Substitute

Something that has been puzzling me for forty years (oh, all right, fifty years) is this -- how is it possible that people generally can't see that damaging the environment is a bad thing? A devastatingly bad thing, not just for wildflowers and frogs and birds but for Human Beings as well. Suddenly, on yet another hot day where my pastures were burning to an even drier crisp and what is left (not to mention my garden) was being eaten by a plague of grasshoppers, it came to me -- it's all to do with language. For fifty years conservationists have been talking about 'the environment' as if it is a faraway place perhaps in a small island in the Pacific, or on a tall mountain in Africa. So when we say -- 'don't do that it is damaging the environment', developers and foresters and farmers and fishermen and energy companies and seed producers all shrug their shoulders and say 'so what?'

So here is a little trick -- substitute the words 'the world we live in' for 'the environment' and then see how you feel. 'Global warming is damaging the world we live in. Genetically modified crops are damaging the world we live in. Clearing native vegetation is damaging the world we live in. Over-fishing is damaging the world we live in. Woodchipping forests is damaging the world we live in.'

If this gets boring try, just for a change, 'damaging the world my children will live in' as in 'Taking too much water from the rivers is damaging the world my children will live in. Burning the forests too often is damaging the world my children will live in. The extinction of species is damaging the world my children will live in. Ice melting in Antarctica is damaging the world my children will live in.'

Try it for a while every time you hear a news report about more and more environmental damage -- you will see the world in a different way.

Maybe the people doing the damage will too.