- Change of treatment process reflects our environmental work.
- Change of treatment process reflects our environmental protection work.
My question is does environment work implicitly mean the effort to protect the environment? Should environmental protection work be more clear and easy to understand?
And does environment work here refer to one of the environmental efforts?
"Environmental work" is slightly more general but includes "environmental protection work". The two phrases are usually interchangeable, especially if there is any establishing context.
"Environmental work" could also refer to work that is not strictly protectionist, such as basic research on understanding the environment, but in most cases that would probably be phrased "environmental research" or something like that. Even then, most researchers studying the environment do so with the intention of protecting it.
Either phrase would likely be taken to mean the total work in general rather than a specific project, unless there is only one relevant project anyway. If you do want to refer to one specific effort, you could do so explicitly, such as "our recent environmental work", "this environmental work", etc.
It's simply a modern convention that "environmental" means "environmental protection". It seems to date from the late 1960s, when it became a buzzword to describe various groups and programs whose mission was to limit the damage from urbanization and industry. Previously those groups were called the "Conservation Movement".
As a result, the term "environmental" invokes the concept of "protection" by default.
As a teenager she would always express concern about things like pollution and deforestation, so it's little wonder that when she went to university she chose to major in Environmental Studies.
In order to save the endangered spotted owl, various environmental groups successfully blocked logging in parts of the Pacific Northwest, through various confrontational methods such as chaining themselves to trees.
