why did the issue of sustainable development emerge in the past century
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Sustainable development, a concept that emerged in the context of a growing awareness of an imminent ecological crisis, seems to have been one of the driving forces of world history in the period around the end of the 20th century. However, as a contemporary buzzword ‘sustainable development’ has become rather overworked. We often use it without thinking of its real meaning and implications. Therefore a historical review of the roots of this concept, following a longue durée approach (see, e.g. Braudel 1982; Tylecote 1992: 1 – 3, 183 – 187; Goudsblom et al. 1996: 3 – 13), might be useful. Such a historical investigation will also reveal the main threads of discourse and the various issues subsumed under the term ‘sustainable development’.
When we wish to study the roots of issues related to the interaction between development and sustainability it would be a good starting point to briefly sketch the evolution of the idea of progress, not only because it was the antecedent to notions of development, but also because it would in due course as its own antipode elicit calls for sustainability. In the literature progress, the idea ‘that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction’ (Bury 1932: 2), has been investigated in terms of scientific (and technological), material and moral advancement (Von Wright 1997: 7).
In pre-modern times thinking about progress slowly started surfacing. During the classical Greco-Roman period the first ideas about progress were formulated (see, e.g. Guthrie 1950; Finley 1956; Edelstein 1967; Dodds 1973; Nisbet 1980: 11, 13 – 47; Burkert 1997: 34), but it was the Hebrew and Christian theology, giving expression to the linear conception of time as a directed succession of events, that transformed the way of thinking about history and progress (Von Wright 1997: 2; see also Crombie 1997: 54). Using a six-stage scheme of human history, Augustine in the City of God portrayed the advancement of humankind in terms of successive, emergent stages (Augustine 1610; see also Nisbet 1980: 64, 65; Crombie 1997: 56). Christian philosophy contributed to the idea of progress the notion of the gradual unfolding of a design present from the beginning of human history, and the concept of the eventual spiritual perfection of humankind in the next world (Nisbet 1980: 47). In the medieval period the Christian conception of progress encompassed millennialism, utopian ideas, and a sense of the importance of improving upon this world in preparation for life in the next. By the 13th century two crucial strands of the European conception of human progress had been established: awareness of the cumulative advancement of culture and a belief in a future golden age of morality on this earth (Nisbet 1980: 77, 100).
Western modernity and the belief in progress are almost synonymous. During the Renaissance ideas of cyclical recurrence were propagated, but Reformation thinkers recovered their belief in the linear progress of humanity (Nisbet 1980: 103, 117 – 119). In 1683 the French scientist Fontenelle first articulated the Great Idea of Progress, i.e. ‘that mankind with the new science and improved technology had entered on a road of necessary and unlimited progress’ (Von Wright 1997: 3). During the Enlightenment and its aftermath (1750 – 1900) the idea of progress reached its zenith in the Western civilization and as a result of the work of Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, Marx, Spencer and many others became the dominant idea of the period (Nisbet 1980: 171). The link between progress and modern, empirical, and exact science was consolidated and the conviction that science was the golden avenue to the future and would give humankind mastery over nature grew stronger (Nisbet 1980: 208; Von Wright 1997: 3, 4).
As the Industrial Revolution was unfolding on the world stage from the 18th century, irrevocably transforming human societies, human progress was also linked to economic growth and material advancement. Donald Worster (1993: 178, 179, 180) describes how industrialization caused ‘the greatest revolution in outlook that has ever taken place’ by leading people to think that it is right for them to dominate the natural order and radically transform it into consumer goods, that it is necessary and acceptable to ravage the landscape in the pursuit of maximum economic production, and that only things produced by industry and placed on the market for sale have value.
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