Even if they were created with good intentions and for the common good, certain words raise eyebrows, even anger or scare us. This is the specificity of some words in “iste”.
Even today, words like “socialist” or “feminist” make many people jump and roar. I submit to you another one that makes many people grimace: the word “ecologist”. Hearing it, we see zealous people with a mission, obsessed people, or perhaps just disconnected and tiring dreamers appear. It seems that certain “ist” words have the gift of putting a distance between ideas and life.
I too am a little tired of hearing about “ecologists” and other environmentalists. A breed apart, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, while the “green economy” wants to take flight on the battery-powered wings of all hopes.
I’m even tired of hearing the word “environment”. As if what defines it, that is to say all “natural” living spaces, was a subject of specialists and laboratories. For ordinary citizens, there is “nature”, a place of escapades and rejuvenation (or countless dangers), and “the great outdoors”, areas for our motorized games or our ecotourism adventures.
However, the environment is our home, it is our air, it is our water, it is our land. We are all dependent on what happens here and there on this round planet, where everything circulates and returns.
For us humans, it is easier to live by compartmentalizing concepts. Nature is vacation, the environment is work. I don’t want to worry about the environment when I want to relax in nature or get lost in the great outdoors on the other side of the world.
As long as we do not feel personally concerned in our everyday lives by the drama that is unfolding today almost everywhere on our planet, indifference will persist in our homes. Not concerned. Not affected. At least not too much. For now.
Water is rising in Bangladesh and becoming scarce in Spain. The ocean swallows villages, and others, submerged centuries ago, resurface. At the same time, it roars and burns from north to south. It’s happening in someone’s environment. It’s happening on the same planet we all live on.
Visit the Acropolis at 45 degrees Celsius? Stretch out on a beach invaded by sargassum? It spoils the holidays a bit, we will change our dates and our destinations.
We cannot leave interest in life on earth and commitment to the preservation of ecosystems to specialists. Ecologists, environmentalists, that should define us all, as much as we are. The environment is where it happens, in the same place and at the same time as our lives.