Environmental sustainability seeks understanding and better management of those aspects of human interaction with the environment that can be controlled or altered, especially those that are in a critical state and require urgent action. Anthropology has since the 1980s made some vital contributions to wider understandings and debates over environmental sustainability, yet sociocultural anthropology and other social sciences often struggle to find a voice in areas of knowledge where hard environmental science is expected to deliver authoritative knowledge. Major contributions of anthropologists include unpicking environmental crisis narratives that perpetuate simplistic versions of ecological degradation and revealing the value of attending to local people's environmental knowledge and practice.