Loath This Growth: Sources of Sustainability in the Early Modern World

Abstract

This chapter begins in the period that historians of Europe and the Atlantic world call “early modernity” (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). It could have begun in the Middle Ages, with the hunting reserves and protected forests established by European rulers in Venice and elsewhere. It could start with an analysis of indigenous societies, from Easter Island to the Maya, that failed to live sustainably and eventually collapsed. It could even begin in antiquity, with Pliny the Elder and his encyclopedic Natural History that tells us so much about Roman conceptions of the natural world. But we begin in the early modern period because of the clear linkages between the modern sustainability movement of the twenty-first century and the consciousness and practices that developed in early modernity. After all, the concept of “sustainability” was given a name in the early eighteenth century by a Saxon bureaucrat who coined the term “Nachhaltigkeit” to describe the practice of harvesting timber continuously from the same forest. Indeed, sustained yield forestry took shape at this time not only in Western Europe but also in Japan, around other parts of Asia, and on colonial islands in both the West and East Indies. The practice of exploiting forests sustainably was but one indication of an incipient awareness about the value of living within biophysical limits and the need to counteract resource overconsumption. Many documents that survive from this period demonstrate that it was possible to have at least a rudimentary idea about the complex relationship between social well-being, the economy, and the natural world. That is, the “systems thinking” of sustainability—the method of studying complex, interrelated systems—clearly has roots that stretch back to this largely pre-industrialized world. In 1700, the global population of homo sapiens was somewhere between 600 million and 650 million. Beijing might have approached a population of 1 million, which would have constituted a megacity at the time, but most “cities” had fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.