World Environment Day – 5 June – is a United Nations (UN)-designated day to raise awareness of the manifold environmental problems our world faces. Given the scope of the word ‘environment’, those problems include a broad swathe of often interconnected issues. This year the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, together with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), is playing host to this fifty-first iteration of World Environment Day (WED). The focus this year is on land restoration, desertification and drought resilience.
A striking success story
The issues WED and associated initiatives have highlighted over those fifty-one years have led to concepts and the terms to denote them leaving the scientific closet and becoming part of everyone’s everyday vocabulary.
For instance, outside the scientific community, who in the general public knew about the ozone layer – the vital role of which is to shield the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation and make life possible – until it was discovered in 1984 that there was a ‘hole’ in the Antarctic one? Actually, it isn’t literally a hole but rather a thinning of the ozone layer in the stratosphere, several miles above the earth’s surface. The widespread use of that metaphor in public discourse, however, illustrates how graphic language can influence public awareness and help effect change.
Scientists in the 1970s hypothesised that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), gases used in aerosols and fridges, could destroy the ozone layer. Now the 1984 discovery showed hypothesis to be fact, and in an inspiring example of international cooperation, governments agreed in the 1987 Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs, halons and HCFCs. The result was that by 2009, 98% of the chemicals proscribed had been phased out. An encouraging success story.
And who now talks of acid rain, the build-up of acidic particles that damage the environment caused by human industrial activity and the burning of fossil fuels? This popular term for what is more strictly known as acid precipitation was on everyone’s lips in the 1970s and 198os but is barely mentioned nowadays. This is because the phenomenon is much less of a problem thanks to various clean air measures introduced by governments.
Where do environmental terms come from?
Apart from the environmental terms just discussed, it’s fair to say there’s an elastic list that forms part of most people’s passive vocabulary, and, of course, of activists’ active vocabulary.
The terms in this notional list illustrate three key ways in which we create new ‘words’. Most often, we do so by compounding, that is, coupling together two or more existing words, as in food miles, to create a novel meaning. That process creates about half the new ‘words’ of English, and, in the environmental sphere, carbon dioxide, carbon footprint, climate change, global warming, greenhouse gas, greenhouse effect, renewable energy and many others. Some compounds are single units, like environment, from environ + -ment.
Second, blends or portmanteau words put together pre-existing forms, as with biosphere, which takes the prefix bio-, found in biography, biology, etc., from the Classical Greek for ‘life’, bios, βίος. Interestingly, English biosphere is calqued, that is, exactly modelled, on the earlier German Biosphäre. And German has over the centuries been a major source of English new words, in the form of calques and loanwords, particularly in the scientific sphere and particularly throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. To German we also owe the word ecology, modelled on Oecologie, current German Ökologie.
The eco- part of ecology is the same element as in economy and derives from the Classical Greek word oikos (οἶκος) for ‘house’ or more generally, ‘dwelling’. The -ology part means it’s the study of that ‘dwelling’, which is the dwelling of all of us, the world.
Less familiar eco– blends include ecotecture, architecture based on sustainability and low environmental impact, and ecotage, sabotage for ecological reasons. As it happens, ecotage is also an outstanding example of how flexible English can be, for it takes the -tage element of sabotage, which by itself is meaningless, to create a new form. A similar devil-may-care attitude to meaning elements makes it possible to extract the element -athon from marathon and reapply it to singathon, telethon, etc.
Finally, to create ‘new words’, new meanings are added to existing words. This is the case, for instance, with sustainable. Something sustainable can be sustained in different meanings of that verb. So a sustainable increase is one that can be sustained or continued at the same rate indefinitely and without creating problems.
But that’s a different and older meaning than the one in sustainable development, sustainable fuel, sustainable energy, and similar, which are all things that don’t exhaust natural resources and respect the environment, that is, are environment-friendly.
THE environment
The word environment, which as a form goes back as far as the seventeenth century, is a bit different from the others discussed in that it uses the definite article to signify a very specific meaning. This is because the word itself has several meanings. For instance, the sentence ‘children thrive in a caring environment’ is talking about all the surroundings, people, events and places that affect the children. If we talk about a plant’s environment, we mean its physical natural surroundings and the weather conditions that affect it. But when we talk about ‘THE environment’, that definite article states very clearly that we mean the whole of the natural world of plants, animals, land and water, either locally or worldwide.
Actually, the German word for the environment, Umwelt, expresses this universality rather well by combining the word for ‘world’, Welt, with the preposition um, ‘around’.
Reverting now to the themes of this year’s World Environment Day, the compound land restoration refers to the process of rehabilitating or restoring degraded land or preventing further degradation, typically by means of reforesting and soil conservation. A major aim is to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Among other measures it’s taking, Saudi Arabia plans to plant ten billion trees in the longer run and 600,000 by 2030.
Desertification is the process by which fertile and therefore potentially productive land is turned into barren desert by human activity. As a word, it’s a bit of an oddity. Most -ification words describing the result of a verb process have a related verb, as in modify, classify and so on. In contract, desertification takes a shortcut and merrily slaps -ification, taken to mean ‘the process of making something happen’, onto the noun desert.
Finally, drought resilience aims to make communities better able to cope with future droughts by helping them learn how to conserve water or access new water sources.
Resilience, the quality of being resilient, is an excellent example of what I’ll call an etymological metaphor. Resilient literally means when something from being compressed springs back to its original shape, and only figuratively does it refer to a person’s attitude to bounce back in the face of difficulty. It derives from the Latin resili(ēns), the present participle of the verb resilīre, ‘to spring back, recoil.’
The story of how the ‘ozone hole’ has been substantially reduced leaves some room for cautious optimism that we and the natural environment can successfully bounce back from our current situation.
By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
