INTRODUCTION

Defining both sustainability and religion broadly (see Chapter 2) allows a closer investigation of a number of historical, intellectual, and policy rivulets that carved their way across the cultural landscape toward larger sustainability streams. This chapter exposes some of the roots of sustainability, which are often mentioned in passing by scholars who investigate sustainability, but are seldom critically analyzed. The conceptual foundations of sustainability and the motivations that root them are heavily spiritualized, and when they have been deployed in public discourse, explicitly or implicitly, they have been drivers of production and consumption behaviors.

Important to this analysis are the values embraced by those who first deployed the terms publicly, and the way these values have been digested and redeployed for, and by leaders of sustainability movements and the general public. Specifically, two foundational ideas related to sustainability—(a) the notion of ecological limits, and (b) the idea of sustained resource use over time—provided conceptual spaces where ecological, economic, and humanistic values were rhetorically and practically joined over the past two hundred years. In many cases, religious and spiritual concepts provided the fertile habitat where the other two concerns could be fruitfully grafted together.