Environmentalists...

When I went to university the group of friends I'd go to football games with were all working on Masters and PhDs in environmental studies. Interestingly, these were people that liked to eat, drink, watch football and be merry - I fit right in even though I was working on a double major in nuclear and mechanical engineering. At first these folks didn't square with my perception of what environmentalist were "supposed" to be. I asked my friend Ryan, a soil science guru in the making, to define what an environmentalist is/was/should be. He said you couldn't... the description is too diverse to mean anything. Describing someone as an environmentalist is like describing them as black or republican or young. It's shorthand for the ignorant.