Are Environmentalists Good or Bad?

• Author: Surtees, Jeff
• Position: ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

Tree-huggers. Greenies. Enviro-nazis. Eco-terrorists. Eco-extremists. City-dwellers. Radicals. Eco-vangelists. Eco-crazies. Sheeple. Foreign-funded___(add any of the preceding epithets).

What ARE environmentalists anyway? Are they good, wise, caring, rational, science-loving people put here to save us? Or are they deluded, uninformed, unreasonable, deranged lunatics out to destroy our jobs and our way of life, probably for personal gain? And what does all of this have to do with environmental law?

In my opinion it has a lot to do with environmental law, or at least it has a lot to do to do with how that law develops. When people use negative labels to describe environmentalists, they are attempting to frame the discussion to suit their own purposes. Repetition of the negative labels is meant to shift public opinion and public opinion eventually impacts what becomes law.

I grew up thinking that "law" was just about rules. My father was a Crown prosecutor. I had a limited understanding of what he did when he went to work, but I knew that he tried to put the bad guys in jail. There were rules. People who broke them went to jail.

I now think that the law is about so much more than rules. It's about what we want the world to look like. It isn't always a thing, it's often more like a process. The capital "L" Law reflects the society we live in, the one we want to live in, the things we collectively care about, the things that percolate to the top and demand the most attention. It's messy and always slightly out of date, because society is complicated and the systems we have in place for creating law (elections, legislatures, law reform research, public consultations, lobbying) are imperfect. There is always a time lag between an expression of some desire in society and that desire finding its way into what we call law. There will inevitably be compromises.

In other words, society and law are inseparable. There is a continuous, symbiotic, push-pull relationship between the two.

Environmentalists are everywhere. Some work for non-profit organizations. Some want to change things quickly, even radically. Some work for oil companies, engineering firms, transportation companies, waste disposal companies, governments, law firms, utilities, universities... trying to make things better. They are farmers and ranchers. Some like to hunt and fish. Some are backcountry campers, skiers and off highway vehicle users. Jeff Foxworthy could probably work up a...