The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, c. 1500–1870 by Paul Warde (review)

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 text, he reiterates that invention is a constantly occurring process, arguing that continuous debates about what constitutes sustainability are productive precisely because they juxtapose "different responses to a similarly shared problem" (358).

Rather than focusing on sustainability as a movement or practice, Warde, who has authored dozens of monographs, chapters, and articles about early modern European environmental history, researches how the more complex, discursive field of sustainability emerged. He details how sustainability became "a theme to argue about, was bound to particular social and territorial units, and especially the idea of the state as a unit of political, economic and environmental management" (6). Uniting environmental, economic, political, demographic, and agrarian history from an era of national warfare, industrialization, and expansion, Warde probes the political and socioeconomic context of early modern thought about humans and the natural world.

The Invention of Sustainability examines agriculture and forest management, especially how scholarly conversations and debates evolved around improvements related to both of those subjects and the broader European public. Cultivators had long understood that land could decrease in productivity based on poor management, and governments had long believed that products of the "organic economy" were needed to maintain social order. Few of them, however, supposed that individual mismanagement could be linked to more pervasive problems of national degradation. Given changes in scientific understanding and state-driven aspirations, forest management increasingly became dominated by educated men who believed they "had the capacity to plan the most desirable—and sustainable—woodlands far into the future" (216). Similarly, by the eighteenth century, agricultural reformers advocated a "new husbandry," using a tested and circulated chemical understanding of soil, along with a healthy dose of manure, to improve national crop yields. New husbandry and new forest management synthesized to form the precursor to modern conceptions of sustainability.

Warde's clear exposition of the necessary shortcomings of such an ambitious, broad, and interdisciplinary project is just as significant as his analysis of the invention of sustainability. Conscious that his book cannot "do justice to the complex history" of the power and truth of sustainability, "especially in the interaction between socio-economic life and argument," Warde presents his history as an opportunity to stimulate more debate and research (357). Throughout the entirety of the text he maintains that "knowledge is a vast, shifting and collective endeavor [and] that the question of sustainability may not actually have an answer, but that there may be nevertheless good reasons for asking it over, and over" (16). He regularly calls for his "arguments to be tested much further both in the crucible of empirical case studies, and [for the story of sustainability to be set] against other narratives of change over the period, to do with knowledge, class, gender, and authority" (14). Similar to his earlier arguments for a more nuanced, localized, and complicated picture of "improvement," Warde's gathering of the many scattered seeds of sustainability in this book will provide scholarly fodder for historians eager to ruminate on the history of ideas and the intersection of...