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THE INVENTION OF SUSTAINABILITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

PAUL WARDE
PAUL WARDE*
Affiliation:
School of History, University of East Anglia E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

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.

Type
Forum: The Idea of Sustainability
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 2011 , pp. 153 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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5 See Sieglerschmidt, “Die virtuelle Landwirtschaft”.

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37 See note 1.

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56 Liebig, Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung, vii–viii.

57 Ibid., 1–7, 13–5.

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