And with that settled, we dug into our barbecued steaks. The poor, ignorant savages just don't get it: Blood belongs on styrofoam trays. 

It was very satisfying -- the scorn we heaped on the Makah, that is, not the steak. We wept for a whale. What better evidence could there be of our environmental bona fides? 

In fact it proved nothing of the kind. It did, however, show how little the public knows about whales. And it certainly showed how much confusion there is about the meaning of ''environmentalism,'' since the controversy never had anything to do with that much-mangled word. 

The Makah are authorized to hunt a total of 20 whales over five years. Gray whales, once an endangered species, have bounced back to a population of 26,000, probably the most abundant they have ever been. No one has credibly argued that the killing of 20 whales over five years will have any effect on the sustainability of the population. 

And ''sustainability'' is the key to environmentalism. Natural processes are, barring changes in external circumstances, self-sustaining. Environmentalism is about making sure that human activities don't interrupt those processes, not only so they are sustained but so our activities, and those of future generations, can be as well. 

Since the sustainability of the gray whale population was never an issue, the fuss over the Makah hunt was never an environmental issue. It was about something else entirely: animal rights. It was over the morality of hunting an animal -- a big, photogenic animal, unfortunately for the Makah. 

That's a serious question and, although I support hunting as an ethical pursuit, I'm not dismissing it. But a line has to be drawn between environmentalism and animal rights. From an environmental perspective, there's no difference in assessing a tree harvest or a whale hunt: The question in both is sustainability and the answers are found in science. The animal rights view, however, poses ethical questions which don't touch on sustainability and aren't settled by science. 

If this confusion only affected how we see the tiny Makah whale hunt, it wouldn't be worth the ink I'm spilling here. But it bedevils a whole range of issues, from the seal hunt to the spring bear hunt and the African ivory trade. 

More seriously, the confusion of these two ideas masks the fact that they sometimes directly clash. 

A few years ago, the Nature Conservancy, an environmental group that protects natural habitat, set to work on Hawaiian land over-run with non-native pigs and goats. Native species had been devastated by the feral invaders. The local eco-system was severely weakened and if it were to be saved, the pigs and goats had to go. Various methods were tried but only killing worked. Snares were used to make it as humane as possible. 

But that wasn't good enough for animal rights activists. ''People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals'' (PETA) attacked the Nature Conservancy with the usual paint throwing and so on. A co-founder of PETA even stormed the stage at a Nature Conservancy meeting, blasting an air horn. 

Tellingly, PETA is a group that relies on publicity generated by its celebrity members, whippet-faced models and Hollywood bimbos with eyes as big and empty as those of the cows they won't eat. These same stars live the sort of resource- consuming California lifestyle that is the very definition of environmental unsustainability. But still, thanks to our confusion over the term, they're ''environmentalists'' because they like puppy dogs. I'd laugh but I don't want to get wrinkles. 

Why does the confusion persist? In part because animal rights activists promote it. In the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, three professors dissect efforts by some anti-whaling activists to ban all whaling -- even of abundant varieties. That's because concerns about sustainability aren't what's behind their campaign. But the activists, knowing that most people in the West think, wrongly, that all whales are endangered, play themselves up as ''environmentalists'' and carefully fudge their numbers. 

Combined with pictures of bloody water, it's a bruisingly effective tactic, capable of making us hate the Makah and weep on our steaks. That it also abuses the idea of environmentalism is of no concern. 

These people, after all, are not real environmentalists. �