She is specifically looking at the (supposedly problematic) language of saying "sunrise" and "sunset," which takes for granted an earth-centric perspective rather than acknowledging the scientific fact that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa.
If I'd wanted to be a real dick, I could have pointed out that according to Einstein's theory of relativity, we are in fact perfectly justified in talking about the sun (and indeed the entire cosmos) as revolving around the earth, if that happens to be our perspective. But I restrained.
The real issue is that many environmentalists are still stuck in the inherited worldview that says humans are "naturally" fallen and sinful creatures and can't do anything right. Therefore, what humans do is bad, and the problem with the planet is humans. Not the specific things that humans do, but simply the humans themselves. Thus, you get existential angst (or politically correct righteousness, or both) over something as innocuous as language that describes the sun as rising and setting.
This was the comment I left on the post:
I haven't heard of any ecocentric folks raising objections to the terms sunrise/sunset -- in fact, this is the first I've heard of it being a problem. I happen to agree with "Nobody" in the first comment above.
Acknowledging that humans have a particular perspective and that human language will reflect that perspective is not inherently anthropocentric.
Artificially trying to surpress our natural, intuitive relationship with our surroundings by adopting constrained language is unlikely to fix the problem, either, in my opinion. Language is itself a living, evolving thing, not a construct that we can meddle with and manipulate as we like. That's not to say that trying to craft more conscientious language isn't sometimes helpful, but I have my doubts about how effective it would be to try to force unnatural/awkward phrasings into the language to replace ones that already serve perfectly well. Words, like organisms, fill niches when they are needed, and a word without a niche to fill is not going to survive for very long.
I'd also point out -- and this might be rocking the boat a bit -- that for most of the hundreds of thousands of years since the evolution of the human species, we've largely been ignorant of the facts of modern science. But that has not necessarily resulted in us being worse human beings, or even worse animal citizens of the planet. We don't worry if the coyote has a coyote-centric perspective of the world, and we tend to assume that it does and that this is perfectly fine. In fact, we can't help but have a view of the world that is defined by our own humanness -- trying to have any other kind of view would be, well, inhuman. And one thing the planet does not need us to be is any more inhuman than we already act. (So many of our screw ups have come from us thinking that we can engineer ourselves into being better humans than the species the planet made us.)
Let's root out the actual ideologies that are problematic and destructive and put our energies into deconstructing those, rather identifying our humanness itself as the problem.
I should check this with Jeff, but it might even be that this is a problem specific to the English language (or a handful of related languages) and not universal to all human languages. If it is universal (which, given just how basic an experience it is to not just humans but pretty much everything on the planet, is the most likely), it tells us something fascinating and valuable about how we experience the world. I think we're better off learning from and appreciating that perspective, rather than trying to surpress it.
ETA: I couldn't help but follow up, in response to Rua Lupa asking another commenter to define (without reference to a dictionary) what a sunrise/sunset actually is:
Arguably, the terms "sunrise" and "sunset" refer to the specific event of the sun rising above or sinking below the horizon line from the perspective of a particular point on the surface of the earth.
In other words, the event itself is place-specific, it is necessarily related to a particular location and the perspective of (e.g. the horizon as viewed from) that location. It would be nonsensical to talk about the position of the sun in relation to the horizon without referring to a specific location.
So I'm not clear how you plan to replace these words/concepts with terms that are place-nonspecific. The very attempt to do so is a kind of ideological blinder, an attempt to universalize what is inherently and by definition a localized event.
I've done too much flying this year. I've experienced firsthand that sunrise/sunset is relative to your location, and to try to talk differently about it is bound to cause problems.
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