If you are trying to communicate anything, it always helps if the two parties use the same language. As obvious as that might sound, it is not always a given, especially when dealing with environmental issues. If this were a scholarly article, I would call it “Semantics of Environmental Language”. I have read a lot of work on ecology and environment lately, numbering into the hundreds of articles on the subject, and several things jump out at me. One is that we are not all talking about the same issues in the same language, and that some definition is in order. I have stockpiled every article that Google has discovered on the subject for several weeks, and it seems that we are not all on the same page, not even in the same book, and, perhaps, not even on the same planet!

RADICAL:

Let’s look at this briefly from a linguistic point of view. In linguistics, a radical is a root, or the root of the word. What I am advocating here is some true Radical thought, by getting back to the root of the issue. For example: Read the rest of this entry »