Exam 18: Working As Agents for Change

Because language is a subjective experience among individual hearers, actual word choice has little impact.

Consensus means that everyone in the group has reached complete agreement.

To have significant impact on issues will require not only individual effort but people working together.

We should continue to use the words we are accustomed to using; that is the most effective way eventually to win over people who do not agree with our worldviews.

A fundamental goal of sustainability work is to persuade other people to agree with what we are telling them about environmental issues.

Ecobabble is the practice of making up words to describe as-yet undefined conditions.

The pattern of networks is relevant to scientific topics but is not applicable to sustainability work.

Ecolinguistics studies the role of language in environmental problems and solutions.

Research shows that the most effective way to motivate people to make behavioral changes is to teach them about the crises facing the planet.

Resilient communities are likely to be a fundamentally important asset in the coming years of transition.

Semantic vagueness is the use of words with unclear or indefinite meanings, such as the word "natural."

Social marketing refers to teaching people how to work together in groups.

"Collective learning" is a characteristic that gives the human species significant ecological adaptability.

Greenwashing is the use of deliberately misleading terms in order to portray an environmentally responsible image.