The point is a simple one - our well intentioned efforts to develop in students an understanding of how earth's systems work and how we, as humans, fit into them are significantly compromised by confusion over what we mean and what we say; we don't know what we are talking about. The language we use in this area perpetuates and reinforces the problems that we are working to understand and solve. As a person with a long standing agreement with the aphorism "talk is cheap", these conclusions have not been easily reached. Follow me along the route - if our actions are only as good as our ability to think them out, and our thinking is only as good as the words that we use to construct shared meaning, then the success of our actions as educators and citizens is dependent on our ability to find and use language which supports and is not in conflict, with our beliefs and intentions. Focused language supports clearer thinking, and successful communication which, in turn, is the foundation of sensible action.

As educators commited to helping students learn to do what they need to do, we find ourselves at a point in history where one of the most important steps we can take is to critically examine and improve our use of language. The road to being positive and constructive, in this case, begins with being critical, and the place to begin is with the word "environment" and its derivatives - environmentalist and environmentalism. Four problems with these terms stand out. The first is that common usage of the terms covers such as broad range of meanings that its use is neutral at best. Most people, when pressed, will define environment as everything that is around us, yet its use in conjunction with environmental education, environmental history, or the Environmental Protection Agency is based on a definition of environment as that part of the world which is theoretically separate from humans. How can we beneficially use a word if it has multiple, intertwined meanings?

A second problem is that when used as environmentalist or environmentalism its meaning is based on relative position. According to the American Heritage dictionary an environmentalist is "a person who seeks to protect the natural environment as from air and water pollution, wasteful use of resources and excessive human encroachments", yet in common usage it is a person who is more concerned with these values than most others. In a community where 200 acre clear cuts are the norm, the person cutting only 150 acres at a time would be considered an environmentalist. If you ask me how warm the bath water is and I answer

"5 degrees warmer than Molly's", it tells you little.

The third problem is that common usage of the term environment perpetuates and reinforces Enlightenment notions of humans as different, separate, and independent from the rest of the world around us. Well worn statements of ecological interdependence such as Muir's, Sealth's, or Leopold's give language to world views to which many of us subscribe, yet our language holds us back in a world of human separateness. The identity of areas such as environmental education and environmental history is dependent on this flawed world view of humans as separate from the world around us. If we apply the meaning of environment as everything around us - including humans - then all education is inherently "environmental education", and the label "environmental education" is no more useful than the chef who hangs the sign "good food" on the front of the restaurant.

The fourth and final problem lies in the over simplification and overgeneralization inherent in our use of the label "environmental issue".

While these cases definitely are concerned with people/landscape relationships they also have as much or more to do with people to people economic, political, socio-cultural, and technological interaction. Three examples which illustrate this are famine, water depletion cases such as the Aral Sea, and the current state of salmon populations in the Columbia River and its tributaries. All three of these cases involve questions of human relationship to the landscapes which support us, but also economic questions of how we assign and exchange value, political questions of who gets what, when, and how much; socio-cultural questions of communication, cooperation, and understanding; and of course technological questions of what our tools will allow us to do and know. What have been called environmental issues are more accurately questions of community, where both human and nonhuman community are taken into consideration. Their common characteristic is our failure to assign adequate value to life giving elements which we in retrospect come to value.

Enough whining - how might we move forward? Although we will each have our own answers, the role of shared meaning in dialogue makes cooperation a vital ingredient here. In an effort to bring greater agreement between our beliefs and the language used to communicate them, I have developed five recommendations that I am personally trying on for size:

The first is to use the term environment in the way that most of us define it - everything around us - including humans. Therefore, all education is at its heart environmental education. People and place are inseparable - all of the places I have interacted with, in small or large ways, are part of me, and I am part of them. A child's inability to concentrate and learn in school because she came to school without breakfast is as much an environmental issue as the fate of the northern spotted owl.

Secondly, say what I mean; wherever possible use specific language. Where in the past I might have spoken of the goal of developing an "environmentally literate" student, I now refer to the specific characteristics that we work to develop - thinking systemically, spatially, tied to place, or as a citizen. Because these characteristics are important to students beyond questions of people/landscape relationships, what in the past has been categorized as "environmental education" appropriately merges into the larger questions of curriculum, teaching and learning instead of continuing as a late coming orphan scrapping for space on the already crowded bench of school curriculum. By doing this we have the chance to correct two damaging myths which are endemic to our system of education: that humans are somehow separate from the rest of the natural world and not dependent on it, and that knowledge comes in discrete, unrelated chunks conveniently packaged into academic disciplines.

My third commitment, strengthened by thoughts from Alan AtKisson and others, is to reclaim the word "nature". It's a good word which we shouldn't be afraid to use. In most cases it serves as a good replacement for the outdated "e word". Part of the work of reclaiming it will be expanding its meaning from Bambi and television documentaries to include such life giving fundamentals as rain nourishing crops and plankton feeding fish which feed us. Central to education is helping students experience and understand nature - the use and stewardship of, and awe and respect for.

The forth choice is to recognize the obvious links between how people treat the landscapes on which their lives depend and how they treat each other. Though our patterns of thought - and language - make these appear to be relatively unrelated, experience is increasingly showing us that they are closely entwined and are fundamentally about the same question of the role of a individual in a community and the relationship between short term self interest and long term self interest. Tangible examples of this successful merging of people/people relationships and people/landscape relationships include the magazine "In Context", watershed education projects, and the use of indicators to monitor long term community health in a dizzying variety of settings.

The fifth and final commitment, which is the most difficult for the "talk's cheap - let's just get on with it!" side of me, is to learn more about these questions of the role, meaning, and value of language through discussion with other people. We have a long way to go. To know what we're doing we must know what we are talking about.