Some people call me an environmentalist.  That’s fine.  I am.  And so are you, I bet.

I was up on the McKenzie River recently, and I met a very nice gentleman who might have had a tiny bit of apprehension talking with an “environmental journalist.”  He was a former logger, U.S. Marine, avid hunter, an all-American.  He didn’t quite relish the “tree-hugger” ethos, I surmised. 

He was a good old Oregon boy, born and raised.  But he intimated that he might want to pick up and move his wife and kids somewhere else.  “Where to?” I asked.

“Wherever we go, it’ll probably be out in the woods like this,” he replied, with palpable reverence.  Maybe Libby, Montana, he said, up in the beautiful Cabinet Mountains. 

The M’cK, on the way to Cougar Reservoir.  Photo:  Johnny Kilroy.

He’d had a job offer in Libby, and so he took a look at the prospect.  After doing some research, though, he found out that Libby was the site of the largest vermiculite mine in the U.S., and is still contaminated with asbestos.  Since 1999, it has been an EPA superfund site. 

He couldn’t take his family there, he said, what with all that health risk.  It wouldn’t be worth the job.  Right then I realized that he and I, however different our life experiences and self-proclamations, were just two people who wanted a clean and safe place to live.

So how could I be an “environmentalist” and he not?  Rubbish.  Why should we be type-cast into different sects?  Poppycock.  I blame a lack of imaginative interpretation.

Come on.  We have a freedom of speech, and plenty of incentive to exercise it.

How should we define the environmental community?  We have a general idea, but how often do we dissect the meaning of the words?

Are they bad words?  Dirty, even?  What would Carlin say?

George Carlin was arrested in Milwaukee for his linguistic commentary.  Image:  Thomas Roche.

Which word is it that really makes you cringe?  Would it be environmental, conjuring those long-haired and sandaled types?  Or would it be community, the evil code-speak for the redistribution of wealth?  I’ve heard of this ethos somewhere before…

The Green Bible emphasizes verses of man’s responsibility to care for nature.  Photo:  GreenLetterBible.com.

You stand a pretty decent chance of hearing a path to salvation or elitist propaganda, depending on who’s preaching.  Your choice, really.

Pat Hudson is a co-founder of LEAF (Lindquist Environmental Appalachian Fellowship) in Knoxville, Tennessee, a group of people “whose faith leads them to take action.”  In the book Something’s Rising, she says,

To me, from the faith perspective, we have been given a great gift.  God’s given us a gift, this marvelous place…Our responsibility is to be stewards, and that’s clear.  That green-letter Bible is going to let everybody know right where those phrases are…

Our modern environmental vocabulary is pretty flaccid.

It’s one big overplayed jam, full of pre-fabricated riffs and absent improvisation.  We’ve entered a new age of rocking, and expected to keep topping the charts with the glossarial equivalent of big hair, leotards, and wailing triple-arpeggios. 

Disco is dead.  Photo:  New Line Cinema.

Green, eco-friendly, environmentalism, sustainability.  These expressions suck.  We hate to admit it, but they suck, because they don’t tell us much.

“Global warming” is not the issue here (oh and dude, “global warming” is not the preferred nomenclature…“global climate change,” please).

Try this one:  “global gas chambering.”  It’s descriptive, easily verifiable, and it represents a clear and present danger to us all, regardless of creed. 

In Something’s Rising, Hudson described her family’s respiratory afflictions in the Tennessee coalfields,

My daughters are ninth-generation Tennesseans, and they both have asthma.  Neither their dad nor I have asthma…What have we done that in one generation we can go from having air to breathe to not?

Maybe in the future people will institute Al Gore Crow laws, with segregated air fountains for the “lefty liberals” and the “righty righteous.”

We could do much better in communicating the urgency of a maintaining a livable planet, aka environmentalism, if we’d try not to think of it as a mutually exclusive hobby. 

“If you have the right thing to say you can save any situation,” a young Frank McCourt reflected.  Perhaps that’s what it needs, a little Irish prose to make the whole thing make sense again.