This article argues that the modernization of environmental institutions has contributed to the intensification-expansion of extractive industries in what we call economic-territorial regional restructuring. To explain this phenomenon, we distinguish two notions of sustainability that are often confused: i) sustainability as a normative referent, and ii) sustainability as an empirical phenomenon, the last, materialized in concrete measures and their respective consequences. The methodology used includes a literature review and database analysis, with the purpose of examining the growth of the mining industry in Chile based on two characteristics of sustainability-understood as an empirical phenomenon-, which, together, increase the pressure on ecosystems and local communities, these are: i) territorial expansionism and ii) unequal distribution of environmental roles. As an analytical performance of this work, we argue that socio-ecological conflicts can be addressed, in a better way, as the clash of opposite action orientations found in the same territory.