positive tension
CSM:
But "environment," defined by one dictionary as "the area in which something exists or lives," doesn't seem to describe a living thing.
What alternatives do we have? "Biosphere," perhaps, although that doesn't quite get it either, and has its particular scientific meaning. Remember Biosphere 2?
At some point going back before the first Earth Day in 1970, "ecology" seemed as if it might catch on in popular discourse. "No deposit, no return" pop bottles were deemed "not good for the ecology," for instance. "Ecology" is shorter than "environment," but it's even less concrete, and it sounds like an academic discipline (which it also is). You might say "ecology" is to "environment" as "biology" is to "human being": One is the study, the other is the thing studied.
If "environment" the noun is bad, the adjective is worse. We've taken to describing as "environmentally friendly" those things that aren't positively "friendly" but only "environmentally less damaging than something else we could be doing instead."
[snip]
"Green" is a bright spot in this discussion. It's short, easy to spell and say, and has a real-life referent: the green grass and trees we can all see.
Recently L'Oreal, the French cosmetics giant, announced its acquisition of The Body Shop, the British cosmetics retailer. When a trade publication ran its story on the deal March 17 under the headline, "L'Oreal Goes Green With Body Shop Acquisition," savvy readers understood that the reference was to The Body Shop's much-promoted environmental consciousness, rather than to St. Patrick's Day, or to extreme hair coloring, for that matter.
"Eco," is a useful combining form, established in "ecotourism," for instance, and it seems to telescope the awkwardness of "relatively less environmentally damaging" into three letters.
This all may seem a little academic, but consider that the frames around "economy" - an even more abstract (unless of course you sit on a board of directors) but no less important word in AmeriSpeak - were also built up a long time ago. Even if you're an anti-capitalist, you talk about the economy, or about some kind of economy, in some fashion.
The "environment"? That's something latte-sippers get (or if you're hefting around some guilt, white latte-sippers get). For me, I gotta say green's a keeper, a little hard to knock, unless Frank Luntz can cook up some talking points about keeping yellow and blue separate for the sake of the children.
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