Aktuelle Diskurse der Nachhaltigkeit: Sprachliche Perspektiven auf Ökologie und Gesellschaft

This contribution examines sustainability as a key concept in contemporary ecological and societal discourses from a linguistic perspective. It argues that environmental challenges such as climate change and resource scarcity should also be understood as communicative phenomena shaped by language, discourse, and narrative framing. The contribution traces the historical development of the concept of sustainability from its origins in early modern forestry discourse to its current status as a central term in global transformation debates. Drawing on discourse-linguistic and corpus-based observations, sustainability is characterized as a discursive keyword marked by semantic openness, normative relevance, and broad societal applicability. Finally, the contribution outlines the thematic structure of the volume and situates the individual contributions within current research on environmental communication, discourse linguistics, and ecolinguistics.