<P> Sustainable development has its roots in ideas about sustainable forest management which were developed in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . In response to a growing awareness of the depletion of timber resources in England, John Evelyn argued that "sowing and planting of trees had to be regarded as a national duty of every landowner, in order to stop the destructive over-exploitation of natural resources" in his 1662 essay Sylva . In 1713 Hans Carl von Carlowitz, a senior mining administrator in the service of Elector Frederick Augustus I of Saxony published Sylvicultura oeconomica, a 400 - page work on forestry . Building upon the ideas of Evelyn and French minister Jean - Baptiste Colbert, von Carlowitz developed the concept of managing forests for sustained yield . His work influenced others, including Alexander von Humboldt and Georg Ludwig Hartig, eventually leading to the development of a science of forestry . This in turn influenced people like Gifford Pinchot, first head of the US Forest Service, whose approach to forest management was driven by the idea of wise use of resources, and Aldo Leopold whose land ethic was influential in the development of the environmental movement in the 1960s . </P> <P> Following the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, the developing environmental movement drew attention to the relationship between economic growth and development and environmental degradation . Kenneth E. Boulding in his influential 1966 essay The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth identified the need for the economic system to fit itself to the ecological system with its limited pools of resources . One of the first uses of the term sustainable in the contemporary sense was by the Club of Rome in 1972 in its classic report on the Limits to Growth, written by a group of scientists led by Dennis and Donella Meadows of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Describing the desirable "state of global equilibrium", the authors wrote: "We are searching for a model output that represents a world system that is sustainable without sudden and uncontrolled collapse and capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people ." </P> <P> In 1980 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature published a world conservation strategy that included one of the first references to sustainable development as a global priority and introduced the term "sustainable development". Two years later, the United Nations World Charter for Nature raised five principles of conservation by which human conduct affecting nature is to be guided and judged . In 1987 the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development released the report Our Common Future, commonly called the Brundtland Report . The report included what is now one of the most widely recognised definitions of sustainable development . </P> <Table> <Tr> <Td> "</Td> <Td> Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs . It contains within it two key concepts: The concept of' needs', in particular, the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and The idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs . </Td> <Td>" </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td_colspan="3">--World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (1987) </Td> </Tr> </Table>

When was the term sustainable development first used