ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a genealogy of sustainability as, at various times, a parallel, divergent, and intersecting concept to environmental justice. Specifically, the chapter summarizes the intellectual history of the sustainability concept, emerging from sustainable development discourse in the 1980s. Although sustainable development and environmental justice concepts developed contemporaneously, they diverged ideologically, specifically around the role of the market. Early conceptions of sustainability/sustainable development and environmental justice appeared to share little common ground. This early conception implies that sustainability and environmental justice are at odds with one another, specifically around whether or how market fundamentalism and developmental ideologies predominate. However, through refinements such as just sustainabilities and, more recently, critical and situated sustainabilities, synergies between sustainability and environmental justice have re-emerged. This intellectual history demonstrates why and how sustainability and environmental justice are co-constitutive with one another. This overlapping is not automatic. Tracing a convergence narrative is important, as sustainability grows in symbolic and material terms. The terms of their reconnection are grounds for synergies around a justice-oriented environmental politics.
