The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, c. 1500–1870

Starting as a book “founded on errors,” most notably the common misconception that early modern societies “were highly preoccupied with issues of what we would now call ‘sustainability,’” Warde’s most recent monograph quickly evolves into a thorough study centered on the idea of sustainability (1). It calls for a more thorough type of history that takes an expansive view of how ideas are created and mature. As Helgerson argued in Forms of Nationhood, “Texts, nations, individual authors, particular discursive communities—all are both produced and productive, productive of that by which they are produced.”¹ Possessed of a similar outlook, Warde interrogates the contextual construction of “sustainability” from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Recognizing that a search for the heritage of our impulses toward sustainability opens the door to a hagiographical construction of our environmental history, Warde is careful to employ the term invention rather than origin. Throughout the...