Critical sustainability: incorporating critical theories into contested sustainabilities

In the Anthropocene, an age where the Earth is most clearly defined by human impacts on the planet, there is growing pressure to find more sustainable social, political, and environmental relations. Calls for greater sustainability have existed for decades, yet have consistently been embedded in capitalist processes and narratives that dilute their intentions and their impacts. Against this backdrop, we advocate for a critical sustainability, a form of sociopolitical and socioeconomic engagement that rejects the superordinance of capital accumulation over ecological integrity. Critical sustainability is developed as a series of nature-society relations that highlight social and environmental justice concepts and practices. While not entirely “new,” critical sustainabilities are distinct from existing literatures in that they underscore the necessity of engaging not only with socioenvironmental relations, but also with the dominant political economies that so powerfully shape these relations.