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either social or environmental issues at the expense of the other. At its best, sustain-
ability offers a vision of socio-ecological integration that breaks down the categories
'humans' and 'nature' and instead focuses on intersections of multiple and complex
processes that do not obey our efforts to neatly categorise them. In so doing, sus-
tainability can also open the door to deep understanding of the causes of environ-
mental degradation and social injustice, and how these are interconnected, a project
that requires attending to relations of power.
The malleability of sustainability as a concept should be seen in light of this
politics. One outcome of the fact that people can use the term to refer to very dif-
ferent things is that people can avoid diffi cult discussions about what they really
mean simply by reference to 'sustainability'; the malleability of sustainability masks
relations of power by subverting political discussion regarding the causes of global
inequity, injustice, and environmental problems. Yet malleability is also a refl ection
of the fact that sustainability is not a closed concept, but is constantly open to revi-
sion. Anyone who engages the idea - whether as a scholar, policymaker, lay person,
or some combination - is actively shaping what sustainability means. As scholars,
and especially as geographers, we can participate in 'writing the story of sustain-
ability' in a way that makes it into 'a progressive project that ameliorates the nega-
tive externalities of economic activity for everyone' (Krueger and Gibbs, 2007). In
other words, it is impossible to categorically decide whether sustainability is a pro-
gressive idea or not; to pretend to do so is, once again, to treat sustainability as an
externally given idea that we can know objectively. Instead, we must recognise that
sustainability is the outcome of power-laden discussions regarding what is right,
what should be done and by whom, and to whose benefi t.
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