This essay attempts something a little peculiar: a study of the genesis of a concept within discourses which did not, in fact, use the word. This is at least true of ???sustainability??? in English. The emergence of the German equivalent, Nachhaltigkeit , which might also be expressed by the idea of ???lasting-ness???, is, however, usually dated to the use of the word nachhalthende by Hanns Carl von Carlowitz in his Sylvicultura oeconomica of 1713, the first great forestry manual of the (...) eighteenth century. In fact, the term can be found in the 1650s. (shrink)

The idea of sustainability is an odd composite of imagination and accounting. Environmental history is a permissive historical subdiscipline, and this essay is about the environmental???economic???intellectual history of an environmental idea, sustainability, which is historical in the sense that it is very old, and historical, too, in the sense that it is an idea about history, or about imagining the future in relation to the past. One of the oddities of the last several decades is that these old ideas have (...) been transformed into the most celebrated of all the dicta of environmental policy, or an aspiration of UN commissions, ???strategy consultancies???, and very large government agencies. (shrink)