Literature as Cultural Ecology

Front matter

ENVIRONMENTAL CULTURES

Sustainable Texts

Hubert Zapf

Part II Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

Ecocriticism in the Twentieth Century: The Return of Nature to Writing about Culture

Ecocriticism in the Twenty-First Century: The Return of Culture to Writing about Nature

Politicized Ecocriticism: From Nature Worship to Civilizational Critique

Ecological Thought and Critical Theory: From Antagonism to Alliance

Part III Literature as Cultural Ecology From Natural Ecology to Cultural Ecology

12 Triadic Functional Model of Literature as Cultural Ecology vii vi Contents

Part IV Transdisciplinary Contexts of a Cultural Ecology of Literature Bibliography Index

269 295

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following persons and institutions for helping me develop the ideas that have gone into the present book. These are, first of all, the members of the cultural ecology research group in American Literature at the University of Augsburg, notably Timo Müller, Michael Sauter, Christina Caupert, Heike Schwarz, Johanna Hartmann, Julia Fendt, Christopher Schliephake, Katharina Donn, Aleksandra Cierpinska, and Erik Redling (meanwhile University of Halle), all of whom actively contributed to the emerging paradigm of cultural ecology in their own ways both by discussing recent developments of ecocritical theory in research colloquia and by producing significant publications in the field themselves. My special thanks go to Serenella Iovino from the University of Turin, Italy, who is not only a dear personal friend but has been a Humboldt fellow and regular guest at the University of Augsburg, where the dialogue between cultural ecology and material ecocriticism formed a central part of our shared intellectual explorations. Serenella’s extraordinary knowledgeability and enthusiasm have helped to turn the Oberseminar Amerikanistik into a forum of international exchange on current issues of the environmental humanities, in which her husband Maurizio Valsania, a renowned scholar himself in the history of political ideas, also most fruitfully participated.

Important and reliable partners in a continuing interdisciplinary exchange of ideas about the function of literature in culture and society are my Augsburg colleagues Martin Middeke, expert in poststructuralist theory; Günter Butzer, scholar of international literatures; Mathias Mayer, director of the graduate program Ethics of Textual Cultures; Sabine Doering- Manteuffel, ethnologist and current president of the university, who is genuinely interested in and supportive of research projects in ecology and the humanities; Jens Söntgen, director of the Environmental Science Center at Augsburg University, in which the natural sciences cooperate with the viii Acknowledgments environmental humanities; and Heide Ziegler, old-time friend, Americanist colleague, and member of the university’s Advisory Board.

My sincere thanks likewise go to many other colleagues and friends outside of Augsburg, with whom I have kept an ongoing dialogue and who regularly visited Augsburg and in turn invited me to lectures, conferences, publications, and occasions for private conversations, thereby helping me differentiate and theoretically substantiate my attempts to formulate a theory of literature as cultural ecology - among them Rolf Breuer, my former academic advisor from the University of Paderborn, who has set high intellectual standards with his keen interest in the relationship between theory and literature that has kept to motivate my own scholarly efforts; Hilary Fraser, friend from early days of academic life and distinguished Victorian scholar at Birkbeck College, whose attention to the culture-critical and life-transforming functions of art have more things in common with cultural ecology than it may seem at first sight; Siri Hustvedt, American writer and public intellectual, whose warmhearted transatlantic friendship and intense interest in the special capacity of literature as an interdisciplinary form of “knowledge of life” that is on a par with scientific forms of knowledge has been an invaluable inspiration for me; Alfred Hornung and Mita Banerjee from the University of Mainz, who invited me to cooperate in their interdisciplinary graduate research center on Life Sciences and Life Writing at the interface of literature and medicine; Wendy Wheeler, Kate Rigby, and Louise Westling, who have collaborated on various projects and have inspired me with their biosemiotic respectively eco-phenomenological ideas; Axel Goodbody, who has made me aware of the manifold interconnections between Anglo-American and German ecocritical thought; Evi Zemanek, Gabriele Dürbeck, and Urte Stobbe, who let me participate in their research network on German ecocriticism and ecological literature; Kaspar Spinner and Berbeli Wanning, who have been exploring the implications of cultural ecology for the teaching of literature; Sylvia Mayer and Catrin Gersdorf, who helped establish ecocriticism in Germany and Europe and organized the foundational conference of EASLCE in 2004, which initiated a constantly growing network of research contacts in the field.

I would furthermore like to mention as important figures of intellectual exchange Gabriele Rippl with her interest in sustainability and gender diversity; Hans-Ulrich Seeber, specialist in nature poetry and the process

Acknowledgments ix of modernization; the Vermont friends and colleagues Tony Magistrale, international Poe expert and frequent partner in co-teaching, Dennis Mahoney, scholar of German romanticism and especially of Novalis, and Marc Estrin, novelist and musician; Georg Stark, computer scientist with a passion for ecology, art, and literature—all of whom representing personal voices, academic cultures, and interdisciplinary perspectives that have enriched my ideas on cultural ecology.

My special thanks go to the editors Greg Garrard and Richard Kerridge for accepting the book for publication in this exciting new book series on Environmental Cultures. They have been very helpful and cooperative in the editorial process. I would also like to thank the two external readers whose reports have given me useful feedback on the manuscript. Thanks also go to David Avital and Mark Richardson from Bloomsbury Academic and Rajakumari Ganessin from Integra for their constructive and competent preparation of the book for print.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my children Jakob, Nora, and Ruth- Maria for their unceasing interest in the creative exchange of ideas between their fields of expertise—film, poetry, and opera—and my own, which has been a constant source of pleasure and inspiration. My deep-felt thanks go to my wife Jacoba, whose patience with my obsessive pursuit of projects such as this goes along with a supportive companionship, shared curiosity, and inexhaustible intellectual energy, making our conversations an ongoing adventure of mutual truth-seeking and discovery.

Part One Cultural Ecology and Literary Studies

Introductory Remarks

This book offers a theory of imaginative literature based on the paradigm of cultural ecology. Cultural ecology is a new direction in recent ecocriticism which has found considerable attention in Europe and the German-speaking world but which is also beginning to be discussed in English-language publications in the field.' A paradigm in the sense used in this study is no totalizing or all-explanatory system but an explorative perspective on its subject. In its dictionary definition, a paradigm is “an example, pattern or model” (OED); a “narrative, story with exemplary, model-like character” (Duden. My trans.). In this sense of an explorative model and meta-narrative, a cultural ecology of literature proposes a transdisciplinary approach to literary texts, in which the interaction and mutual interdependence between culture and nature is posited as a fundamental dimension of literary production and creativity. Between an anthropocentric cultural studies perspective, in which nature is dematerialized into a discursive human construct, and a radical ecocentrism, in which cultural processes are basically subsumed under naturalist assumptions, cultural ecology looks at the interaction and living interrelationship between culture and nature, without reducing one to the other. Literature is seen as a cultural form in which this living interrelationship is explored in specifically productive ways, providing a site of critical self-reflection of modern civilization as well as a source of creative cultural self-renewal. This is not merely a question of thematic orientation or content but of the aesthetic processes staged in

! The approach of a cultural ecology of literature as proposed in this book has evolved from previous publications in German, notably the monograph Literatur als kulturelle Okologie (2002) and the edited volume Kulturökologie und Literatur (2008), in which the theoretical contexts and methodological implications of the approach were explored mainly by German and European scholars. The dialogue with an Anglophone audience and community of ecocritics has however begun to take place in several publications (Goodbody 2006, chapter “Theoretical Perspectives”; Rigby and Goodbody 2011: 71-83; Clark 2011: 153-155).

imaginative texts, which in this sense can be described as functioning like an ecological force within the larger system of cultural discourses.

A cultural ecology of literature is based on a functional-evolutionary view of cultural and literary history, in which literary texts as imaginative and artistic forms of textuality have acquired specific qualities, modes, and features of writing that are both interrelated with and different from other forms of writing. Literature is described as a transformative force of language and discourse, which combines civilizational critique with cultural self-renewal in ways that turn literary texts into forms of sustainable textuality. Literature uses the resources of language, imagination, and discourse for the creation of long-term, self-reflexive models of ecosemiotic complexity. If sustainability in a biological sense means the ways in which living systems remain alive and productive over time, then the cultural ecosystem of literature fulfills a similar function of sustainable productivity within cultural discourses. And if sustainability in a cultural sense means the ways in which the life of culture can be kept in “equilibrium with basic ecological support systems” (Stivers), then this criterion applies in a special degree to literary culture, which is characterized in its functional dynamics by maintaining a deep-rooted affinity between its modes of (re-)generation and the ecological processes of life that it both reflects and creatively transforms.

On the one hand, this approach is grounded in a general theory of cultural ecology as a field of transdisciplinary studies that has gained considerable visibility in recent ecological thought, bringing together the formerly separate epistemic domains of ecology and culture, biological life sciences and the sciences of mind, systems theory and textual theory, natural and cultural evolution in manifold and promising new ways. On the other hand, the book adapts, translates, and integrates these insights from various disciplines into a more specific theory of literature itself as a medium of cultural ecology. It focuses attention on the forms, modes, and functions of representation and communication that have evolved in literary history as a generative potential of texts. A guiding assumption of this approach is that imaginative literature deals with the basic relation between culture and nature in particularly multifaceted, self-reflexive, and transformative ways and that it produces an “ecological” dimension of discourse precisely on account of its semantic openness, imaginative intensity, and aesthetic complexity. As I hope to show

Introductory Remarks 5 in the examples from various genres and cultures that make up the textual corpus of the book, this focus on imaginative, artistically complex texts doesn't imply any presumption of cultural elitism but rather an exploration of the critical-creative potential of the aesthetic as a vital mode of ecological knowledge and transformation. It resonates with Derek Attridge’s notion of the “singularity of literature” (Attridge), even while acknowledging the indissoluble interdependence and semiotic co-agency of individual texts with its intertextual and historical-cultural environments. My attention is therefore not on a strict separation between genres or between fictional and nonfictional modes of writing but on the imaginative and artistic procedures with which they activate what seems to be a transculturally effective ecological potency of texts.

One fascinating but also disturbing implication of the recent explosion of productivity in ecocritical thought and of its expansion into more and more disciplines across the environmental humanities and beyond is the enormous challenge that it poses for individual scholars to integrate the vast, transdisciplinary but also highly specialized and differentiated knowledge that is relevant to the field. Ideally, a contemporary ecocritic would have to be conversant with the most recent state of knowledge in such diverse areas as scientific ecology, evolutionary biology, historical anthropology, social systems theory, environmental history, geography, geology, as well as phenomenology, history of philosophy, art history, media theory, gender studies, postcolonialism, globalization studies, and, of course, cultural and literary studies. The impossibility of coping as an individual with such a complex agglomerate of highly diversified forms of knowledge is self-evident. One consequence of this is that ecocritical scholarship must always be seen as part of an ongoing dialogue and cooperative form of work-in-progress between scholars rather than only an accumulation of singular isolated contributions of individual minds. Such a cooperative project corresponds to the idea of intersubjective communication circuits within an “ecology of mind” as proposed by Gregory Bateson, and it also underlies the cultural-ecological approach advocated here (Bateson 1973). The present book considers itself as part of such an ongoing dialogue. It is written from the awareness that its argument only lives from its constant exchange with other scholars, ideas, and, indeed, with the literary writers and texts that are the main source and inspiration of its cultural-ecological argument. Another response to the huge scope and complexity of the field is to narrow down the focus of investigation both in terms of discipline and of subject matter. This is what I am doing in the present study, whose focus is explicitly directed toward the ecological potential of literary culture, which comprises both the scholarly disciplines concerned with literary studies and the ecological knowledge provided by literary texts themselves. Even more specifically, I concentrate in my book on examples from American literature as my main field of specialization, even though texts from other literary cultures are included as well to indicate the transnational and transcultural horizon of a cultural ecology of literature. Of course, when zooming in on such a more concrete research agenda, it turns out in the end that the multidisciplinary questions that have temporarily been bracketed, open up again on a different scale, especially in the case of the culture of literature, which is itself the site of a constant crossing of discursive boundaries and a complex fusion of heterogeneous domains of knowledge.

The argument of the book does not simply proceed in a linear way. It follows neither a merely deductive method, which would derive concrete observations from general premises of thought, nor a merely inductive method, which would develop ascending scales of generalization from the observation of concrete phenomena. It rather practices an “abductive” procedure in the sense described by Charles Sanders Peirce, which involves intuitive guesses and methodological leaps across different, heterogeneous domains of knowledge in order to establish new, hitherto unseen connections and analogies between them—in this case between the domains of ecological and literary knowledge (Peirce 1998; Wheeler 2011). The book proceeds in such a way that theory is related to texts and texts to theory in evolving feedback loops and spirals of reflexivity, in which the aim of new knowledge is successively validated by the mutually illuminating evidence of discursive argument and aesthetic concretization. Theoretical discussions alternate throughout with text-oriented analyses in the attempt to bring out the argument of a cultural ecology of literature in an ongoing dialogue between theory and text.

Nevertheless, the book follows a general structure which is organized in successive methodological steps. The first part, “Cultural Ecology and Literary Studies,” introduces the aims, conception, procedure, and thesis of the book. It contextualizes its main assumptions with a view to the ecocultural

Introductory Remarks 7 potential of imaginative literature on the one hand and the current debate on sustainability as a cultural phenomenon on the other, and it exemplifies these assumptions in three poems from different periods of American literature. The second part, “Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology,’ positions cultural ecology within the wider field of ecocriticism and ecological thought, relating it to the spectrum of ecocritical directions that have evolved between natureoriented, culture-critical, and political forms of ecology. It argues that the initial antagonism between ecological thought and critical theory is currently opening up in favor of mutual dialogue and conceptual enrichment. The third part, “Literature as Cultural Ecology,’ presents the general approach of cultural ecology within bio-evolutionary, systems-theoretical, linguistic, and materialecocritical frameworks. On its basis, it develops a specific theory of literature as cultural ecology and proposes a triadic functional model for describing the transformative role of imaginative texts within cultural systems and discourses.

The fourth part, “Transdisciplinary Contexts of a Cultural Ecology of Literature,” discusses various transdisciplinary contexts, which are of relevance to a cultural ecology of literature and to the sustainable form of textuality that it provides for cultural criticism and self-renewal. It focuses not on isolated concepts but on patterns of relational polarities, in which the mutually defining movement between the constitutive terms, rather than any single semantic reference domains, are foregrounded. This will help to place the approach of a cultural ecology of literature within a number of widely discussed frameworks of ecocultural debates in order to demonstrate and further differentiate its transdisciplinary potential as a generative paradigm of literary and cultural studies. These relational polarities are “Text and Life, dealing with literature as a cultural-ecological form of “knowledge of life” that self-reflexively stages complex dynamical life processes, which are described in related but different ways in the life sciences; “Order and Chaos,” discussing the necessary co-agency of the forces of order and chaos in both ecology and in aesthetics; “Connecting Patterns and Creative Energies,’ exploring the interplay between “patterns which connect” (Bateson) and transgressive excess in creative processes; “Matter and Mind,’ examining the dynamic interactivity between matter and mind in literary texts as exemplified in the poetics of the four elements; “Solid and Fluid,” focusing on the beach as a liminal space between land and sea, culture and nature, as a particularly productive site of literary creativity; “Wound and Voice,’ mapping the outlines of a cultural ecology of literary trauma narratives; “Absence and Presence,’ placing a cultural ecology of literature within postmodern debates on absence and presence as discursive modes of texts; and “Local and Global,” tracing conflicting orientations between the local and the global, and between postcolonial and transculturalecocosmopolitan models of ecological thought in contemporary texts within the frameworks of climate change and the Anthropocene. In all of these chapters, different dimensions of transdisciplinarity are explored, in which the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic functions of literature as cultural ecology are demonstrated both on a theoretical plane and in textual examples.

These textual examples are taken from different periods and genres of literary history, and they especially revolve around a number of core texts which I believe are not only milestones in American literary history but also represent particularly rich models of a cultural ecology of literature. Among these are, besides the obvious case of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Nathaniel Hawthornes’ Scarlet Letter, Melville's “Bartleby” and Moby-Dick, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,’ Kate Chopins The Awakening, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and Toni Morrisons Beloved, along with poems by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and more recent writers like Allen Ginsberg, Linda Hogan, Simon Ortiz, and A. R. Ammons. The book’s argument circles back to some of these texts several times in order to establish a field of references in which various aspects and contexts of a cultural ecology of literature can be illuminated from within a network of shifting angles and frames. This textual corpus is deliberately heterogeneous and includes such aesthetically and stylistically diverse artistic models as represented by the writings of Thoreau and Poe, Frost and Hogan, Chopin and Morrison; the aim here is to pay due attention to cultural and aesthetic differences while at the same time emphasizing a shared code of literary productivity which seems to indicate a deeper, ecosemiotic potential of literature across such cultural and aesthetic boundaries. Examples from African American and Native American literatures are part of this network of core texts to indicate the transcultural and, indeed, ecoglobal implications of a cultural ecology of literature, which are underlined by intermittent references to various texts beyond US literature, including Indian, South African, British, and German literature.

Introductory Remarks 9

However, the main focus remains on US literature, which is considered not an exclusionary national phenomenon but a multiply connected, exemplary field of literary production in which the theory and aesthetics of a cultural ecology of literature can be paradigmatically explored.

While the book deals with examples from literary art, other forms of art and imaginative production in different genres and media could equally be included in such a cultural-ecological analysis—such as film, painting, the visual arts, theater, music, opera, and so forth. While such an analysis would evidently require genre- and media-specific modifications, some of the fundamental characteristics of an aesthetic transformation of knowledge and experience as described by cultural ecology are shared across the boundaries of these genres and media—as is evidenced in the many examples of intermedial and cross-medial forms of artistic production that characterize the modern and contemporary art world. While such extensions are clearly desirable, I will confine myself in this book to an analysis of literature, even though much of what will be said about the critical-creative potential of texts can also productively be transferred to other art forms and media.

The Ecocultural Potential of Literature

It seems to me that the enormous ecocultural potential of imaginative literature, in the sense of a specifically artistic form of cultural productivity, is just beginning to find the attention in ecocriticism that it deserves. This focus on imaginative literature as a culturally embedded but nevertheless distinct form of textuality and knowledge differs from a prevailing tendency in ecocritical studies to consider questions of art and the aesthetic as marginal to the main task of tracing and identifying environmental issues in texts. (Cf. also Easterlin 39ff.) To be sure, ever more examples from nonrealist fiction and other genres of imaginative writing have been included in ecocritical analyses; but more often than not, they have been treated rather indiscriminately with other forms of textuality and not been explored as distinctive, semiotically condensed models of ecocultural critique and communication. The insistence on such differences in this book is not a question of hierarchy or ideology but of historical and textual evidence. Its argument assumes no metaphysical autonomy of the aesthetic but rather a metadiscursive space that the aesthetic transformation of cultural discourses opens up in language, text, and communication.

More generally speaking, this attention to difference and evolutionary diversity in the emergence and functional differentiation of textual genres and modes of writing has its foundation in ecological thought itself. To be sure, one central axiom of ecological thought is universal interconnectedness in the sense of Barry Commoner’s First Law of Ecology that “everything is connected to everything else” (Commoner). On the other hand, however, an equally important axiom of ecological thought is diversity, that is, the acknowledgment of the emergence and coexistence of multiple forms of life and culture, which are interrelated but nevertheless also distinct from each other, connected but also singular in their evolutionary signature and nonidentity. This is expressed with particular acuity in Morton's deconstructionist ecological philosophy of all existence as coexistence, as radical alterity within a shared world of planetary coexistence (Morton 2010). In a cultural-ecological approach, this relates not only to a material or bio-existential level but to processes of evolutionary cultural differentiation, and it means that any ecological account of literary and cultural history has to proceed on the two fundamental assumptions of an ecological epistemology, interrelatedness and diversity, similarity and difference, connectivity and singularity. By implication, this also applies to literature and art as forms of cultural production that have developed in coevolution and competition with other forms of cultural production in cultural history. It seems crucial from a cultural-ecological perspective to consider art and literature not just as illustrations, however well-intentioned, of already existing forms of knowledge but as explorative forms of cultural knowledge and creativity in their own right.

Imaginative literature is clearly interacting with other forms of cultural discourse and is in many ways composed from the ideas, concepts, themes, values, symbols, and worldviews transmitted by them. But it is also the other of these discourses, a different form and medium of representation with its own codes and autopoetic rules of production. Indeed, one way of describing the specific dynamics of literary texts is that, within their imaginative counter-discourses, those two ecological principles— connectivity and singularity, relationality and difference—are brought out in special intensity. Literary texts are sites of radical strangeness, alienation, and alterity, both in terms of aesthetic procedures of defamiliarization and of existential experiences of alienation and radical difference; and they are also simultaneously sites of reconnection, reintegration, and, at least potentially, of regeneration on psychic, social, and aesthetic levels. In foregrounding this ecocultural potential of aesthetic texts, I will deal in this book not primarily with environmental writing in a thematic sense but with texts which are less obviously relevant for ecocritical than for literary contexts. Indeed, on one level, the textual examples and analyses offered in the book seem to indicate that there is a degree of correlation between the artistic and the ecological potency of texts. My examples are diverse in terms of period, genre, and aesthetic conceptions; but all of them are cases of that artistic potency, which

The Ecocultural Potential of Literature 13 turns out to be inherently connected to their agency as an ecological force within cultural discourses.

Some of my textual examples are therefore, inevitably, taken from what has come to be regarded with suspicion as the canon of “great works” of literature, while others represent the writings of less established authors. For some time now, the critique of traditional canon-formation as a strategy of cultural power and exclusion has led to continuous revisions and extensions of the traditional canon during the past decades. Nevertheless, in this revisionary dynamics literary scholarship still needs, at some stage, to rely on criteria of quality, representativeness, or some other form of artistic or cultural significance for the revaluation of the authors, works, genres, or styles that it includes in the new corpus of relevant texts or literary phenomena (Bartosch 2012). Both the tradition of past works of literature and art, which are still thought ofas important today, and the inclusion of new works in a revised canon are dependent on explicit or implicit criteria of evaluation, however cautious and provisional these criteria may be. The charge that the canon of great works of literature has often been constructed in complicity with historical power formations related to nation, class, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality was doubtlessly justified in the face of the massive exclusion of non-western, non-white, non-male, nonheterosexual writers from a normatively homogenized practice of selection and artistic recognition. But this doesn’t mean that works of literature of the past are solely the construct of such power strategies. On the contrary, as I will argue later in more detail, there has always been an intrinsic tension between the creative energies of literary artworks and the political and cultural systems within which they are inevitably positioned. This tension has sometimes been especially emphasized, such as in romanticism, surrealism, or postcolonialism, and sometimes been downplayed or covered over, such as in classicism, socialist realism or some versions of affirmative postmodernism. But it is one important source of the criteria that have evolved and are constantly being redefined in the literary field for evaluating the power of imaginative texts as complex forms of cultural criticism and self-representation. It points to a dimension in texts which includes, but also goes beyond, the conditions of their historical-cultural emergence, turning them into a transhistorically effective site of knowledge and aesthetic experience that can be activated in ever new historical situations and cultural contexts by ever new generations of readers.

In this view, the power of literature is not a power in the sense of dominance or domestication but a power of production and creativity, in a Nietzschean sense of the productive energies of the creative human being, der schaffende Mensch, as an archetype of civilizational self-renewal (Pütz). The artwork in this view is not only ergon but energeia, a living force field of transformative energies which both subvert and enhance human consciousness and existence in rationalized modern societies. As a singular product and event, the individual text nevertheless feeds into the circuits of literary communication which are sustained in the continuous exchange between texts and readers. Literary texts are open semiotic systems, which depend on the active participation of their readers in the creation of their meanings. The power of imaginative texts is not so much the empowerment of writers but the empowerment of readers in terms of a creative activity that both thrives on and goes beyond differences of texts and cultures. In this way, the creative energies of texts can travel across periods and cultures and can be shared by a potentially global audience.

All literature, in this sense, is always also world literature (Arac). It does not exist in the diachronic context of its historical genesis alone but in a synchronic relation of constant reaction, interaction, exchange, and copresence with other texts in an ever-expanding literary field. It represents a sustainable form of textuality, which, in the very indeterminacy and polysemic openness of aesthetic processes, provides a source of critical self-reflection and ever-renewable creative energy for ever new generations ofreaders (Rueckert).

To discuss literature in connection with the concept of sustainability raises the question about its relationship to economic, social, and ecological concepts of sustainability, which are being debated on a broad scale in the environmental sciences. Sustainability in its German equivalent of Nachhaltigkeit was first used as a term in the early eighteenth century in the context of forestry “to characterize a management of forests that would not deplete resources, but allow the renewable natural resources to regenerate and thus ensure its exploitation in the long term” (Kagan 9). However, the concept only gained more widespread significance in the later twentieth century within economic debates about the future of industrial capitalism and the limits of growth, as manifested in the Club of Rome report from 1972, in which the exhaustion of natural resources by reckless economic exploitation was first addressed as a massive threat to human well-being and survival on the planet, and in the United Nations Brundtland Report of 1987, in which sustainable development was primarily defined as a transgenerational justice problem:

Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits - not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities. But technology and social organization can be both managed and improved to make way for a new era of economic growth. (Brundtland Report)