This article analyzes the history of the environmental principal of sustainability in agrarian and industrial cultures. Its example is Central Europe between the Middle Ages and the 21st century. After the great deforestation of the 12th century, and reaching the limits of the region’s carrying capacity in the 15th century, the European seignorial-communal culture developed a model of sustainability appropriate for a socio-metabolic system based on solar energy, elements of decentralization in local entities, recognition of the upper-limits of the local ecosystem, systemic control of environmental consumption, and the optimization of the use of scarce resources. This system operated until the double Enlightenment-Industrial Revolution at the turn of the 19th century. The socio-metabolic system of the 19th century tried to exist without sustainability, but this concept was rediscovered in the 1990s.