I stand by that minor feat of scholarly inquiry. (It took me less than five minutes.) However, I was a little puzzled by these results. Surely the concept is much older than that?<\/p>\n My method had obvious limitations. I was looking at the history of a word, not the idea behind the word. <\/p>\n New research by Jeremy L. Caradonna suggests the roots of the idea go back to late 17th- and early 18th-century Europe, when people started cutting down too much forest and endangering their own way of life. Caradonna points to one Hans Carl von Carlowitz as the one who coined the word \"sustainability\" in 1713. <\/p>\n How did I miss that? The twist is that since von Carlowitz was German he called it Nachhaltigkeit<\/i>.<\/p>\n Indeed, the Ngram Viewer yields quite different results<\/a> when searching for this term in the corpus of German texts. There's still a major spike in usage over the last several decades, but it doesn't spring out of nowhere.<\/p>\n![\"Sustainability](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8596\/16005249112_d0f02a9b82.jpg?resize=500%2C190&ssl=1\")
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