Paul Warde

The Invention of Sustainability

This essay attempts something a little peculiar: a study of the genesis of a concept within discourses which did not, in fact, use the word. This is at least true of “sustainability” in English. The emergence of the German equivalent, Nachhaltigkeit , which might also be expressed by the idea of “lasting-ness”, is, however, usually dated to the use of the word nachhalthende by Hanns Carl von Carlowitz in his Sylvicultura oeconomica of 1713, the first great forestry manual of the eighteenth century. In fact, the term can be found in the 1650s.

Energy availability from livestock and agricultural productivity in Europe, 1815–1913: a new comparison

This article explores the proposition that a reason for high agricultural productivity in the early nineteenth century was relatively high energy availability from draught animals. The article is based on the collection of extensive new data indicating different trends in draught power availability and the efficiency of its use in different countries of Europe. This article shows that the proposition does not hold, and demonstrates that, although towards the end of the nineteenth century England had relatively high numbers of draught animals per agricultural worker, it also had low number of workers and animals per hectare, indicating the high efficiency of muscle power, rather than an abundance of such power. The higher efficiency was related to a specialization on less labour-intensive farming and a preference for horses over oxen.

Counting carbon: historic emissions from fossil fuels, long-run measures of sustainable development and carbon debt

This article examines how to account for the welfare effects of carbon dioxide emissions, using the historical experiences of Britain and the USA from the onset of the industrial revolution to the present. While a single country might isolate itself from the detrimental effects of global warming in the short run, in the long all countries are unable to free ride. Thus, we support the use of a single global price for carbon dioxide emissions. The calculated price should decrease as we move back in time to take into account that carbon dioxide is a stock pollutant, and that one unit added to the present large stock is likely to cause more damage than a unit emitted under the lower concentration levels in the past. We incorporate the annual costs of British and US carbon emissions into genuine savings, and calculate the accumulated costs of their carbon dioxide emissions. Enlarging the scope and calculating the cumulative cost of carbon dioxide from the four largest emitters gives new insights into the question of who is responsible for climate change.

Making the Environment Historical — An Introduction

‘History is a nightmare, from which I am trying to awake.’ Stephen Dedalus’ words in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses are not just the kind of words that sound familiar to a student in school who just cannot get the point of learning about all the familiar details of history: wars (mostly wars), battles (surprisingly important), royalty, leading politicians and their deeds, lineages of the welfare states, Raj and Mandarins, liberation struggles here and there, reforms and revolutions. Joyce was part of a modernist revolution of thought and form, of literary and artistic expression in early 20th century Europe, and in the mind of modernists, futurists and nihilists history was indeed, if not a nightmare, at least a burden, an unnecessary set of fetters that constrained human ingenuity and human deed. Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874), wanted to free history from its backward looking obsession and nostalgia. History was part of making a new world; only feebleminded Ressentiment Menschen would be interested in the fine tuning of ephemeral bygones. History should be part of action, and therefore the worst enemies of future-embracing history were the historians.

Law, the ‘commune’, and the distribution of resources in early modern German state formation

This article examines a series of disputes that developed among villagers in the Duchy of Wurttemberg in south-west Germany during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, disputes that were appealed to higher courts and became a matter for decision by the Duchys ruling council. The disputes concerned the allocation of free wood from communally owned woodlands, and the size of shares permitted to particular groups, but developed into arguments over the nature of communal government and the authority of custom. They provide avenues to the understanding of the development of intra-village tensions, and to how disputes over resource allocation could erupt at particular instances, drawing higher echelons of state authority into the resolution of essentially local problems. In doing so the article seeks to provide a corrective to simplistic explanations of why resource regulation occurs at particular junctures, and contributes to a history of state formation, the village commune and legal change, giving proper place to pressures ‘from below’ as well as government intervention.

Energy availability from livestock and agricultural productivity in Europe, c.1800-1913: a new comparison

This article explores the proposition that a reason for high agricultural productivity in the early nineteenth century was relatively high energy availability from draught animals. The article is based on the collection of extensive new data indicating different trends in draught power availability and the efficiency of its use in different countries of Europe. This article shows that the proposition does not hold, and demonstrates that, although towards the end of the nineteenth century England had relatively high numbers of draught animals per agricultural worker, it also had low number of workers and animals per hectare, indicating the high efficiency of muscle power, rather than an abundance of such power. The higher efficiency was related to a specialization on less labour-intensive farming and a preference for horses over oxen.

The Environmental History of Pre-industrial Agriculture in Europe

Agricultural history and environmental history are inextricably linked. This is not simply because agriculture directly exercises a profound influence on the surface and climate of our planet, but also because until very recently indeed the great majority of humans were agriculturalists. For millennia the passage of their lives as rural consumers and producers gave the human role in changing the face of the Earth a distinctly bucolic tint, even when these populations exercised their power indirectly, through demand for the products of cities, manufactories and mines. Yet while the land has been a perennial concern of environmental historians over recent decades, their interest in agriculture,most especially perhaps in Europe, has frequently been rather incidental, though with notable exceptions.1 Cultivation has frequently been viewed simply as another means by which humans inflict change, and pre-eminently damage, on the ‘environment’. Conversely, agricultural historians, while producing extensive writings on what we might consider ‘the environment’, have tended to consider it as either the backdrop to human endeavour, or written narratives by which nature’s fecundity is increasingly harnessed and enhanced by human ingenuity.

Fuelling the English Breakfast: Hidden energy flows in the Anglo-Danish Trade 1870-1913

The 1870–1914 globalization period had profound impacts on the international division of labour, with coal-endowed countries specializing in the production of energy-intensive manufacturing goods and others in the production of agricultural goods. This study analyses the environmental consequences of this specialization, by quantifying the flows of energy and hidden energy embodied in the bilateral trade between the UK, the industrial workshop of the world, and Denmark, a coal-poor country with an agricultural economy. We show that the transformations that occurred in Danish agriculture to meet the growing demand for breakfast foods in the UK required significant quantities of feed and coal. Denmark was a net importer of energy throughout the period and a net importer of hidden energy in 1870. However, by the end of this wave of globalization, Denmark had become a significant net exporter of hidden energy to the UK. This was due both to an increase in its land productivity and to the import of coal, grain and fertilizers from abroad.

Trees, Trade and Textiles: Potash Imports and Ecological Dependency in British Industry, c.1550–1770

Research for this article was facilitated by funding generously provided by the British Academy.

Constructing Arctic Energy Resources: The Case of the Canadian North, 1921–1980

This chapter explores how the future of Arctic hydrocarbons was narrated and imagined, and the real effects stories have had on the rocks, inhabitants, hydrocarbon reservoirs and ecologies of the north. It takes the case of the Canadian Arctic as a prospective zone of hydrocarbon exploitation since the 1940s, and especially in the peak era of exploration in the late 1960s and 1970s. Arctic hydrocarbons were presented as a treasure house for Canada, for export income, national economic development and security. Yet, very little has been extracted. It examines how resources were mobilized by presenting futures in the form of estimates of gas and oil reserves, infrastructure, demand and prices, and geopolitics; and related forms of the sociability among actors such as firms and government.