In this blog, Laura Meneghello introduces the latest, fully Open Access, issue of Global Environment, which she guest-edited – a Special Issue on ‘Visions of Sustainability’.
Visions of sustainability have substantially shaped relations between humans and the environment. Besides being a reaction to economic issues and environmental problems, they were also linked with ideas of temporality and, in particular, imagined futures. The aim of the special issue of Global Environment 18.1 (2025), entitled ‘Visions of Sustainability’ and edited by Laura Meneghello, is to historicise narratives of sustainability from different methodological and disciplinary perspectives, analysing the plurality of meanings with which sustainability was invested by historical actors and how these changed over time. The issue gathers specific case studies displaying different perspectives on discourses of sustainability and their social and cultural construction, negotiation and contestation on the global, national and local levels. These discourses implied and in their turn produced imaginations of future societies, which is why the contributions refer to ‘visions’ of sustainability. Especially dealing with sustainability discourses beyond political debates in the strict sense, the issue is based on selected contributions presented at the conference ‘Visions of Sustainability’, held at the University of Siegen, Germany, on 11–12 March 2021.
If cultural construction of the environment and of sustainability are often neglected in contemporary debates, this is possibly due to the claims of scientificity and objectivity that are characteristic of the environmental sciences. This often goes hand in hand with a claim of universalism that has long shadowed the cultural and historical aspects of sustainability and might lead to conflicts between environmental experts’ and citizens’ interests as well as their own visions of sustainability. However, environmental concerns may also foster the cooperative interaction of different social groups, whereas environmental movements are characterised by processes of transnational circulation and appropriation of sustainability ideals. As global historiography has recently taught us, dichotomies are not helpful for the understanding of global interactions, which feature entanglements of global and local rather than their separation.
Interestingly, the historical actors did not perceive claims of universalism as being incompatible with the existence of a plurality of visions of sustainability. In fact, the way sustainability has been conceived of varies from place to place and its meaning depends on the social, political and cultural context in which the concept is used, as well as on the specific interests and concerns of the involved actors. The case studies ask how sustainability was defined and related to the past, present and future by these actors. Discourses of sustainability were and indeed are constantly accompanied by ideas of temporality, in particular in the form of imagined environmental and social futures. In other words, not only does sustainability have a history, but the way it is conceived of and disseminated also shapes imaginaries of future societies and future environments.
The broad focus of the special issue is to encourage the establishment of connections between the use of ‘sustainability’ in domains of action and knowledge, geographical areas and historical periods that are seemingly very different from each other and, in so doing, understand how discourses of sustainability involved conflicting interpretations as well as fruitful cooperations between actors with different backgrounds and concerns.
The articles join interdisciplinary perspectives from ethnography and anthropology with cultural, economic and environmental history as well as the histories of knowledge, technology and infrastructure. Martin Stuber deals with the role played by the concept of sustainability in the emergence of a national environmental policy in Swiss forestry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the context of the attempt to increase wood production for the growing energy needs of the industrial society, ‘sustainability’ pointed to intergenerational issues as well as more pressing threats such as flood prevention, thereby helping in overcoming the opposition between scientific forestry and rural societies. The article by Laura Meneghello sheds light on the continuities of sustainability narratives from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century by focusing on the history of infrastructure and, more precisely, on discourses concerning pneumatic transport as sustainable infrastructure. Thereby, it is argued that techno-scientific plans and utopian representations put forward the idea that environmental problems could be solved through technological innovation, known as the ‘technological fix’. Lisanne Rother approaches sustainability narratives through the methods of visual history while dealing with the moral economy of renewable resources and electricity supply in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s; she identifies the function and visual strategies of advertisement as aiming at legitimising the electricity industry and, at the same time, popularising sustainability discourses about energy supply. Moreover, she traces the development of visual imaginaries and narratives about renewable energy deriving from the sun, wind or water, showing continuities with the representations of electricity since the nineteenth century. The article by Eriko Yamasaki (first author) and Laura Meneghello (second author) focuses on how concepts of sustainability shape imaginations of future development in the Mexican Caribbean and how engaged citizens appropriate globally circulating discourses in order to promote sustainable tourism and thereby protect the local environment.
While analysing discourses of sustainability, the contributions pay special attention to their temporal dimension, as well as to their entanglement with political and economic matters, scientific knowledge and moral values. Thus, the special issue is meant to foster a deeper, critical understanding of contemporary discourses and debates, entailing the entanglement between the macro and the micro level. By combining different methodological approaches such as discourse analysis, ethnographic research and cultural and visual history, the contributions strive towards an integrated environmental history that critically engages with the temporal dimension of environmental discourses and concepts both as being historically constructed and as producing historical futures.
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