One reason for the disengagement over the dire state of the natural world is that the discussion has, over the past several years, dissolved into a blather of babble. That obscurity and ambiguity about what we mean when we try to talk sensibly about the environment has enabled too many of us to emotionally distance ourselves from the most terrifying issues of our time.
Climate change: an existential crisis? Come again?
We care about COVID because it’s tangible. Someone you know starts dry-hacking one day, lands in the ICU and is dead a week later. Boom.
We care about the stock market. We watch it rise and fall, and when it swings low, and lower, we can feel that sucker punch to the gut.
We care about air quality when we hear the struggled wheeze of an emphysema patient. Or we live in San Francisco and one morning, glance out our window at an eerily iridescent orange haze.
But climate change—even when the proper term has been officially changed to those in the know to climate emergency or crisis—leaves too many people confounded. Even the converted. Ditto with biodiversity loss. The need to reduce emissions to net zero. Participate in the circular economy. Buy circular fashion. Support regenerative agriculture, regenerative business and even regenerative tourism…
Huh?
Do our words matter? I worry that the passion and energy is being passively plucked out of the discourse when words like sustainability take root in our lexicon, like an invasive species, and nobody except for a few eggheads at the UN or National Institute of Science, is the slightest bit confident that they know what it means. And even if they do, that their confidence as to its common meaning is woefully misplaced.
In the old days, fifty years or so back, a fiery conflagration in Cleveland’s oil-soaked Cuyahoga River sparked a global movement. Even then-President Nixon and Congress were quickish to act, passing the EPA, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts in 1972.
In those days, we talked in plain terms about polluted skies, melting nuclear power plants and acid rain. Not only did most people know what the heck was being discussed, but because these concepts were both intelligible and tangible, people could respond with a manageable and visceral emotional reaction other than the frozen stare and despair of hopeless angst that today’s linguistic mumbo jumbo breeds.
In their lumpy Birkenstocks, frumpy haircuts, and unshaven body parts the passionate and well-meaning Seventies environmentalists ultimately seemed too earnest and do-gooder to many. Their message, while refreshingly straightforward, was too didactic—too Debbie downer.
The paucity and deprivation themes and memes that defined the first phase of our environmental movement was ultimately a no-go in this country, and ultimately in many countries. (Remember cardigan-clad Jimmy Carter telling his fellow Americans to use less gas and turn down the thermostat to save energy? Not a smooth move from a purely political popularity perspective).
In 1987, with the publication of the Bruntland Report, also known as Our Common Future, environmentalism morphed into a new more feel-good movement: sustainability. Although most people, then as now, weren’t so sure precisely what it meant, it was novel and certainly had a more hopeful and reassuring ring. "Sustainable development could meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
What could possibly be wrong with that picture?
Our good old American desire to move from puritanical constraint to abundance was warmly embraced by people on both sides of the aisle and country as individuals and companies sanctioned the new win-win-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too paradigm. Wealthier people in wealthier nations could feel good again about stockpiling their shopping carts high with food, using paper and producing stuff—particularly when it grew on trees in poor countries. It just needed to be harvested sustainably or responsibly or ethically.
A whole new cadre of feel-good, do-good companies got into the act. Ben and Jerry’s, Eileen Fisher, Stonyfield Farms. They were the precursors to the B-Corp businesses, and their founders found a way to make environmentalism profitable. And they made money hand over fist—especially when they sold out to Unilever and other multinationals. Their message: consumers could help the planet by “shopping with their wallets.”
While forward-thinking companies began to embrace sustainability, after a short while, stories of birds and butterflies and emotionally fulfilled coffee farmers didn’t hold water with their shareholders, who demanded true accountability. That’s when and why sustainability moved into the purview of the corporate bean-counters. And for a legitimate reason. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” as the euphemism goes.
The vague term of sustainability spun off a new vocabulary, efficiently truncated to terse acronyms like CSR and ESG. Biz speak.
Meanwhile, the science community continued to politely sound the alarm over our collective assault on the environment—tossing around terms like climate change, global warming biodiversity loss and chloroflourocarbons. Al Gore got into the action. An Inconvenient Truth. Downer. Again.
While the science was real, the messaging—both from the scientific and the business communities—continued to be squishy. Who here can clearly define circular economy or tease apart the difference between net zero and carbon neutral? What exactly is a regenerative business? Ummmm…
Pair a picture of migratory songbirds dropping dead mid-flight and falling from the sky by the tens of thousands next to a graph illustrating the crashing of biodiversity. As we English majors learn early on, show don’t tell. Want to know where your food comes from, other than your local Whole Foods? Google images of feedlot fed cows. You may think twice about your next burger.
In other words, there’s just been too much telling and not enough showing. When ideas are crystal clear and in HD sharp focus, we know it and we feel their meaning viscerally.
It’s not only that our language has grown clinical and imprecise when it comes to the environment, it’s that the obscure syntax has given us license to distance if not utterly detach from the issues. Greta Thunberg’s public display of anger made us squirm because she challenged us to feel—not just think—our way through the issues.
The MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have done an inspiring job of encouraging all of us to find and hone our voice in the cultural conversation. But in any conversation, words matter.
Just as the call for social justice and accountability has caused so many us to question our use of language—some would say to an extreme—our language around the natural world could use some more rigor, revising and even regenerating. The words we choose to use need to convey more emotional weight than what has become the euphemistic language generated and regurgitated by businesses and scientists. Out with the jargon. Time to tell it like it is, with intention, so that we stop obfuscating the truth and face it head on. Our house is on fire. The time is now.