the.com/environmentalist
Loves the planet enough to make everyone else feel guilty about straws.
means A person who advocates for protecting the natural environment and reducing human harm to it, through activism, policy, or lifestyle choices.
from Built from 'environment' — which traces back to the Old French 'environ,' meaning 'around' or 'surrounding' (from 'viron,' to turn or encircle) — plus the agentive suffix '-ist,' marking someone who practices or champions a cause. 'Environment' itself only settled into its modern ecological sense in the 19th and 20th centuries, and 'environmentalist' followed as a distinct label once organized conservation and green politics took shape in the 1900s, especially picking up steam alongside the environmental movement of the 1960s–70s.
- term coined
- popularized widely in the 1970s environmental movement
- common split
- deep ecology versus policy-and-recycling pragmatists
- famous irony
- many fly often to attend climate conferences
- earliest version
- 19th century conservationists like John Muir