environmentalist

From environmental +‎ -ist.

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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.
   • 2016 April 5, Madeleine Somerville, “How I deal with the unbearable hypocrisy of being an environmentalist”, in The Guardian‎:

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

   • 2016 August 20, Bruce Watson, “The troubling evolution of corporate greenwashing”, in The Guardian‎:

     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.

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

     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.

   • 2022 September 12, Zoe Williams, “Why are people getting arrested in Britain for being republicans?”, in The Guardian‎:

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

2. (anthropology, social sciences) One who holds the view that environment, rather than heredity or culture, is the primary factor in the development of an individual or group.
   • 1926, Clark Wissler, The Relation of Nature to Man in Aboriginal America, published 1971, pages 211–212:

     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.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:environmentalist.

• (one who advocates for the protection of the environment): environmental activist, ecologist, eco-warrior, greenie (chiefly Australia and New Zealand, slang, often derogatory), tree hugger (slang, often disapproving)

(one who advocates for the protection of the biosphere):

• ecocapitalist
• ecosocialist

• anti-environmentalist
• enviro
• pseudoenvironmentalist

• environmentalism
• environmental
• environment
• enviro-

environmentalist (comparative more environmentalist, superlative most environmentalist)

1. Of, or relating to environmentalism.
   • 1939, Alfred L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, published 1963, page 69:

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

• conservationist
• ecologist
• preservationist

• “environmentalist”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
• “environmentalist”, in Collins English Dictionary.