I hate to see the phrase “destroy the environment”, especially when it occurs in sentences like “We are destroying the environment.” The phrase conjures associations with primitivism, with anti-industrialism, with counter-culture– which typically means behavior that would lead to social collapse where it implemented in full–, with a detestation with civilizations, and with a loss of very much everything we humans have achieved in the last few thousand years.

The second such a phrase gets uttered any eyeballs, not belonging to people already singing in the choir, roll backward, sighs of irritation fill the air, and visions of dirty hippies dance through the mind like grotesque clowns in a horror film. And with good reason. It is a god-damned stupid thing to say.

The only way to destroy “the environment” is to destroy every living thing on the planet. Anything short of such total destruction does not count. The environment, after all, is nothing more than a relationship between organisms and non-living things. If you’ve got one bacteria, you’ve got a relationship between it and the rock it sits upon. Hence, you’ve got an environment. Humans are not capable of such utter destruction. We have nowhere near the ability to author such devastation. We cannot– absolutely cannot– destroy the environment.

What we can do is alter it enough that things become very bad for us, and that should be our concern. That, and not the hyperbole, should be the starting point of environmental discussion. We are cabable of converting the planet into a place where we cannot survive. We are capable of producing a future where our great-grandchildren are reduced to living like chimpanzees roaming the deserts and forests chewing grass seeds. We are capable of sufficiently abusing our farmlands that they no longer produce enough to feed the species, and we start to starve en masse as in happening across parts of Africa now and as has happened to local population of humans in the past, on Easter Island for example. We can poison our food and water enough to reverse the happy trend toward longer average lifespans. These should be our concerns.

And these concerns should not be peppered with counter-productive hyperbole. Yes, I understand that “destroy the environment” has more punch than “make ourselves uncomfortable”. Likewise, “Bush is a Nazi” has more shock value than “The Bush administration favors legislation frightenly like that favored by totalitarian regimes”. In either case, though, opting to argue via shock-value at the expense of accuracy means one immediately loses one’s audience. And what is the point of arguing in the absence of an audience?

I also understand that most environmentalists really mean more or less just what I’ve said– that we can make the world a wretched place for ourselves. That really is the translation of “destroy the environment”. That also is beside the point. There are some forms of argumentation, some forms of debate or rhetorical techniques that are simply counter-productive. I am tired of hearing such things from the mouths of the good guys. Nonetheless…