“Manured with the Starres”: Recovering an Early Modern Discourse of Sustainability

Abstract

The assumption that sustainability is a modern invention appears frequently, in nuanced forms, across historical and literary investigations of ecological change, resource management, and waste in the early modern period. What remains under‐investigated is the period's ethical and theoretical understandings of these issues as debates, which deployed complex oppositional rhetorical strategies and literary forms that underpinned the organization of knowledge and pragmatic measures. Sir Hugh Platt's experimental program of resource management carried out in a context of dearth in the 1580s and 1590s provides an important means for recovering an early modern discourse of sustainability in its own terms. The article uses this case study to demonstrate how the specificities of sustainable practices and their conceptual articulation can be recovered, and how such a focused and historicized approach raises key questions about the debating of ecological ethics in societies across time.