Like Heinrich Cotta, Georg Ludwig Hartig came from a family that was shaped by forestry – his father Friedrich Christian Hartig (1734–1815) and grandfather Ernst Friedrich Hartig (1698–1759) practiced this forestry profession in the Hessian hinterland.[1] After a two-year apprenticeship, the man who was acquitted of his uncle's apprenticeship letter attended the University of Gießen, which was rather unusual for Förster at the time.[2] In 1786 he entered the service of the Prince of Solms-Braunfels as head forester in Hungen and founded a forestry master school. In 1797 the Prince of Orange-Nassau called him to Dillenburg as state forester. There he set up a forestry school, where prospective forest officials from Germany and abroad were trained. In 1806 he accepted an offer from King Friedrich I of Württemberg and went to Stuttgart as chief forest officer of the Württemberg forest administration. In 1821 he set up a chair in forestry at the University of Berlin, which later became the Eberswalde Forestry College.
In an early work, Hartig compiled all the rules known at the time for establishing and maintaining forest stands. Summarized into short teachings, he published them in 1791 as instructions for foresters on wood breeding. Four years later he followed up with his instruction on the taxation of forests, in which he formulated how the principle of sustainability can be implemented in forestry practice. The term sustainable in connection with the management of forests goes back to the Saxon chief miner Hans Carl von Carlowitz. He was the first to coin the term sustainability in his work Sylvicultura oeconomica, published in 1713 as "Household message and natural instructions for wild tree cultivation".[3]
Source: Wikipedia