I’m an environmentalist. At least that’s the term people like myself are painted with. I’m still not sure exactly what it means. I don’t wear flowers in my hair or boast a closet full of hemp clothing (the stuff’s expensive, man) or play my acoustic in parks while singing songs about Our Mother Earth.

I also don’t join every single environmental group in existence, although I do work with a significant few. I don’t throw buckets of red paint on people wearing fur or chain myself to pine trees. And I haven’t abandoned my car for a more environmentally friendly mode of transportation.

I haven’t done these things because most of them don’t mean a damn thing.

For a short period of time, I thought if I didn’t read from my “Book of Poems about the Earth” every day, then I was a bad environmentalist. And if I didn’t go to every single Earth Day event, then I should just hand my Sierra Club card over to the proper authorities. I wondered why I wasn’t going out of my way to protest every unwise decision our pseudo-intellectual politicians made about ecological issues. Then I saw the light.

I don’t believe in short-term attempts to solve long-term problems. I would rather lock myself in a library for 10 years and emerge with well-thought-out and realistic plans for solving the dilemmas that continue to plague this world. The only way I can win this fight is if I go into the ring with my boxing gloves on, poised and prepared for every punch the opposition will throw.

In this way, everything I study becomes a part of my environmental education. Even my lessons in history, a major I chose in an attempt to better comprehend a chaotic world, lend an enormous amount of training to my future as a professional-type environmentalist. If I can learn how humans have gone about shaping the world over the course of written history, then, and only then, will I be in a position to help shape the future I most want to see.

A future that I see so clearly, so logically.

I don’t understand a term like “environmentalist” because I believe ecologically wise decisions are common sense. If someone lives in an almost waterless desert like Las Vegas and since a grass yard requires an abundance of water annually, then that person would be stupid to keep a grass lawn, wouldn’t they? And if the state of the ocean determines the state of the world’s climate, and all alien elements submerged into the ocean will damage the marine ecosystem and thereby adversely affect all life on the planet, then it would be insane to expose the ocean to any kind of pollution, wouldn’t it? Of course it would.

This must mean in our industrial age the world is operating without a great deal of common sense. So, the only people with common sense are the ones who call themselves environmentalists, for lack of a better term, because they would be shot on sight if they called themselves People with Common Sense. At least I’m quite sure the insufferable Rush Limbaugh would get out the guns because he has nothing better to do than shoot down people who are smarter than he is.

Go ahead, Rushheads. Write me letters. I am more informed than you are, and I’m not afraid to say it.

The biggest obstacle to attaining an ecologically balanced planet is also the strangest one to me. Those non-environmentalists out there who vote business over nature seem to believe plans to maintain the health of the planet threaten their well-being, especially their economic position. And they’re right, but they’re thinking of well-being in micro terms. You know the old example of the spotted owl that threatened the construction of the big housing project. This kind of whining sickens me. Killing all the planet’s species one at a time will, without a doubt, result in the final destruction of our own species. Don’t anybody ever forget that.

At times I wish another species would grow to dominate humans so people could have the experience of being pushed around, killed off, destroyed, moved out and genetically altered for the benefit of the “superior” species.

Now if I say I’m ashamed to be a member of the species that currently dominates the planet, I’ll get letters from people who’ll tell me to renounce my human status and join the fish or something. Those people should understand that humans once lived — and some still live — in conjunction with nature, in cooperation with the ecosystem, and not so completely against the laws of nature that they destroyed everything they ever touched.

Rather than try to go back to a time when people wandered the earth only in search of food and temporary shelter, I hope (dangerous word, hope) for a future in which common sense will once again fuel people’s actions. A time when industry will willingly undergo a change so profound that pollution will never again flow down our streams, into our river basins and out to our oceans. Is this too much to hope for? Not if you’ve been to a movie theater lately.

The films coming out of Hollywood these days are filled with one major natural disaster after another. I think people are genuinely terrified nature will wipe them out just because it can, and ultimately there is no place to hide. “Twister” tried to make a game out of chasing tornadoes, but in the end the players acknowledged there are forces stronger than people and nature can’t be fully controlled. That’s one lesson every person on this planet should learn as soon as possible.

So I give myself to the struggle for an ecologically balanced future, and I have to be honest about it. I’m pissed off that I have to do that at all. Why do I have to fight for wisdom and common sense? Why don’t you write me a letter about that, Rushheads?

Tell me why I have to fight you for the rest of my life.

Mandy Parkinson is a history senior and the assistant opinion editor of The Daily Aztec. Her e-mail address is

parkinso@rohan.sdsu.edu.