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Callon (2007) in order to understand better the social function of objects and technologies

used to measure and articulate sustainability. Market devices do things: they ‘are material and

discursive assemblages that intervene in the construction of markets’ (Callon et al. 2007, p.2).

We could name both sustainability certification and sustainable seafood guides as market

devices, or more appropriately for the topic of this thesis, “sustainability devices”. They enact

particular versions of what sustainability is and what it is to be sustainable. Through this

chapter I add them to the components of our sustainability assemblage, and identify them as

participants in a sustainability discourse.

My aim in this chapter is to consider how the term sustainability emerged during the

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latter part of the 20 century. To leave the inquiry at the suggestion that sustainability

emerged as a response to environmental pressures – such as issues of climate change,

extinction, food security – would fall short of a deeper analysis of the conditions of

emergence and of the social function of the term. There remain niggling questions about how

and why sustainability has come into prominence, overtaking terms like conservation and

preservation, which had been key terms of previous environmental movements (see Benton &

Short 1999). Of course, environmental issues such as stock decline are real, and debates over

aspects such as fishing gear are important. I am not arguing that these issues do not exist or

are irrelevant. Rather, the current chapter considers the ideas, technologies, activities and

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disciplines that have formed since the late 18 century as conditions of possibility for a
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marine sustainability discourse to emerge in the latter part of the 20 century. I explore

significant transformations in western thinking about nature, including the development of

taxonomy and areas of specialisation within the natural sciences, with a focus on aquatic

nature. This chapter is thus part of the wider project of this thesis, to render visible those

aspects that are obscured through a contemporary sustainability assemblage – in this case, the

cultural and epistemological lineage of sustainability as a discourse.

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