Important books have been written on sustainability and sustainable development. But none like this: it’s on the cultural history of the term. By Udo E. Simonis

A scene from Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic “Alice Through the Looking Glass” describes the mechanism of sematic power games of all kinds. “’When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is’, said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is’, said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all’”.

Ulrich Grober is not trying to be master with his book on sustainability, and he does not want to present the world another definition, prescribing us all something, as one might suspect. His intention is of quite a different nature: It’s about historically discovering sustainability. It’s a master piece of an erudite author, a cultural being, an enthusiastic hiker (his hand book for hikers published in 2006 is also worth reading) – and of a discoverer of new worlds, both past and present. Anybody who allows himself to be drawn into this work, will undoubtedly be influenced – but in no way exploited.

On the emergence of a great idea

“The idea of sustainability is not a mere mind game played by modern technocrats, nor the brainwave of some tree-hugging eco-warriors…It is our primal world cultural heritage” (p. 11), to quote one of the author’s basic tenets. Approaching the term from this point of view, one has to take a rather long way round in order to then arrive at the word’s inner meaning. With his linguistic and historico-cultural clarification of the term Grober wants to contribute to the sensitisation towards the fundamental tasks ahead of us in the future. This he manages to achieve in a most splendid manner – he takes us along on a journey and shows us how intuitive foresight has crystallised into one single term, how the hopes and dreams from ages of human history were stored and eventually morphed into a vision of the future.

The book thus deals with the emergence of a great idea and the way it relates with the worlds in which it developed. In this way, it is both up-to-date and historical at the same time. Viewed from a distance it helps us to both take measure and to set standards, in order to re-assess the thoughts behind it, the term itself and the semantic field of “sustainability” and, as the author says, to sound out its gravity and to evaluate its elasticity.

A term with deep roots

This modern term has deep roots and looks back over a long tradition. It can be found in all cultures, and of course in particular in European history. Grober takes us to the (apparently) ideal world of the medieval monasteries, to the times of the cathedrals, to the geometrically surveyed forests of the Enlightenment, to the epoch when people wanted to get “back to nature” and the one when people (re-)discovered the connection between economy and ecology. He thus brings us right up to the present day and the global crisis in the relationship between man and nature, between society and the environment - a crisis that can and must help us to bring about a sea-change in our approach to sustainable development.

We learn about sustainability from ancient texts, from Francis of Assisi, Nikolaus von Kues, Spinoza, von Lenné, Goethe and Novalis – and we get to know the wordsmiths, the professors of the “University of Sustainability” in Tharandt (a town famous for its forestry tradition), the mining director Hanns Carl von Carlowitz from Freiberg, the first ecologist Alexander von Humboldt and Ernst Haeckel, the founder of ecology as the science of ecosystems. These observations make exciting reading, as Grober succeeds in placing each individual character in his historical context and at the same time in elevating them to the vanguards of the present-day discourse on sustainability.

He names the people who pioneered the practical implementation of the concept and describes the ensuing upheavals, the debate on the “Limits to Growth” after 1972, the Stockholm Conference on the Environment, the reports submitted by the Brandt and Brundtland Commissions, the Gaia Hypothesis, newly coined terms like biodiversity, ecological footprint, renewable resources – and, of course, the “Spirit of Rio” and the international agreements and conventions inspired by it.

“This word contains everything that matters”

For Grober the bottom line is – after four decades of this kind of “earth politics” one ought to have realized by now that the planet Earth is still locked on a collision course. His explanation – there is either not enough differentiation or none at all between “sustainable” and “non-sustainable”. The litmus test he recommends for all economic and social developments and political decisions is made up of two components: “Is the ecological footprint being reduced?” and “Is the quality of live improved?”

This journey that the author takes through time and areas closes with a prognosis: “Sustainability will remain the key term in the world’s languages”. It has the necessary gravity and elasticity. It derives its gravity from its existential perspective, its elasticity from its ability to adapt its substance to the relevant conditions. In this sense, Grober’s cultural history of sustainability ends with an euphoric sentence: “This word contains everything that matters."

This reviewer would really like to go along with this conclusion, yet he has to issue a warning to the reader. When it comes to its design, content and style, this book is a real tour de force. On the other hand it also documents the enormous loss of culture we have had to endure since the times of those great holistically minded champions of the term and the important pioneers of its practical implementation. It also indicates the great loss of confidence that has resulted in the past due to the broken reform promises of the modern era. Both these trends may continue in the future, despite such brilliant intellectual achievements as this book offers.

Udo E. Simonis 2012 ist Professor Emeritus für Umweltpolitik amWissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB) und Kurator der Deutschen Umweltstiftung