ABSTRACT
A growing consciousness about the pitfalls of industrialization has stimulated interest in sustainability. Indeed, sustainability has been a standard feature of public and political discourse ever since the United Nations adopted the concept in a series of conventions and reports in the 1980s. Sustainability has certainly been, at times, misused and greenwashed, but it is quite clear that Bill McKibben was incorrect about its decline. Since the year 2000, over 5,000 published books have included either the words "sustainable" or "sustainability" in the title, compared to zero such books before about 1976. The history of sustainability, which has been written in an explicit manner only since the 1990s, has begun to differentiate itself from other, complementary approaches to history, the most important of which is environmental history. To certain extent, some environmental historians have been writing the history of sustainability for quite some time, even though they have not necessarily been using the explicit language of sustainability or sustainable development.
