FORUM: THE IDEA OF SUSTAINABILITY INTRODUCTION

The encounter of environmental history and intellectual history is a union of two insidiously oceanic inquiries. "Oceanic" in the sense of limitlessness, or oneness with the universe. "All history is the history of thought", and the history of thought is in modern intellectual history a universal investigation, of advertisements for sofas and Ayn Rand and adoption laws in early colonial Bihar. But all history is also the history of space, and of the environment that surrounds the sofas and the laws. It is apparent, now, that "history occurs in space as well as time". Environmental history is everywhere as well as nowhere. It is a new universal understanding, which subverts even the historians' own anxieties about universalization: a "negative universal history. © Cambridge University Press 2011.