You Say Potato, I Say Environmental Deterioration

Re-branding is not such a subtle art. Remember when Kentucky Fried Chicken became "KFC"? Or when the scandalized Blackwater security firm ditched its name altogether and became "XE"?

Then there’s the field day the left had when the Bush administration announced its "enhanced interrogation" program, or how environmentalists jumped on Bush's Clear Skies Inititative as an evisceration of the Clean Air Act.

Now environmental PR firms are re-working their language to push people who are on the fence about climate change over to their way of thinking. A Pew study in January found that climate change ranks at #20 on a list of people's concerns. The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes.

As part of our Next Green Thing series, we’re turning to Jonathan Hiskes. He reports on climate politics for Grist and he recently detailed some of the new terminology being advised by the non-profit PR firm EcoAmerica and why that language is setting off peoples' truth detectors already.

Grist: It's Got A Ring To It, No?

New York Times: Seeking to Save the Planet with A Thesaurus

(Photo by Peter Beazley via Flickr/Creative Commons)