According to a recent mailer, “Environment America” is “the new home of U.S. PIRG’s environmental work.” At first glance, the relaunch/rebranding excercise is impressive — appealing colors and a tasteful contemporary design, but upon closer scrutiny, some old bad habits from the environmental movement are still quite evident.

The new slogan is a good place to start the critique – ”Clean Air, Clean Water, Open Space” — a striking combination of words that work and words that don’t. As you know, clean air and water are terrific words to use in all circumstances, words that everyday citizens and voters understand and use themselves. But “Open Space” … not so much.

In their landmark study “The Language of Conservation,” Lori Weigel (Public Opinion Strategies) and David Hart (Fairbanks Maslin Maullin and Associates) were quite explicit about the shortcomings of this term:

DO NOT say “open space.” “Open space” is not one of the better terms to use in the vocabulary of conservation, and “urban open space” is even worse. In focus groups, voters perceived “open space” as empty land, not near them, and did not necessarily see how they benefitted from it or could use it. “Urban open space” was perceived as a bench between sky scrapers or an abandoned lot.

Put another way, while Environment America means one thing with the term “open space,” some everyday citizens will understand somthing else entirely. My spidey senses are tingling here and they tell me that “Environment America” might get more of the reaction it is looking for if the slogan was something like “Clean Air. Clean Water. Healthy Nature” or “Clean Air. Clean Water. Natural Areas.”

So I’m really quite curious about this. Did U.S. PIRG go to the effort and expense of launching a whole new brand for itself without showing it to people outside the office first? Or did the organization show the slogan to people, who had a different reaction that participants in previous efforts?

Because if they did, I’d sure like to get my hands on that work.