In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities and sustainability, and explore the connections and relations between them. These concepts include: environmental justice, ecological debt, popular epidemiology, environmental racism, climate justice, environmentalism of the poor, water justice, biopiracy, food sovereignty, "green deserts", "peasant agriculture cools downs the Earth", land grabbing, Ogonization and Yasunization, resource caps, corporate accountability, ecocide, and indigenous territorial rights, among others. We examine how activists have coined these notions and built demands around them, and how academic research has in turn further applied them and supplied other related concepts, working in a mutually reinforcing way with EJOs. We argue that these processes and dynamics build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, furthering both academic scholarship and activism on environmental justice. Keywords: Political ecology, environmental justice organizations, environmentalism of the poor, ecological debt, activist knowledge RésuméDepuis le début des années 80, à travers leurs propres luttes et réunions stratégiques, les EJOS (Organisations de Justice Environnementale) et leurs réseaux ont introduit quelques concepts différents d'écologie politique qui ont été repris par le monde académique et par les décideurs politiques. Dans cet article, nous expliquons les contextes qui ont promu l'émergence de ces concepts, et offrons des définitions pour un large ensemble de concepts et de slogans lies aux inégalités environnementales et à la protection durable de l'environnement, et nous explorons les connections entre eux. Ces concepts incluent: La justice environnementale, la dette écologique, l'épidémiologie populaire, le racisme environnemental, la justice climatique, l'environnementalisme des pauvres, la justice hydrique, la bio-piraterie, la souveraineté alimentaire, «les déserts verts», «l'agriculture paysanne rafraichit la terre», la prise des terres (land grabbing), l'Ogonisation et la Yasunisation, les plafonds de ressources, la responsabilité des entreprises, l'écocide, les droits indigènes territoriaux, et quelques autres. Nous examinons comment les activistes ont inventé ces termes, construit des demandes autour d'eux, et comment la recherche académique les a appliqués, et ensuite comment elle a offert de nouveaux concepts, travaillant de manière symbiotique avec les EJOS. Nous argumentons que ces processus et dynamiques construisent une science du développement durable conduite et co-produite par les activistes, ce qui renforce ainsi la littérature académique et l'activisme sur la justice environnementale....

The central operating strategy within the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and most of the advanced capitalist world's environmental policy is to address climate change through the market mechanism known as emissions trading. Based upon government issuance and private trading of emissions reductions credits and offsets, this approach quickly rose to $135 billion in annual trading. But in the wake of the collapse of climate negotiations in Copenhagen and a world financial crisis which undermined market faith in derivative investments, carbon trading has an uncertain future. Linkages between deep-rooted financial market and emissions market problems are revealing in spatio-temporal terms, especially in the context of a deeper overaccumulation crisis and investors' desperate need for new speculative outlets. It is in the nexus of the spatial and temporal aspects of carbon financing amidst resistance to "new enclosures" by adversely affected peoples, that broader-based lessons for global/local environmental politics and climate policy can be learned.

Brewing since the advent of South African democracy in 1994 and promises of health sector transformation, an extraordinary drug war between President Nelson Mandela's African National Congress government and U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers took on global proportions in 1998-1999. Within months of the passage of South African legislation aimed at lowering drug prices, the U.S. government quickly applied powerful pressure points to repeal a clause allowing potential importation of generic substitutes and imposition of compulsory licensing. At stake were not only local interpretations of patent law and World Trade Organization rules on Trade in Intellectual Property, but international power relations between developing countries and the pharmaceutical industry. In reviewing the ongoing debate, this article considers post-apartheid public health policy, U.S. government pressure to change the law, and pharmaceutical industry interests and links to the U.S. government, and evaluates various kinds of resistance to U.S. corporate and government behavior. The case thus raises--not for the first time--concerns about contemporary imperialism ("globalization"), the role of the profit motive as an incentive in vital pharmaceutical products, and indeed the depth of "democracy" in a country where high-bidding international drug firms have sufficient clout to embarrass Vice President Al Gore by pitting him against the life-and-death interests of millions of consumers of essential drugs in South Africa and other developing countries.

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If Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is often reduced to ‘greenwashing’ for naïve middle‐class consumers, is there a more durable force to address excessive profit taking and consequent underdevelopment? While the post‐apartheid era in South Africa has been celebrated, with little foresight, for an ‘economic boom’ that restored relative corporate profitability to levels last witnessed during apartheid's heyday, the same period saw world‐class social opposition to corporate power. Three areas are illustrative: the Treatment Action Campaign's street pressure and legal strategy to acquire anti‐retroviral drugs for HIV‐positive people; Sowetans whose street protests helped drive Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux out of Johannesburg and whose constitutional case over the right to water attacked its commercialization policies; and climate activists who oppose carbon trading. Meanwhile, activists also demanded reparations from apartheid‐tainted transnational corporations in the US courts through the Alien Tort Claims Act, while a ‘Corpse Awards' was launched by activists in part to mitigate against CSR efforts. The critiques of corporations — and CSR — and the motivation for social activism are informed by strategic principles of ‘decommodification’ and ‘deglobalization of capital’; the first cannot work without the second.

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