Abstract
Reviewed by: P. M. Jones, University of Birmingham, UK
Paul Warde makes clear at the start of his book that he intends to explore the origins of an idea, namely that ‘a society must not undermine the ecological underpinnings on which it is dependent’ (5) if it is to remain viable. This is a work of intellectual history in other words. The idea of sustainability forms a part of public concern for the environment understood as an interconnected whole. Like the word itself, the concern is recent and widely shared. It was not always thus, however. The author sounds a retreat from earlier views, his own included, that country dwellers sought to manage their livelihood in a consciously sustainable fashion and instead places the ‘invention’ or construction of an argument in favour of sustainability firmly in the ranks of intellectuals, experts, planners and government officials. As the book’s sub-title acknowledges, a very broad time-span is required to enable us to capture the process of construction. If the emphatically public issue of environmental awareness as we know it today is a post-Second World War phenomenon, the strands of awareness from which an argument for sustainability was woven can be traced as far back as the sixteenth century. That said, the key developments occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since Warde largely by-passes the familiar way-stations of early modern political and economic history, the reader has to work hard to keep a grip on the threads of an intricate argument and to keep the bigger picture in mind as they are gradually pulled together. Discursive asides, over-long quotations and encyclopaedic footnotes make for a fascinating book, but one more challenging to read than it needed to be.
With the advantage of hindsight it is apparent that the issue of sustainability crystallized as a product of the following: the shift towards a more active policy-making stance among rulers and bureaucracies; the sharp decline of providentialist thinking about the mechanisms of change in the natural world; significant advances in the areas of soil science and plant nutrition; a growing realization of the implications of resource shortages; and finally the gradual emergence of a wider, all-embracing apprehension of the fragility of the environment. The significance of statist interventionism is nicely illustrated with the history of forestry management motivated by perceptions of shortages – whether of fuel, or building and naval timbers. The author’s considerable research on German forestry, particularly in the Duchy of Württemberg, is put to good use, although the earliest instance of the planting of faster growing tree species in the 1360s is taken from the neighbourhood of Nürnburg. Coppicing was an even older practice in Europe. Yet neither artificial plantations nor coppicing, he cautions, indicate a preoccupation with sustainability or the environment in themselves.
Of course, for as long as God was deemed to control the levers of the natural world, new thinking was unlikely to make much headway. It required a changed mindset and a capacity to view the products of land as ‘resources’ for agricultural improvement to happen. It also presupposed chemical research into the composition of soils and laboratory experiments to determine the food of plants, which were no longer in thrall either to the sacred or to vitalist theories positing the essential similarity of plant and animal life. Yet the philosophy of vitalism, argues Warde, provided a bridge which helped to make sustainability a thinkable proposition inasmuch as it helped to gestate ideas of circulation and balance. Whatever it was that was being taken up by plants from the soil had somehow to be put back. Nevertheless, it was the German chemist Justus Liebig’s demolition of the ‘humus theory’ in the 1840s that in this author’s judgement really launched the question of sustainability as we understand it today.
As an unashamedly intellectual contribution to the literature on environmental history, it will be apparent that Paul Warde’s book is largely text-based. Even though the destiny of society is the ultimate object of his analysis, the argumentative threads that he deploys are rather elusive and difficult to tie to anything concrete. To this reader they often appear to be stretched across an asocial vacuum. But what is the alternative? An empirical account of the origins of sustainability would focus instead on practices in agriculture and forestry, and no doubt quarry evidence from the agrarian historians. Yet the risk of anachronism when drawing conclusions relevant to the present from practices among country dwellers in the past is dauntingly large. We have to be certain that peasants really did care for the land they worked and that agricultural improvers were motivated by more than simply the desire to increase rents.