Everything Around Us? It’s ‘The Surround.’

The word ‘environment’ puts the world in a cognitive box

Frog by M W from Pixabay

‘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…