Sustainability Challenges of the Mid-nineteenth-century Dutch Energy System

Energy consumption plays a central role in sustainability debates. However, how new are these sustainability challenges? Did sustainability challenges feature in historical energy transitions? This paper analyses societal debates concerning sustainability around the transition from peat to coal in the Netherlands in the mid-nineteenth century. By dividing sustainability challenges in here and now, later and elsewhere, this paper addresses to which extent elements of sustainable development featured in the historical resource transition. Digitized publications in newspapers and journals were an... Mehr ...