Environmental justice organizations (EJO) have introduced or adopted powerful concepts and principles to analyze and to cope with environmental conflicts. Among others are: biopiracy, environmental racism, food sovereignty, "green deserts", defense of the commons, land grabbing, corporate accountability. They have produced a "political ecology from the bottom up". The paper traces origins and vocabulary of the eco-justice movements, arguing for processes and dynamics that build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, which can be furthered both by academic scholarship and by continued activism in environmental justice