Historians have recently shown how the concept of ‘sustainability’ (Nachhaltigkeit) first emerged through statist ambitions to enfold nature into political economy in eighteenth-century Germany. Shifting the focus from forestry to mining, this article draws upon the case of Prussian mining official Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ‘Mining School’ he founded in Bad Steben to argue that sustainable resource management also entailed the strict discipline of labour relations and a programme of ‘psychological policy’. Humboldt's Mining School sought to address administrative concerns about ‘Raubbau’ – the rash exploitation of mineral resources ‘without consideration for the future’ – by cultivating a new generation of mine foremen loyal to the state and schooled in its protocol. Ostensibly, Humboldt wished to purge the industry of ‘superstitious’ folk knowledge that undermined the state's commitment to long-term exploitation. Yet analysis of mining songs and sagas suggests a striking analogy between official and vernacular understandings of resource extraction as an ethical matter. Thus, the environmental alarms sounded by German miners around 1800 were triggered by transgressions of a social nature; and political concerns about social order in the ‘mining state’ were constitutive of material concerns about natural resources.

历史学家最近展示了“可持续性” （Nachhaltigkeit）的概念是如何通过统计学家的雄心勃勃出现的，该雄心勃勃的野心是在18世纪的德国将自然纳入政治经济学。本文将重点从林业转移到采矿，借鉴了普鲁士采矿官员亚历山大·冯·洪堡（Alexander von Humboldt，1769年至1859年）的案例以及他在巴德·斯特本（Bad Steben）成立的“采矿学校”的情况，该论据认为可持续资源管理也需要严格的劳动纪律关系和“心理政策”计划。洪堡矿业学校寻求解决有关劳布鲍的行政问题'–无需考虑未来就可以轻率地开采矿产资源–通过培养忠于国家并接受其协议教育的新一代矿工领班。表面上，洪堡希望清除该行业的“迷信”民间知识，这会破坏该州对长期开采的承诺。然而，对歌曲和萨加斯（Sagas）开采歌曲的分析表明，官方和当地人对资源提取是一种道德问题的理解之间有着惊人的类比。因此，德国矿工在1800年左右发出的环境警报是由社会性质的犯罪触发的。对“采矿国”中社会秩序的政治关注构成了对自然资源的物质关注。