EARTH SCIENCE AND SUSTAINABILITY: HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The field of sustainability is often defined as emerging in the 1980’s after the publication of Our Common Future, more commonly known as the Brundtland Report, which detailed a number of pressing existential environmental problems for global society. However, humans have always been confronted with existential threats. This study focuses on environmental sustainability in two locations in distinctly different time periods: Prehistoric Wisconsin and 19^th Century California. At around 900 CE, a group of Mississippian peoples decided to settle on the banks of the Crawfish River in what is now called Aztalan in southern Wisconsin. In so doing, they came into contact with indigenous Woodland people who lived quite differently from their new neighbors. The two groups confronted a number of sustainability challenges that included access to resources, environmental equity, and food storage. Across the continent, in 19^th Century Sonoma County, California, a group of Russian settlers, along with Native Alaskans, settled on a marine terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Fort Ross to try to create an agricultural settlement to support their Alaskan pioneer settlements. The newcomers faced a number of environmental challenges such as coastal hazards, poor weather, and poor agricultural conditions that led to the ultimate failure of the colony. These two case studies provide a new way of framing environmental sustainability that helps broaden the modern understanding of the discipline.