Sustainability History Project

A special issue of the journal Science as Culture (19:4, Dec. 2010) is focused on “nature’s accountability” and provides some insights into the historical development of sustainable practices.:

The past three hundred years has seen a rise of scientific measures to account for the human uses of nature. These measures have monitored, recorded and visualized nature, its uses and over-uses. From early concepts of sustainability in the 18th century, to models of sustainable fisheries of the late 20th century, accounting measures have always involved economic and political accountability. They are exercises of power, norm-setting and sanctioning. Such measures highlight some aspects of human involvement, while obscuring others.

This special issue explores how nature has been taken into account for maximizing sustained yield and producing sustainable quality in forestry and agriculture through cosmopolitan science in the context of capitalist development. Contributions develop an interdisciplinary, historical perspective on sustainability as a concept and practice.

Chapters include:

** Sabine Höhler and Rafael Ziegler, “Nature’s Accountability: Stocks and Stories”

** Richard Hölzl, “Historicizing Sustainability: German Scientific Forestry in the 18th and 19th Centuries”

Abstract: German scientific forestry is generally referred to as a starting point for the concept of sustainability and the variety of interpretations it has found in recent public and scientific discourses. Its early history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, is treated, more or less, as a ‘founding narrative’ with all the typical aspects of this literary device: simplicity, a degree of mysticism and a teleological relation to the current state of the art. But there is more insight to be gained from the history of scientific forestry, and sustainability in particular, than the affirmative creation of tradition. The origins of sustainability were fraught with conflict . . .

** Emily Pawley, “Accounting with the Fields: Chemistry and Value in Nutriment in American Agricultural Improvement, 1835-1860”

Abstract: During the 1840s, a coalition of agricultural chemists and improving agriculturists came to promote plant, animal and soil analyses as a way of identifying monetary value in the material transactions of the farm. They were motivated in part by the broadening practice of accounting with the land, a modification of existing accounting practices, through which some farmers came to treat their relationship with the fields and animals of the farm landscape as a series of transactions between debtors and creditors. New forms of chemical analysis added a further dimension to this accounting . . .

** Jeremy Vetter, “Capitalizing on Grass: The Science of Agrostology and the Sustainability of Ranching in the American West”

Abstract: While concepts of environmental accounting and sustainability may have emerged originally in the context of European forests, they would later be extended to many other places, including the vast American grasslands. To be accountable in the larger political economy, observations and experiences of the natural world had to be rendered in a form that could circulate in an increasingly global, cosmopolitan science. Local, experiential knowledge was converted into a set of categories . . .

** Dean Bavington, “From Hunting Fish to Managing Populations: Fisheries Science and the Destruction of Newfoundland Cod Fisheries”

Abstract: When the first European explorers wrote about the Grand Banks off the island of Newfoundland on Canada’s east coast they reported codfish so numerous they choked the passage of vessels. In 1992, fishing trawlers could find no cod on the Grand Banks and officials declared a commercial moratorium on what was once the world’s largest scientifically managed ground fishery. Since the moratorium wild cod, fishermen and fishing as a way of life have failed to recover and cod aquaculture has been promoted as a replacement industry. Scientific fisheries management, however, has maintained its legitimacy and continues to dominate national and international policy responses . . .

** Paul Erickson, “Knowing Nature Through Markets: Trade, Populations, and the History of Ecology”

Abstract: Those concerned with issues of environmental sustainability typically harbor a deep ambivalence with respect to markets and related institutions of the capitalist system of production and distribution. Perhaps most troubling is the way that market practices-standardization, commodification, and monetization-tend to facilitate erasure of the complex ecological as well as social connections linking production and consumption. But despite this tendency, the global spread of markets-and methodologies for their analysis-has also permitted us to learn much about the status of natural resources and populations . . .

** Karen Hébert, “In Pursuit of Singular Salmon: Paradoxes of Sustainability and the Quality Commodity”

Abstract: New ways of accounting for natural resources, as well as for their producers and consumers, inform efforts by Alaskan salmon fishers to service emerging markets in sustainable goods. For much of the twentieth century, commercial fishers in the rural Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska harvested salmon as ‘poundage’, an undifferentiated mass destined for transformation into relatively uniform products. In more recent years, Alaska’s fishers and policymakers have sought to produce ‘quality’ salmon for new sectors as a way to boost its wild salmon industry . . .

This journal is available in electronic format through the Portland State University Library.

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