Why I continue to use the word sustainable.

I have long thought of myself as an environmentalist, as well as one who strives for sustainability, both in my own life and in the communities in which I live. Many of these communities relate themselves to environmental awareness, spiritual openness, whole life learning, and social justice and in so doing suffer from the linguistic failing of word overuse and regular re-association of words. None of these fall so heavily into the traps of linguistic redefining than the environmentalists.

We love words.

We love to come up with ways to say, “Love your mother, this planet” without saying a single one of those words! We say, “Protect the animals.” We say, “Save the Earth!” We say, “Be resilient!” We say, “Coexist.” And every few years we choose a new set of words to harness for our cause. We fear that we cannot walk a talk that, to be walked fully, would take up every minute of every hour of every day, all year round. We watch each other buying new gas powered cars. We judge each other’s recycling habits. We show pride at our lack of travel. We step outside of the modern human world, but not so far as to be the crazed mountain man, nor the hippy witch woman (yes, I often fall into this latter category, but I think you get my meaning.) We love local food and local artists, but we know we cannot financially support them. This is a talk we can not fully walk.

So too do we think ourselves superior to all those who make a different set of choices. We feel out cause is superior, we feel our choices are superior, when we make mistakes we hide them and find ways to explain them away, like a yuppie woman taking a day away from her low-carb, gluten-free, raw-foods diet. But we forget how much we can learn!

We can learn from those who came before us, both in our cause and many others. I want to especially point to our social justice friends. The people who lovingly grip the word “feminist” until everyone they know believes in it, and the spiritualists who convince you of the goodness of their faith until you too believe that faith can be good. These should be our heroes and role models. We should not let go of a word just because it feels warn out or because it is not broad enough, think of the transformations in the definition of feminism over the past few decades! We should not treat our “talk” as a diet, something we are trying for a time, but as a faith, unchallengeable in its own way.

I am an environmentalist, I believe in the ability for humanity to sustain itself on this planet. And I fly, because I am also a woman living in this modern global world. I do not own a car and I reuse or recycle almost everything, but that does not make me a good person, (though I might believe it makes me a better person then someone who does not do these things.)

But my point is, we need to learn. We need to retain our identity and clarify out terminology rather than simply giving ourselves new words. We need to stop shifting and sustain our movement, or we will not be a movement. We will be the noisy rabble who can never have their voices heard.

Stick with a word Environmentalists! Any word at all.