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Everything Around Us? It’s ‘The Surround.’
The word ‘environment’ puts the world in a cognitive box
‘Environment’ is a Boring Word
The air we breathe, the water we swim, the ground we walk aren’t “merely” those things. Yet a word like “environment” may dull us to the reality of our own planet. Because it’s so broad, it may steer us away from our interest in the planet’s physical details. Especially if we don’t have a career in “managing” its potential “resources” for humanity’s “use,” we may feel that what’s under the hood of “the environment” is too technically complex for us to understand.
The planet is inherently valuable. We shouldn’t need fancy words to “sell” the building blocks of life. The planet isn’t a rhetorical exercise or a marketing game.
We need to live in places that are clean, beautiful, and biologically productive, in some kind of harmony with other living beings, human and non-human. Why does that need require an elaborate story to justify it? Whose approval or permission do we seek?
In fact, we already value nature, even if we don’t consciously know that we do. Derrick Jensen argued in 2006:
“If I hit your thumb, you won’t decide cognitively that getting hit by a hammer hurts. Not getting hit by a hammer has inherent value, no matter what you decide about it. * * * Drinkable quantities of clean water are unqualifiedly a good thing, no matter the stories we tell ourselves.”
Our Environment is How We Act
One possible meaning of the word: Our environment isn’t our surroundings but the way in which we behave.
On this point, Tom Hayden noted comments by John Dewey and Vaclav Havel. “‘Environment’ is not something around and about human activities in an external sense; it is their medium,” Dewey wrote in 1949, explaining that the “narrowing of the medium is the direct source of all unnecessary impoverishment in human living.” Damaging our environment gives us less room and limits the ways in which we can act. Havel similarly complained that the word “environment” suggests “that whatever is not human merely ‘environs’ or surrounds us and is therefore inferior to us, something we need care for only if it…
