English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The German word for sustainability, Nachhaltigkeit, arose (according to Wiktionary) in the 18th century. Ngrams shows this. I was wondering if the concept of sustainability did not exist before the 1980s? At least in English science, wasn't there a technical term, phrase, whatever to describe this problem?
Does anyone know if there were more common terms/technical phrases and when they arised the first time in English science/books? I need some keywords for a historical search.
The Online Etymology Dictionary says sustainability is from 1972, though its root words are much older.
sustainable
1610s, "bearable," from sustain + -able. Attested from 1845 in the sense "defensible;" from 1965 with the meaning "capable of being continued at a certain level." Sustainable growth is recorded from 1965. Related: Sustainability (1972).
An article by Nathan Thanki called Sustainable: a philological investigation gives some background, here's an excerpt that neatly links sustainability with Nachhaltigkeit:
So it is what we are trying to sustain that is usually the meat of arguments about “sustainability”—is it overconsumption, overpopulation, environmental degradation? The term has become synonymous with that “meat” in the past few decades. The Club of Rome, in its 1972 report, “Limits to Growth,” claimed that it was searching for a global equilibrium, “a world system that is: 1. sustainable without sudden and uncontrolled collapse; and 2. capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people.” When the World Commission on Environment and Development (aka the Brundtland Commission) concluded with the notion of “sustainable development,” the emergence of the concept we know too well today was fully underway. Since that time, sustainability has come to be almost synonymous with “sustainable development, defined in Our Common Future as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
...
While the origins of the words association with the environmental seem to lie in the emergence of the environmental movement of the 70s, Ulrich Grober points out a deeper root. In “A conceptual history of ‘sustainable development’ (Nachhaltigkeit),” he argues that the term actually comes from 18th Century forestry (at the time timber was a key resource with an uncertain future). German nobleman and forester Hans Carl von Carlowitz wrote “’daß es eine continuirliche beständige und nachhal–tende Nutzung gebe,’ (that there would be a continuous, steady and sustained use).” Sadly, Europe no longer has any primeval forest outside of the Białowieża Forest in Poland and Belarus.So it would appear to me that the quest for “sustainability” is older than we commonly recognise, and, thus, so is our failure to achieve it: marking the failure of civilization.
Edit: The 1972 date is surprisingly late, here are some antecedents from 1906 and 1907.
From a cursory perusal of on-line thesauruses, it looks like there are no instances of alternates for the word 'sustainability'.
For 'sustainable' there are a number of synonyms, but still none that really match the meaning of 'sustainable'. However, any kind of proposed synonym should work as the beginning of a keyword, historical search. I suggest
in that order of 'closeness'.
Historically, it was once self-identified conservatives who cared about conserving the environment. (The words do not overlap by accident.) A conservative approach or a conservationist approach was the contemporary equivalent as far as I can tell. The conservation movement was a global phenomenon that Wikipedia, at least, traces to seventeenth-century France and Prussia.
