By relocating value in local everyday caregiving skills and indigenous knowledges, Salleh reconsiders social justice and sustainability questions like climate change and the neoliberal green economy and her current writing focuses on integrating the discourses of political ecology.

In contrast to idealist ecofeminisms coming from philosophy and cultural studies, Salleh's materialist analysis is closer to that of fellow sociologists Maria Mies in Germany and Mary Mellor in the United Kingdom.

Salleh's book Ecofeminism as Politics outlines the scope of an embodied materialist feminism, offering a transdisciplinary analysis of the deeply sex-gendered roots of capitalist patriarchal culture.

[3] However, from pre-capitalist patriarchal times and onwards through the European scientific revolution into modernity, the roles of men and women have been constructed differently with respect to the metabolism of human societies within nature.

Salleh's book Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice introduces this analysis and in later writing it develops as a system of six debts, providing a common denominator for workers, decolonial, women, youth, species, and planetary well-being.

Pointing to patriarchal bias in both orthodox Marxism and environmental politics, Salleh argues that the Left's narrow productivist focus on use and exchange value, and failure to acknowledge the metabolic value of natural living processes is an obstacle to formulation of a coherent eco-socialism, and to the unity of grassroots movements.

[7] She maintains that the worldwide unity of meta-industrial labour - the forces of re-production - through political actions like the World Social Forums and Global Tapestry of Alternatives, is essential to build a pluriversal and life-affirming Earth Democracy.