environmentalist

plural environmentalists

1. One who advocates for the protection of the environment and biosphere from misuse from human activity through such measures as ecosystem protection, waste reduction and pollution prevention.

   This tension is familiar in the lives of most environmentalists. Some own cars; some still eat meat.

   2016 April 5, Madeleine Somerville, “How I deal with the unbearable hypocrisy of being an environmentalist”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 11 Apr 2022

   4 more examples

   The Santa Barbara oil spill has environmentalists and California officials scrambling as an estimated 105,000 gallons of oil may have spilled into the Pacific Ocean and onto the Golden State’s coast.

   2015 May 21, Eliott C. McLaughlin, “How does Santa Barbara match up with other U.S. oil spills?”, in CNN, archived from the original on 01 Apr 2016

   The term greenwashing was coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986, back when most consumers received their news from television, radio and print media – the same outlets that corporations regularly flooded with a wave of high-priced, slickly-produced commercials and print ads.

   2016 August 20, Bruce Watson, “The troubling evolution of corporate greenwashing”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 14 Apr 2021

   A widening of the M4 had long been mooted, and the Welsh Government had even earmarked most of the required £1.6bn funding for a new 14-mile, six-lane section around Newport. Then, in the face of opposition from environmentalists, came a realisation that similar road schemes across the world tend merely to encourage greater car use and therefore soon prove ineffective in solving the original problem.

   2020 December 2, Christian Wolmar, “Wales offers us a glimpse of an integrated transport policy”, in Rail, page 56

   He [King Charles] is a committed environmentalist at a point when the government is full of climate change deniers.

   2022 September 12, Zoe Williams, “Why are people getting arrested in Britain for being republicans?”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 29 Mar 2023

   Synonyms: environmental activist, ecologist, eco-warrior, greenie, tree hugger

2. anthropologyOne who holds the view that environment, rather than heredity or culture, is the primary factor in the development of an individual or group.

   1 more example

   As we remarked once before, there are two extreme views with respect to life, one attributing everything to the environment, the other to inherent abilities. If, for example, an unusual number of distinguished men are born and reared in the same locality, the environmentalists assert that the causes for their appearance were entirely external and that had their parents changed habitats with those residing elsewhere the result would have been the same, except that the family names of these eminent men would have been different.

   1926, Clark Wissler, The Relation of Nature to Man in Aboriginal America, published 1971, pages 211–212

comparative more environmentalist · superlative most environmentalist

1. Of, or relating to environmentalism.

   The environmentalist explanation would be that tropical environment retards or depresses culture through its physiological effect on the human organism.

   1939, Alfred L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, published 1963, page 69