Abstract
Sustainability discourse has long been dominated by the imperative to maintain human life and civilization under conditions similar to those that we now enjoy. This focus on the needs of human beings—rather than the needs of other-than-human creatures, biospheres, or ecosystems—has come under recent attack by some ecocritics. Yet even if we grant this anthropocentric premise, the concept is haunted by unanswerable questions: which human beings? How many? For how long? And, of course, how? This chapter traces the origins of the sustainability concept in nineteenth-century discourses of population and resource management, particularly Malthus and his successors and Victorian writings on coal exhaustion. By tracing the economic roots of sustainability in the nineteenth century, this chapter helps to reveal its inherent complexities, contradictions—and, ultimately, bad faith.
Fear lurks behind the proliferating, sanitized term “sustainability.”
—Alaimo (2012, 559)
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Notes
- 1.
Climate change is a more recent addition to this constellation of problems.
- 2.
- 3.
While Grober’s aim is to emphasize the ancient roots of the sustainability concept in order to lament our post-lapsarian state, the thesis of Warde’s study is the relatively recent invention of sustainability (Warde 2018, 4).
- 4.
- 5.
There has been recent pushback against “consumer responsibility” discourse and an attempt to re-frame the problem of climate change as due largely to corporate greed. See Darby (2018).
- 6.
The term comes from ecologist Garrett Hardin, who coined the phrase after rediscovering Lloyd’s pamphlet in 1968 (Hardin 1968).
- 7.
Similar critiques have been levied at Hardin’s employment of the concept. See the special issue of Environmental Science & Policy entitled “Interrogating the Commons,” particularly Araral (2014).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Although, as Yves Charbit argues, “there is a strong theoretical and doctrinal continuity between the successive versions” (2009, 10). For an excellent discussion of the tensions and contradictions across Malthus’s body of work, and a convincing attempt to reconcile them, see Chap. 2 of his book. See also Chapter One of Kreisel (2012) for discussion and bibliography.
- 11.
For an excellent overview of the Victorian conception of time scales, see Jonsson (2018).
- 12.
- 13.
Carbon sinks are reservoirs—either natural (such as trees, oceans, and soil) or human-made—that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it for an indefinite period of time.
- 14.
“It is worth noticing that if Jevons is right, then encouraging energy-efficiency as a means of reducing carbon emissions would be a counterproductive policy” (Madureira 2012, 409).
- 15.
- 16.
One of the central concerns of queer ecology, an important new direction in ecocritical thought, is the question of our affective relations to futurity; this work has drawn from foundational queer theory on “the antisocial thesis” by Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, and José Esteban Muñoz, among others. See, for example, Mortimer-Sandilands (2010), Seymour (2013), and Kreisel (2018).
- 17.
The conceptual synthesis of long-term population and resource management is the steady-state economy. Adam Smith and David Ricardo feared the stationary state as the inevitable future of capitalism (Marx referred to it as the “bourgeois ‘Twilight-of-the-Gods’”), while later thinkers such as J. S. Mill and John Ruskin welcomed the stationary state (Marx 1952; Mill n.d.; see also Parham 2017). Recent versions of zero- (or even negative-) growth economies in response to ongoing environmental crisis have been championed by ecological economists, most prominently Herman Daly (1991, 1996).
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Kreisel, D.K. (2019). Sustainability. In: Hadley, E., Jaffe, A., Winter, S. (eds) From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2_6
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