notion of humans living within their natural limits, even if many of
the thinkers in this period cared little about nature in and of itself.
This early ecological consciousness nonetheless became a powerful
vantage point from which to attack human destructiveness and
animosity toward the natural world.
 In looking at the emergence of sustainability in early modernity, it
becomes clear that the concept has roots in forestry. This is not a
coincidence. In the period before the widespread use of fossil fuels,
many world societies relied heavily on trees for fuel and other needs,
and deforestation brought with it the specter of societal collapse.
The forest was life sustaining, and because of the immediate
relationship that pre-industrialized peoples had to this natural
system, it was relatively easy to recognize its value and the effects
of misuse. It is no exaggeration to say that, in Europe, the economy
and social well-being were wholly dependent on the continued
existence of woodland and a steady supply of forest resources.29
Urbanites and peasants needed wood to heat homes, build fences,
and construct buildings. Without wood, most people would have
frozen during cold winters, and the cooking of meals in most places
would have been nearly impossible. Farmers and ranchers turned to
woodlands for a wide range of needs, from nuts, mushrooms, and
berries that supplemented diets, to twigs and undergrowth that
grazing animals used as fodder. Countless industries needed a
steady supply of wood, too. Glue makers transformed tree sap into
adhesives. Tanners and glassmakers and charcoal makers consumed
vast quantities of timber and often contributed very directly to local
deforestation.30 European monarchies also valued woodland but for
different reasons. For the elite, forests were important as hunting
sites and places of leisure, but even more important was the fact
that navies needed a constant supply of dense wood, especially oak
and elm, to build armed ships. It took 2,000 to 3,000 suitable oaks
to build a large warship.
Not only were forests recognized as vitally important, but there
was a growing realization from the late seventeenth century onward
that woodland was shrinking quickly, and that this was a problem
with widespread consequences. Historical and ecological data show
quite clearly that forests were, in fact, disappearing in this period.
Per capita consumption rates stayed level in most places, but the
European population grew considerably in the 1700s, creating new
stresses on woodland resources. (In France, for instance, the
Another random document with
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Fifteen Oxford Peals.
 Adventure. 1 and 2.
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24135 35124 14235 14532
21453 31524 14325 14352
24153 13254 13452
42513 13524 13542 13425
42531 15342 13245
45213 15432 15324 12354
45231 15234 Extr.
54321 14523 12543 12345
54312 14253 Extr.
53421 12435 12534
53412 Extr.
Doubles and singles. Every bell leads four times. The Treble hath a
dodging course; and is one of the two bells which makes every single
change except when it leads, and then ’tis made in the 3d and 4th
places; but when the 2 lieth next it, an extream behind.
 Camelion. 1 and 2.

12345 45213
21354 45123
23145 41532
23415 14523
24351 14253
42531
Every time the Treble hunts up and down, it makes a single in the
third and 4th places, and when it leads the single is there also; but
when 2 lies next it, then an extream behind. Every bell except the
Treble leads four times.
 Medley. 1 and 5.
12345 54132
21354 54123
21345 51432
23154 51423
23145 15243
32415 15234
34215 12543
32451 12534
34251
43521 14352
45321 14325
43512 13452
45312 13425
Doubles and Singles. The treble leads four times, lieth behind as
many, and twice in every other place. Every other bell leads four
times. Every single is made behind, except when the Treble is either
in the fourth or fifth places, and then in the second and third places.
Every time the Treble goeth to lead and leaves leading, the double is
on the two first and two last bells, except when the treble goeth to
lead if the 5th gives it place, and then the double is made on the four
first bells.
 Oxford Paradox. 1 and 5.

12345 54312
21435 54132
21345 45312
23154 45132
23514 41523
32154 41253
32514 14523
35241 15423
35421 14532
53241 15432
53421
Doubles and singles. Every bell leads four times, and lieth
behind as many. Every single is made in the third and fourth places
until the Treble leads, and then in the second and third places: but
when the Treble leads and the fifth lieth behind, then the extream in
the third and fourth places.
 Halliwell. 1 and 2.
12345 54312
21354 45312
21345 54132
23154 54123
23145 51432
32415 51423
23415 15432
32451 15423
34251 14532
43521 14523
45321
Treble leads four times, lies behind as many, and twice in every
other place. When it leaves the two hind bells, they dodg until it
comes there again, except when it leads and 2 lies next it, for then an
extream is made in the third and fourth places.
 Oxford Sixscore.

12345 32514
21345 32154
23145 31254
23415 13254
23451 13524
32541
The Treble hath a direct hunting course, as in plain changes; and
the changes are all single except when the Treble lieth behind, and
then a double is made on the four first bells; and when it leads, the
single is in the third and fourth places, but when 2 lieth next it an
extream behind.
 Fortune. 1 and 2.
12345 13254
21354
23145 14523
32415 14532
34251
43521 12354
45312 Extr.
54132 12534
51423
15432 14352
15423 14325

13245 &c.
Doubles. The Treble is a perfect hunt, and when it leaves the two
hind bells they dodg until it comes there again. Every bell leads
twice, and then hunts directly up, unless the aforesaid dodging
hindreth them. Every time the Treble leads, a single is made behind,
except when 2 lieth next it, and then an extream in the third and
fourth places.
 Oxford Single Bob.
Triples, Doubles, and Singles.
1. 2. and 3.
123456
214365
241356
423165
432615
346251
364521
635412
653142
561324
516342
153624
156342
513624
531642
356124
365214
The Treble hath a direct hunting course; and when it leaves the
two hind bells they dodg until it comes there again. Every bell leads
twice, and then hunts directly up, unless the aforesaid dodging
hindreth them. When the Treble leads, the double is on the four hind
bells. By this method it will go sixty changes, and by making of
singles it will go 120, 240, 360, or 720. The singles in the 120, 240,
and 720, must be made by the same method with those in Old
Triples and Doubles, page 109. And to ring 360, every time the 1.2
lie together before, the single must be made behind; and when 1.2.3
lie together there, then the single in the fourth and fifth places.
 Oxford Double Bob.
Triples, Doubles, and Singles.

123456 246135
214365 421653
241356 412635
423165 146253
243615 142635
426351 416253
243651 461235
426315
When the Treble leaves the two first bells, they dodg until it
comes there again; but in all other respects ’tis the same with the
former. And the singles in the 120, 240, 360, and 720, to be made as
in that Peal.
 Oxford Single Bob.
The method of this Peal is the same in all respects with Oxford
Single Bob, Triples Doubles and Singles, excepting the bobs in this
peal, which are made in stead of the singles in that. By making of
bobs it will go 180 or 360. The bob is a double change at the leading
of the Treble, wherein the bell in the fourth place lieth still.
To ring 180, there must be a whole and half-hunt; and when the
whole-hunt is before and the half-hunt behind, the next change is to
be a bob.
To ring 360, there must be a whole, half, and quarter-hunt, viz.
First, when the whole-hunt comes to lead, and the half-hunt to fall
behind, the next change is a bob: and
Secondly, when the whole-hunt leads before the quarter-hunt, and
the half-hunt is in the fifth place, the next change is also a bob.
The 1 and 5 may be the whole and half-hunts in the 180, and
1.5.3 the whole, half, and quarter-hunts in the 360, or others at
pleasure.
 Oxford Double Bob.
The method of this peal is the same in all respects with Oxford
double Bob before, excepting the bobs in this peal, which are made
instead of the singles in that. The bobs are here made in the same
manner, and call’d by the same rule in the 180 and 360, as in Oxford
single Bob next before; and the two extreams in the 720, both in this
and the last peal, must be made according to the general rule in the
Introduction.
 Oxford Triple Bob.
123456
214365
124356
213465
231456
324165
321456
234165
243615
426351
423615
246351
264531
625413
624531
265413
256143
521634
526143
251634
215643
126534
216543
125634
152364
513246
153264
512346
521364
The Treble is the whole-hunt, and hath a dodging course. When
it leaves the two hind bells, they dodg until it leads, and then a
double is made on the four middle bells, which parts the two hind
bells; but then the two hind bells dodg again until the Treble
displaceth them. Every bell leads twice (except when the Treble
dodgeth there) and as they hunt up and down do make a dodg in the
third and 4th places. When the Treble moves up from dodging
before, the bell that dodged there with it continues in the first and 2d
places, lying twice together in each, until the Treble comes down to
dodg there with it again. By this method it will go 120, and by
making of bobs it will go 360. At the bobs the bell in the fourth place
lieth still. The warning for them is this, When the half-hunt leads,
and the Treble moves down, and dodgeth there with it, a bob must
then be made at that leading of the Treble. The 3 may be the half-
hunt, or any other.
 Oxford Triple Bob, the second way.
123456 254613
214365 245163
124356 421536
213465 425163
231645 241536
326154 214356
321645 123465
236154 213456
263514 124365
625341 142635
623514 416253
265341 146235
256431 412653
524613 421563
526431 245136
This peal is in all respects the same with that next before, except
the double change which is made when the Treble moves up out of
the second place, and also down into that place again, which is here
made on the four middle bells, and consequently parts the two hind
bells, which in the former peal continued dodging together. This will
also go 360, the bobs being made, in the same manner, and also the
warning for them the same, as in the former peal.
 Oxford Riddle, or the Hermophrodite.
Treble is the whole-hunt; whilst ’tis hunting up the two last bells
dodg, and whilst
123456 341652
214365 314562
241356 135426
423165 134562
432615 315426
346251 351462
432651 534126
346215 543216
436125
’tis hunting down the two first. Every time it leads and lieth
behind, the double is made on the four farthest bells from it. Every
bell leads twice and lieth behind twice, except the dodging hinder. By
this method it will go sixty changes triples and doubles, and then by
making of singles as in Old triples and doubles, it will go 120, 240, or
720.
 My Lord. 144.
123456
213465
231456
324156
342516
432561
423651
243615
234165
321465
312456
132465
123645
——————
Doubles. Treble is a perfect Hunt. Every bell leads twice, and
then moves up into the third place where it lieth twice, and then
moves down again except the motion of the Treble hindreth. When
the Treble goeth to lead and leaves leading, the double is on the two
first and two last bells; and when it leadeth, ’tis on the four middle
bells. But when it leadeth, and the 6 lieth behind, then a single in the
third and fourth places.
If a double be made on the four hind bells, at every third leading
of the Treble it will go 180 compleat doubles; and then by making of
two singles it will go 360, or with four singles 720.
Seventeen Peals composed at Cambridge, by
Mr. S.S.
 My Honey. 1 and 2.
12345 31254 54321
21354 31245 45231
21345 13254 54231
23154 45213
23145 13524 54213
32415 15342 45123
23415 45132
32451 15432 41523
23451 51423 41532
32541 51432 14523
23541 54123
32514 54132 14253
23514 45312 12435
32154 54312
32145 45321 12453
In this peal there is a whole-hunt and an half-hunt. The whole-
hunt lieth always four times before, and four times behind, and twice
in every other place. The two hindmost bells always dodg ’till the
whole-hunt hindreth, except when the whole-hunt is before, at which
time there are four changes made of a four and twenty doubles and
singles; the first of which is a double change brought in by the course
of the bells (as in the following peal appeareth) 13254; the second is a
single in the third and fourth places (13524); the third is a double on
the four last (15342), and the fourth a single again in the third and
fourth places (15432), except when the half-hunt is with the whole-
hunt before, then it is to be an extream behind. When the whole-
hunt leaves the third’s place hunting up, the two formost bells dodg
till it returns into the same place again.
 The Whirligigge. 1 and 5.
In this peal, first the bells dodg behind (and not before) till the
whole-hunt hindreth them; and the next course they dodg in like
manner before (and not behind) till the whole-hunt hindreth them;
and so by turns throughout the whole peal. When the whole-hunt is
before, if the bells were dodging behind before it came to lead, single
behind; if they were dodging before, single in second’s and third’s
place; and when the whole-hunt leads, and half-hunt is in Tenor’s
place, there is always an extream to be made in 3d and 4th place,
which is every fourth time the whole-hunt leads.
21354 51243 31245 41352
23145 52134 32154 43125
32415 25314 23514 34215
34251 52341 25341 43251
43521 25431 52431 34521
45312 52413 54213 43512
54132 25143 45123 34152
51423 21534 41532 31425
15432 12354 14523
15423 13254 14532 13425