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Looking back over the period of the 1980s and 1990s, and even from the current day,

we can tease apart two interrelated sustainability discourses: one that has a closer alliance

with environmentalism, which I analyse in this chapter, and the other which attempts to

explicitly address socio-cultural elements through an integrated model, which I analysed

through the concept of the culture complex in the previous chapter. In this chapter I analyse

the discourse that emerged in the 1980s and continued the work of environmentalism,

sustaining species, ecosystems, and even the entire planet for future generations. However,

both the environmental and the integrated versions of sustainability share a genealogy, and so

the current chapter works back through the epistemological and ontological origins of both

sustainability discourses. It therefore contributes to some of the questions raised in the

previous chapter in regards to the relationship between the concept of biodiversity and

cultural diversity.

In this chapter I advance the argument that the term sustainability does more than

simply reflect cultural values, ideas, rules and systems. Rather it is part of a process of their

making. Subsequently, a social function of sustainability is not only to delimit but also to

limit the term and terms of sustainability, including who and what participates in this process

and how they participate. This can be explained through Foucault’s notion of productive

power. I argue that by analysing sustainability as a discourse, as opposed to simply analysing

it as a solution to environmental problems, we are able to better understand the cultural

constitution of sustainability and to further describe a sustainability assemblage. The function

of sustainability is not only to solve environmental problems but also to produce cultural

values, knowledge and specific systems, devices and institutions of managing the

environment. This is what I will term in this chapter, “environmental ordering”. This

approach puts forward the argument that forms of environmental management are always

cultural. But rather than doing this in order to locate an ideal cultural contribution to

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