This work aims to encircle the elements that characterized the environmental paradigm in order to reveal the condition and the function put in action by the environmental speech under the influence of neoliberal globalization. It is important to say that the environmental paradigm in this period have been evolved throughout a relevant rupture which comport two divergent interpretations about the development perspectives. It is believed that the meaning of this rupture preserve the environmental movement as a social movement, based on a criticism of a economy of overproduction and overconsumption which believes that sustainable development only can be conceived overcoming the logics of capitalism. In the other hand, this environmental paradigm acquires another meaning, when it is applied as a mechanism of market changing in several economy sectors, whose central idea states the paradigm appropriation as a way of company support. In other words, the neoliberal institutions unite the environmental speech and its criticism from social and environmental contradictions by the economic development and transform themselves into ideology according the spreading of concepts and varying ideas about the nomenclature of sustainability.
Environmentalism; Paradigm; Development; Sustainability