Can the past reframe our view of a sustainable future?

This week, Bertie Harrison-Broninski speaks with Professor Annette Kehnel, Chair of Medieval History at the University of Mannheim. Kehnel gives us a potted history of sustainability and argues that sustainable practices have existed throughout history, yet our modern collective memory is influenced by ideas of resource exploitation introduced in the 18th and 19th centuries.  

Annette Kehnel is currently a visiting fellow at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She is the author of The Green Ages: Sustainable Practices, winner of the 2021 NDR Book Prize. Its English translation by Geshe Ipsen has been shortlisted for the 2025 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. 

Further reading:  

• The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability, Annette Kehnel, Profile Books 
• Die sieben Todsünden: Menschheitswissen für das Zeitalter der Krise (The Seven Deadly Sins: Human Knowledge for the Age of Crisis), Annette Kehnel, Rowohlt 
• Governing the commons : the evolution of institutions for collective action, Elinor Ostrom, Cambridge University Press 
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes, Bloomsbury 
• Managing the Lake Constance Fisheries, ca. 1350-1800, Michael Zeheter, Berghahn 

Click here for our website to read all our most recent Land and Climate Review features and pieces.