wolf

 

 

The Devil’s Environmental Dictionary

The “Devil’s Environmental Dictionary” for grassroots environmentalists contains uncommon definitions for common words, phrases, laws, constants and rules-of-thumb discovered over the years.
by Jim Britell (Rev. 3nd ed. 5/09)

Activism
1st rule of: Mother Nature doesn’t love you.
Activism
Gresham’s Law of: Consensus groups and partnerships extinguish advocacy.
Activists, best kinds
The best activists and organizers are “Mama bears”, aka mothers.
Adrenaline
Formerly our primary defense against being eaten by other animals, now a reminder we are one.
Acceptance & Acceptability
“Local people will not support what they do not understand” means, people will not accept what they do understand if it costs them money or proves their whole life is a tragic mistake. (See Willful Ignorance)
Accountability
Generally advocated after it is too late to actually achieve it.
America
Formerly the best country in the world; now the least worst.
Apologies–Pseudo (3 kinds of)
1. Everywhere/nowhere, “Mistakes were made,”
2. Anytime/no time, “We now know much more than we used to.”
3. Anyone/no one, “Let’s avoid counterproductive finger pointing.”
Apologies Sincere Form
Roll on your back like a puppy, piss on your stomach, and promise never to do it again.
Awe and Wonder
Two Ways to Experience: 1. Place oneself in proximity to things both natural and wild. 2. Place a powerful gasoline engine in proximity to ones genitals. (See Tops of Food Chains, Goofies)
Balance
To make tradeoffs between tepidly enforcing environmental laws and ignoring them altogether. Derived not from the Latin “bilanz”—to weigh, but rather from the Greek “balanoc”, to insert a suppository in the rectum to ease irritation, as in, “Please bend over so the doctor can insert a ‘balanoc’ into your equation.”
Bastards
1st rule of: No man can serve two bastards.
Biologist(s)
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s View of: “... like children...a protected class; ...hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up.” (q.v. American Scholar 1837)
Biology
Anti-advocacy rule: Self-imposed constraint unique to B. The advocacy of research that might suggest people should alter their behavior to help other species survive is grounds for denying tenure. If medicine adopted this rule, physicians at accidents might be constrained to counting dead people.
Biostitute
A biologist who opens up sacred domains closed to human intervention into profane ones open to intervention. [N.B. The “fact” has yet to be discovered that could persuade a B. that anything a corporations does could be bad.
Birderism
Aka Peeperism: The myth that making elaborate lists of birds somehow helps them.
Bull Markets
1st rule of: don’t conflate bull markets with your own intelligence.
Business Planning
1st rule of: If you are able to control the assumptions in a business plan, you can prove that people can eat things larger than their heads and trees can grow up to the sky.
Business Planning Model
Return on Investment, (ROI): A rigorous method of balancing risks and rewards for alternative courses of action. Using ROI one might conclude that snatching an ice cream cone from a 4-year-old on a passing bike has merit.
Commodifiers, Simplifiers, and Domesticators
What they most fear: Any awareness in any human that man is an animal. (See Tops of Food Chains)
Consensus Decision Making
Generally promoted by the strong and verbally skillful to create an appearance of democratic process while oppressing the weak. [N.B: generally OK for families, tribes or religious orders with endless time and shared values.]
Consensus Decision Making
History in England: Since the English Shires “under the spreading oaks” in 500 AD, considered a poor deliberative process by parliamentarians as intimidation is inevitable, leaders can easily suppress the views of minorities, conflicts of interest cannot be challenged and thus will be concealed, and invariably motions pass which conflict with higher authority.
Consensus Decision Making
History in Greece: a popular decision-making procedure prior to 109 B.C. Abandoned due to widespread intimidation and coercion. Replaced by voting, ballots and parliamentary procedure.
County
American political designation originally developed along with the township and range system to facilitate real estate speculation.
Counting
1st rule of: The largest number most people can comprehend is 20, (possibly 21 for males).
Counting
2nd rule of: Millions of people don’t know the difference between a billion and a trillion.
Cross Purposes
As in, “State and Federal agencies too often work at cross purposes.” Usually indicates there is someone at Fish and Wildlife who won’t fudge the data and ignore violations and thus is considered “working at cross purposes” with the other agencies who will.
Dysergy
Antonym to Synergy: Unpredictable, disagreeable outcomes created by mindlessly tinkering with, or simplifying, complex systems e.g. disease, floods, fire or famine (the 4 horsemen).
Ecological Equilibrium
1st Law of: The political smarts of the average ecologist are equal to the ecological smarts of the average politician.
Ecological Putz
A person who spends a day monitoring the ecological health of a watershed, oblivious to a deadline which expired that day to file appeals to stop a development that will trash it.
Ecologically Significant Areas
Best Way to Prepare to Protect: (Long form): memorize the Latin names of all significant plants and animals living in the area. (Short form): memorize the name and phone number of the public official aware of any scheme to develop the area.
Ecotourism
Non-fattening hot fudge sundae approach to economic growth.
Ecotourists (ETs)
1. People who don’t stay home where they belong but go around being a nuisance to others.
2. Easiest way to attain entitlement to everything with responsibility for nothing.
Economic Development
1st Law of: Rural economic development always involves extending free water and sewer lines to some “partners’” previously undevelopable land. (See Utopian Plumbing .)
Economic Development
2nd Law of: Subsidies should be incomprehensible to voters yet simple for speculators.
Ecosystem Management
A method of creatively not enforcing environmental laws so they can be applied uniformly and even-handedly everywhere with little or no inconvenience to anyone.
Engrossment
Piling up undue personal wealth. For 800 years, engrossment was a civil crime and punishment for the third offense was “pillory and utter ruin”. In medieval times, periodically cured by formal public ceremonies where the church removed ill-gotten gains from engrossers. Engrossers have gradually evolved into the Forbes 400.
Environmental Effectiveness
Rule of Thumb: One’s political effectiveness is generally inversely related to the number of things one can name in Latin. Nonnulli tam intellegentes sunt ut stulti sint (“Some people are so smart, they’re stupid.”)]
Environmental Enforcement
1st Rule of: From St. Augustine, “Give me chastity and continency - but not yet!”
Environmental Enforcement
Circular Argument of: #1. Environmental laws sustain the web of life, alas, 2. if we ever enforced them the public outcry would cause their repeal, therefore, 3. we cannot enforce them. (return to #1.)
Equation
“We must put people back into the equation!” Mythical mathematical concept generally used to inject local job impacts into Endangered Species listings which the law’s framers excluded, because, they knew if we had to find that it cost anybody’s job to protect some creature, none would ever be protected from anything, anytime, anywhere.
Evolution
Americas Wacky Notions About: According to Noam Chomsky: we are a religious fundamentalist society whose views are unique in the industrial world and similar to preindustrial societies. Half of all Americans believe the world was created a few thousand years ago.
Evolutionary Education (niche of)
Formerly colonized by biology teachers. Lately, Creationist Christians have been driving them out. Apparently biologists can teach about niches, but cannot successfully defend one.
Fascists
As a political class, fascists fear only their moderate members.
Forces (two primary)
1. Strong force–peer group pressure.
2. Weak force–self esteem.
Forester
A deforester.
Givings
Political Theory of: Those who derive windfall profits from public infrastructure improvements and zoning changes should return some of those windfalls to the public treasury.
Goofies
Domesticated animals with a trusting manner like cows and sheep. Those who care for them are characterized by predictability, dullness, and a fanatical hatred of predatory wild animals. (Concept discovered by P. Shepard)
Grandfathered in
If your grandfather got away with it, you can too.
Grants
1st Rule of: People only write checks to buy things.
Grants
2nd Rule of: Foundations don’t fund anti-corporate campaigns for the same reason monks don’t dissolve monasteries.
Gridlock
1.Formerly, third-world traffic congestion created by non-enforcement of traffic laws. Now, a legal impasse that prevents clearcutting in many forests.
2. A badge of honor, or measure of effectiveness.
Habitat Conservation Plans (HCP)
God’s Approach: Rain leaches nutrients from the soil on a mountain down to the sea. Salmon, bears, eagles and other species put the nutrients back where they came from. Cycle continues forever.
Habitat Conservation Plans (HCP)
Developers Approach: Scalp and pave 90% of a mountain, extirpate every living thing, and build condos. Set aside the other 10% (undevelopable anyway) as open space and deed it to the Condo Association.
Idealism
A craving for political processes different from the ones you have.
Jobs (Acronym)
Just Old-fashioned Business Subsidies.
Taxes
1st law of: Since billionaires don’t get W-2’s, income and payroll taxes just produce chump change. Wimps tax income; real men tax assets.
Local Involvement
A myth that public processes are improved when local people are partners in managing public property. You don’t let communities adjacent to the Statue of Liberty decide to melt it down to create good paying jobs for local scrap metal yards.
Local input
Real estate speculators’ comments on agency plans, they are generally aware of all agency requests for input because they are the only people who thoroughly read newspapers.
Local Knowledge
1st. Law of: “Locals know best” because by living close to environmental problems they obtain certain unique insights, e.g. the local area’s clean water, shrimp, old growth trees, turtles, elephants etc. is boundless and therefore can never be used up.
Managerialism
The form of totalitarianism most appropriate to democracies as the outward forms of certain freedoms like speech, press, assembly and voting are retained. (q.v. Orwell, also see Totalitarianism)
Market-Based Solutions
1. A process for assigning specific dollar values to the incalculable and ineffable.
2. Attractive strategy for laundering corporate money into ostensible environmental organizations. (see Privatizing)
Mitigation
Finding and setting aside “equivalent” habitat over here to replace habitat destroyed over there. If English Departments determined equivalence the way Fish and Wildlife Departments do, “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” would be equivalent to a Shakespeare Sonnet. [From the Latin “mitigatio” to appease or pacify, a softening or smoothing.] (See HCP)
Milerepa’s lost prediction (13th century Tibetan saint)
In the coming age of kali-yuga [the iron age, when horses ride on metal] information will expand to a point too stupendous to comprehend, but conclusions will be very hard to reach. (attrib: unk.)
Monitoring
The collecting of detailed and comprehensive scientific data about an environmental problem, so that hopefully, in the far distant future, scientists may have evidence of what is already obvious to anyone driving by.
Movies
Meta message of: only Batman or Clint Eastwood can go up against Mr. Big.
Napoleon’s motivation law
The best motivators are ribbons, pins and badges.
National Environmental Player
A person without understanding of local environmental issues whom, nevertheless, settles them behind the backs of local activists who do.
Native Americans
Basic teaching: if white people really loved their country they wouldn’t have done what they did to it.
Neo-liberalism
The product of crossing the Lovin Spoonfuls with Excel spread sheets.
Neo-liberalism: six myths of:
1.All problems can be negotiated by people of good will.
2.Social conflicts are imaginary constructs.
3.Examining malfeasance is unprofitable because no problem’s root source is ever corruption.
4.The bigger the conflict of interest the better.
5.Problems only arise from “mistakes.”
6.“Bad actors” don’t have names or faces.
Not Ramming (Things Down People’s Throats)
A modern version of John Calhoun’s Theory of Nullification that caused the Civil War.
Nudnik (Nudzh, Nudge)
A Yiddish word meaning one whom continually pesters and annoys others. When effective environmental activists begin to actively participate in “roundtables”, partnerships, local economic development schemes and other “win-win” processes, over time they are gradually and inevitably reduced to Nudniks.
Nuisances
1st Rule of: Don’t be a nuisance to others, or yourself.
Observer
According to conservatives, the only proper relationship of a citizen to local extractive industry is as an observer.
Oregon Planning
Any “partnering” between agencies and landowners promoted by a Democratic Governor to obfuscate the state’s refusal to enforce environmental Laws. Novel Restoration theory that “Crooks Know Best”.
Organizational policies (actual)
What the employees actually do.
Part-out
Right-wing strategy to dispose of America’s public assets. Slang for the dismantling of automobiles for their parts to resell, i.e. water-pump, carburetor, etc.
Partnering
Innovative method used to establish compromising and conflict-of-interest-prone relationships between law enforcers and violators. A creative public policy tool generally used to slip serious environmental enforcement ahead in time hopefully into the indefinite future.
Perfect storm
A perfectly predictable catastrophe whose obvious harbingers were ignored.
Pigs in troughs (1st rule of)
To remove a pig from a trough, use a 2x4 not a flipchart.
Policy (1st Rule of)
The devil’s in the details because that’s where the policy is.
Policy (2nd Rule of)
What you gain in the policy you lose in the procedures.
Political Power
The ability to determine what people look at, and influence how they think about what they see.
Powerpointing:
To read a speech on a wall behind you, while doing tech support on a computer in front of you.
Privatizing or Privatization
Unbundling policy and priority-setting functions of environmental organizations from their operational activities and strategically marketing them to large corporations for specific periods of time. [N.B: possibly invented by the Environmental Defense Fund] (see Part-out)
Property
1st. Law of: Land, once stolen fair and square, cannot be stolen back.
Property Rights
Basic rule: If a property owner ever had the right to piss on a piece of land he has a right to site a dump on it in perpetuity. Asserting private rights over private property is all-American: asserting public rights over public property is un-American.
Public Land
1st. Law of: The tough guys always get the ground.
Pukes
Term of endearment applied to Pew foundation grantees by Pew foundation non-grantees.
Quantification fallacy
Important issues are; seldom quantifiable, quantifiable issues are seldom important.
Reaching Out
A fallacy that accommodating those adversely impacted by environmental laws means not enforcing them. If Eisenhower had “reached out” to the citizens of Little Rock instead of sending troops, the South would still be segregated. (see Partnering and Win-Win)
Reconciliation
Saul Alinsky’s Opinion: “Reconciliation means just one thing: when one side gets power, the other side gets reconciled to it.”
Right wing political strategy (basis of)
Reduce turnout in black voting precincts by demoralizing, disorganizing or destroying them.
Roundtable
An administrative forum created to convince environmental activists they have the authority to grant waivers to environmental laws. If policemen had “roundtables”, they might start issuing “OK to speed” waivers.
Salwasser’s Law
Some people are so smart they’re stupid.
Scientific Proof
Utterly unachievable standard of proof required to prove an environmentally destructive practice should stop; not required to begin one.
Scoping
The process by which land management agencies solicit public input on proposed plans. In practice, generally scheduled too early to be seriously considered or too late to make any meaningful difference.
Scrupulosity
To expose the imaginary flaws of others in furtherance of utterly unachievable and possibly undesirable ends.
Selling Out
1st rule of: Make sure you get paid.
Selling Out
2nd rule of: Never cross the line between shilling and pimping.
Social Change
1st rule of: to remove a pig from a trough use a 2x4 not a flipchart.
Squirrel
A person who lacks “walking around” sense.
Stability
A prerequisite to certain highly destructive activities. e.g. laws governing grazing leases on public land make it difficult for some ranchers to fully exploit these privilege; to provide s. many elected western representatives would transfer title to millions of acres of public lands to these ranchers.
Stakekholderism
Crackpot political theory: Novel method of allowing people with conflicts of interest to participate in decisions they should be recused from.
Strategic Plan
Exculpatory document providing managers with a rationale to refuse to do important tasks, absent which, they would have no way to avoid.
Strategic Planning
Rhetorical patina. To embellish a pre-determined agenda with faux collaboration.
Sustainability (slang)
The challenge of maintaining high levels of unsustainable activities, like clear-cutting timber on public land, despite laws that forbid them.
Talk and Log Group
Formal ongoing consultative process that meets to discuss certain trees being logged to assess possible approaches to permanently protect them. Generally disbands after the trees become logs.
Tharn
A total stupefying, hypnagogic paralysis following the startling appearance of an utterly unfathomable and incomprehensible event. Ex. “A deer caught in the headlights”, Democrats after 9/11.
Timber Dependent Communities
A local community so complicit with the benefits of logging that reduced cutting levels cannot be considered, imagined or discussed.
Timber Taxes
1st Law of: The total property taxes collected on all the private timberland you can see from the highest point in any incorporated town, is less than the property tax collected on an average home in that same town.
Timber Taxes
2nd Law of: An industry powerful enough to wreak physical devastation on a landscape you can see, has already done worse things to state rules and regulations you can’t.
Tops of Food Chains
Reason For Human Extirpation of: When the wolves and sharks are extirpated, humans can never again be prey, so our awareness of being animals will be extinguished. (See Commodifiers, Goofies)
Totalitarianisms (three kinds)
Communism, Fascism, Managerialism.
Utopian Localism
A creation myth.
1.If someone proposed a plan to attract tourists to a small town on the 4th of July by lining up all the town’s grandmothers down the white line in the middle of the main highway to be simultaneously raped by Hells Angels from LA, the local Chamber of Commerce would probably donate $100 out of the bed tax money to support it.
2.The only people who don’t know what’s best for any small town are the people who live there. (see Balance)
Utopian Plumbing
Since the “outputs” of most local economic development schemes are free underground pipes they are best viewed as Utopian Plumbing Schemes or “Pipes for Partners.” (see Economic Development 1st. Law of)
Watershed Council
A novel political construct to allow local communities to substitute science fair projects for Environmental Laws. Sometimes used to expedite giving public resources to environmental criminals or circumvent laws that forbid using public funds to do lobbying. (see Oregon Plan)
Watershed Council, Agenda Items (Appropriate)
Non-controversial issues acceptable for a Watershed Council’s consideration, i.e. to lobby Federal scientists and agencies not to list species on the verge of extinction where the law and science clearly compels it.
Watershed Council Agenda Items (Inappropriate)
Controversial and divisive issues i.e. to discuss asking a timber company not to clear cut a sheer slope in a critical fish bearing watershed.
Watershed Council, (Blocking)
A basic right of any member to exclude from an agenda the kind of issues, which caused the Council to be created in the first place. Ordinarily invoked for issues that might establish that some member or his relative should be indicted as an ecological war criminal.
Wilderness
Any place where you may die even if you are careful.
Wilderness Paradox
Some people love terrifying situations where they can’t possibly get hurt. (e.g. Horror Movies, blood sports, rollercoasters, eco-tourism.)
Willer Constant of Forestland Ownership
Four or fewer out-of-state corporations will own 75% or more of the industrial forestland in any rural county. (q.v. C. Willer)
Willful Ignorance
A reflexive reaction by “higher monitoring authorities” to scientific data that proves their own past practices created some horrific environmental problem.
Win–Win (From the old English word “winnan”—to fight)
A negotiating strategy urged upon environmentalists by their opponents, who never practice it themselves, to ensure activists “lose-lose” gratefully.

Proverbs, Epigrams, Maxims

©2008 Jim Britell All rights reserved. May not be reproduced without permission.

Home | Consulting Services | Biography | Index of Writings | jim@britell.com