When most college students were in elementary school, there were endless opportunities to be “environmental,” because it meant picking up litter, recycling, minimizing waste and planting trees.

Caring for the environment involved a lot of work and what felt like considerable sacrifice, but when you were done you could look out your window and see trees and greenery where before you saw a trash-littered lot.

Flash forward to today. All it takes to be “environmentally conscious” in this day and age is a Toyota Prius, a bunch of bumper stickers and a combative temperament. Environmentalism is now more about politics than the actual environment.

In elementary school, the solution was simple but tiresome, and the results were largely visible. You were justified in feeling like you had helped the environment.

Today, however, trees are being clear-cut to make way for overcrowded expanses of McMansions, and water is being wasted with apathetic malaise. But all anyone hears about are CAFE standards and how Bush is the antithesis of Earth. It’s no longer about the environment; it’s about politics.

When was the last time anyone planted some trees or cleaned up trash? It isn’t done, because the “real” environmentalists are handing out leaflets printed on non-recycled paper talking about how the 2 percent or so of carbon dioxide making up all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is dooming the Earth.

The best way to combat this, according to these “real” environmentalists, is to buy carbon credits, buy new appliances, buy new cars, buy this and buy that.

That has become the point, hasn’t it? Environmentalism is about money now.

Is the car polluting too much? Buy a Toyota Prius. Are you producing too much of that gaseous bogeyman, carbon dioxide? Buy carbon offsets. Are you lacking information? Buy this and that documentary DVD and book and pamphlet and lecture series.

Is your home using more energy than the “real” environmentalists say it should? Don’t just use less, but buy more efficient appliances as well.

It’s all so simple and easy now (as long as you have the cash). And all the while, the streets fill with trash, water gets wasted and the beautiful trees are slowly but surely falling by the wayside.

But at least it still feels like you’re doing something.

Environmentalism is no longer something you work to uphold; now it is something you buy yourself into and do little beyond talk to uphold. Modern environmentalism has lost its way.

[Reach reporter Anthony Michael Erickson at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu]