Praise for Sustainability: A History

Praise For Sustainability: A History

Introduction

In the 1990s sustainability become a familiar term in the policy area. Nonetheless, many intellectuals such as Bill McKibben (most prominent environmentalist in the last 30 years) claimed that it would never catch on in mainstream society and therefore decline relatively quickly.

One way to show that he was quite wrong about the quick decline of sustainability is by looking the growing interest in this field.

Since 1980 there has been an explosion of books and articles dealing with sustainable concerns.

The concept of sustainability could be considered as the world’s third major social-economic transformation (after the Agricultural Revolution 10000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteen and nineteenth centuries).

Sustainability is directly tied to climate change that was triggered but industrialization as explained in the Fifth Assessment Report (2014) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “Earth’s climate system is warming steadily due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations (increasing temp +8.1°F or 13.28°C by 2100), such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide and from positive feedback effects (the loss of reflective ice cover, the release of natural stores of methane…)”.

Sustainists’ aim is to counteract the environmental issues introduced since the Industrial Revolution. Sustainability means planning for the future and rejecting that which threatens the lives and well being of future generations.

2 paths exist today: (i) continue with business as usual, ignore the science of climate change and pretend that our economic system is not on life support or (ii) remake and redefine our society along the lines of sustainability.

The conceptual roots of sustainability stretch back since the late seventeenth century.

For many writers it seems that the idea appeared 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”.  Since then there were a lot of debates around the definition and the concept of sustainability because it is a discursive field that suggest a set of condition rather than a specific outcome.

“Sustainable” and “sustainability” derive from Latin sustinere – sub (up from below) and tenere (to hold) meaning to maintain, sustain, support, endure or restrain.  In old French it meant “soutenir”. The noun “sustainability” entered English early 1970s, this verb (to sustain) had developed into an identifiable concept – maintaining human society over the long term.

Almost all definitions of sustainability emphasizes on an ecological point of view – the notion that human society ad economy are indelibly connected to the natural environment.