Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture

[...]the term sustainable development entered into widespread circulation with Gro Harlem Brundtland's 1987 UN report "Our Common Future," that warned of long-term challenges to global and intergenerational equity, including deforestation, desertification, fossil fuel exhaustion, climate change, population pressure, and decline in biodiversity. According to Parkins, the Victorians were the first to contemplate "the widespread environmental despoliation wrought by industrialization" on a national and planetary scale (1). The discovery of the Ice Age in the late 1830s paved the way for a new conception of civilization as the product of interglacial thaw in the Holocene.