ABSTRACT
Ideas about sustainable development have deep roots. This chapter takes a historical approach to describe the evolution of ideas on which thinking about sustainable development grew. It identifies four themes, overlapping in time. The first is the idea of nature as a resource. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nature was mostly understood as a resource for commerce to exploit, but by the end of the nineteenth century the idea of wise use or resource conservation was widely discussed. The second theme concerns the idea that nature needed to be protected from exploitation. In the nineteenth century, conservation organisations began to be established and national parks were created. From the 1950s, conservationists began to protect nature by trying to influence the way development planning was done. The third theme considers the growth of ecology and its influence on the way nature and living resources were conceived and the way economic development was planned. The fourth theme is the emergence of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, with its increasingly global perspective and its concerns about resource depletion, population growth and industrialisation.
