Sustainable development started with worries about running out of timber
The modern slogan has roots in seventeenth-century forests. As England's timber dwindled, John Evelyn urged in 1662 that every landowner treat planting trees as a national duty. Half a century later a Saxon mining official coined the idea of managing woodland for a sustained yield, a principle that grew into the science of forestry.
That official, Hans Carl von Carlowitz, published a 400-page forestry treatise in 1713, building on Evelyn and the French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. His thinking passed through Alexander von Humboldt and Georg Ludwig Hartig into formal forestry, then on to Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the US Forest Service, with his creed of wise use, and to Aldo Leopold, whose land ethic helped inspire the environmental movement of the 1960s.
The postwar decades sharpened the questions. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 spotlighted the link between economic growth and environmental damage. In 1966 Kenneth Boulding wrote of a coming spaceship Earth, arguing that the economy must fit within an ecosystem of limited resources, and in 1968 Garrett Hardin popularised the phrase tragedy of the commons.
The best-known definition came in 1987 with Our Common Future, the Brundtland Report from a United Nations commission: development that meets present needs without undermining the ability of future generations to meet theirs. It stressed two ideas, the priority owed to the essential needs of the world's poor, and the limits that technology and social organisation place on what the environment can provide. The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro put the concept on the international agenda, and in 2015 it became the basis of global goals set for 2030, covering poverty, climate change and biodiversity loss.
The idea balances economy, environment and society, sometimes called the triple bottom line. UNESCO distinguishes sustainability, a long-term goal, from sustainable development, the many routes toward it. Critics call the phrase an oxymoron, arguing growth can never be sustainable, or complain that its vagueness lets almost anyone claim it. Even digital technology, often promoted as a solution, may carry a net environmental cost.
Source: Sustainable development
