Our brief overview of developments in environmental anthropology since 1980 and their antecedents is organized around three themes: systems ecology, political ecology, and cognitive science. In some areas, the context is familiar. As Latour recently observed, the intellectual themes captured by the emergent concept of the Anthropocene have long been familiar to anthropologists. After decades of research on human–environmental interactions, anthropology, and more particularly environmental anthropology, suddenly finds itself pushed into prominence. A vibrant and kaleidoscopic research agenda has ensued and borrows extensively from other disciplines. This agenda coincides with increased interest in coupled human and natural systems from both the social and the natural sciences. Such attention is not solely the product of academic integration or the analytical reflection of empirical realities; it also stems from growing concern over the role of humans in the global transformation of the environment.

As sustainability gains popularity in public discourse, scholars have noted its diverse uses, multiple meanings, and contradictory outcomes. This paper explores how the current proliferation of the concept of sustainability stems in part from its varied normative appeals, which in turn motivate, legitimate, and unsettle its diverse mobilizations. As the concept of sustainability calls for an extension of moral horizons beyond the immediate here and now, this redrawing of moral boundaries has simultaneously produced new externalities as well as enduring anxieties and responses within these moral bounds themselves. Drawing on ethnographic and historical materials, we argue that sustainability’s moral boundaries have become both an object of scholarly critique and their own productive site of anxiety and negotiation. Questions about sustainability’s moral horizons and externalities often surface in the concept’s public deployment itself. We suggest that these tensions can be made visible by attending to the intersections between sustainability and a broader range of moral concerns at work.

This article examines current thinking about the divide between the ethnographic subject and object, based on my recent work with a Dayak NGO in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. I suggest that the increasing complexity of relations between ethnographer and subject, as in my involvement with this NGO, necessitates some rethinking of our concept of the ethnographic project. I argue, first, that this new ethnographic order of things challenges us to think strategically about the need to counter rather than critique monolithic representations. There may be a need for us to contribute to the construction of representation, rather than to avoid representation. Second, I argue that we need to worry less about the unintended consequences of our study of local organizations and movements, and to worry more about the intended consequences of our relative lack of study of central institutions of power. The proliferation of local organizations challenges us to rethink key ethnographic boundaries, not just between subject and object, but also between the center and periphery of the discipline, between North and South, and between modern and post‐modern paradigms.

Is “diversity” a modern concept, like indigeneity or biodiversity, which is conceived precisely at the time that it seems to be threatened and on the verge of disappearing? In the face of perceived threats to diversity, projects and policies have been crafted to protect, promote, or conserve diversity, but in doing so they have often demonstrated a paradoxical propensity toward purity and authority in representations of diversity. Perceptions of “pure” natural diversity might represent native forests comprised solely of native species; “pure” cultural diversity might represent indigenous peoples who still speak indigenous languages and wear native dress. If purity is emblematic of diversity, what, then, is the place of hybrid landscapes and peoples? In our study, we draw on a range of examples—of agrobiodiversity conservation in Bolivia, satellite mapping initiatives in Madagascar and Ecuador, scientific authority about anthropogenic climate change, indigenous language and identity in Peru, and a comparison of the Amazon and Atlantic Forest in Brazil—to demonstrate gaps between representations of diversity, and the heterogeneous local realities they obscure. We suggest that hybridity is a form of diversity unto itself—albeit a form of diversity that is more complex, and thus harder to codify and categorize.