Ecology and Language

• Stories are the secret reservoir of values, changing the stories that individuals or nations live by changes the individuals and nations themselves.
• Stories have tremendous creative power to coordinate human activity, focus attention and intention, define roles, and identify what is important and even what is real.
• Ecolinguistics is about ecology and language, but these two areas appear separate at first.
• Language influences how we think, impacting how we act, and also how ecosystems are destroyed or protected
• Ecolinguistics critiques language contributing to ecological destruction and seeks language that inspires people to protect nature.
• Ecolinguistics explores language patterns that influence how people think about and treat the world, including mental models that influence behavior.
• Key stories are about economic growth, technological progress, nature as an object, and profit, impacting the treatment of life-supporting systems.
• Thomas Berry describes the current era as between stories as the old story is ineffective and the new story is not learned.
• The link between ecology and language is that our thoughts, concepts, ideas, ideologies, and worldviews influence how humans treat each other and nature; language shapes these.
• Language builds economic systems, resists destructive ones, and creates new economies, it also creates consumerist identities versus inspiring people to "be more rather than have more.”
• Language mentally reduces nature to objects and resources, and it can encourage respect for life-supporting systems.
• Only an act of language can create a new human condition, escaping the technical automatisms of financial capitalism.
• Linguistics provides tools to analyze everyday texts, revealing hidden stories for ecological questioning, resisting destructive stories, and promoting beneficial ones.
• The book brings together linguistic and cognitive science theories to reveal stories and develop an ecological framework.
• Ecolinguistics can expose and question the stories we live by, contributing to the search for new ones through ecolinguistic inquiry.
• Growing inequality, climate change, biodiversity loss, alienation from nature, and loss of community question the fundamental stories of industrial societies.

Four Stories

• David Korten describes four stories with ecological implications at the heart of western imperial civilization.

Prosperity Story

• Promotes worship of material acquisition and money.

Biblical Story

• Focuses on the afterlife rather than the world.

Security Story

• Builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination.

Secular Meaning Story

• Reduces life to matter and mechanism.

• These stories perpetuate injustice and lead to alienation from life and environmental destruction, rooted in individualism, progress, economism, and anthropocentrism.

• The most dangerous story is the story of human centrality, destined to be lord of all, unconfined by limits.

• These stories exist behind the lines of texts, describing "bad news" or promising improvements through consumerism.

• Ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies include stories about unlimited economic growth, accumulation of unnecessary goods, success defined by innovation and profit, and nature as a resource to exploit.

• The 2013 BBC documentary "What Makes Us Human?" features two stories: humans live outside the animal kingdom, and what makes us human is discovered in our differences, instead of our commonalities.

• Focusing on difference can obscure commonalities like emotions, embodiment, social bonding, and dependence on other species.

• Plumwood criticizes separating humankind from nature as a chief mark of ecological failure.

• Human exceptionalism has allowed for more ruthless exploitation, with destructive forms of life dominating the planet.

• In addressing ecological challenges, there is a need to explore and reconsider fundamental cultural stories, including those about human identity.

• Studying stories helps to bring diverse ecolinguistic analysis approaches into a single framework by revealing ideologies, metaphors, and other phenomena shaping lives.

• ‘Story’ traditionally refers to a structured narrative understood as one perspective.

• The stories people live by are encountered without conscious selection and they appear between the lines of everyday texts without announcing themselves.

• Kingsnorth and Hine state, 'the story of human centrality' is dangerous "since we have forgotten that it is a story,” which impacts individuals across society, recognizable through critical analysis.

• Midgley calls stories "myths we live by" and imaginative patterns interpreting the world" Kingsnorth and Hine call those stories myths and stories, “the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from “nature”.”

• Robertson calls “paradigm" as "a fundamental framework for understanding the world"

The Term “Stories-We-Live-By”

• Refers to myths, paradigms, refrains, and root metaphors as cognitive structures that influence how individuals perceive the world, with widely shared mental models influencing cultural treatment of ecosystems.
• The definition uses talking, but the stories manifest in writing, singing, drawing, photography, and other forms of expression.
• The stories-we-live-by influence actions and can lead to exploitation or overlooking wellbeing.
• Ecolinguistics analyzes texts to expose these underlying stories and to encourage support for those that foster respect for ecosystems and resist those encouraging ecological destruction.

Eco in Ecolinguistics

• The story of human distinctiveness has been central to humanities subjects in past scholarship, with scholars traditionally study and celebrate rationality, language, history, religion, culture, and literature as superior qualities.
• Orr claims that humanities and social sciences alike have advanced human domination of nature for the past five hundred years.
• An ecological turn in humanities and social sciences recognizes humans and societies as embedded in the physical world, and as more accurate since human minds, cultures, and societies are shaped by the natural world.
• This has practical implications of helping solve of the overarching ecological challenges facing humanity such as biodiversity loss, food security, climate change, water depletion, energy security and a rise of ecocriticism.
• Ecolinguistics, used since the 1990s, is a term that has been applied to many interests and approaches to the ecological turn”.It has also described areas of language interaction, text analysis and diversity.
• Steffensen and Fill identify four interpretations of ecology behind different approaches: language as symbolic ecology, sociocultural ecology, cognitive ecology, and natural ecology concerned with language relationships.
• This book focuses on 'the interaction of organisms with each other and their physical environment, which humans are a part of, playing role by the effect towards human behaviour, natural world, culture and human cognition.
• Humans interact with each other, other organisms, and their ecology.
• Ecology is concerned with connection survival and continuity and is used to protect ecological system with many dimensions.
• Robbins argues that apolitical ecologies are implicitly political. Ecolinguistic studies have normative goals similar to medical science.
• The ‘eco’ in the ecolinguistics in this book refers to the life-sustaining relationships and protecting the systems that humans and other life depend on.

Ecolinguistics

• The linguistics in ecolinguistics is the use of analysis to reveal stories with ecological perspectives
• Theories that interrogate language to reveal the foundations used in cultures and societies have risen prominence in critical analysis
• Relationship between language and the underlying stories that societies/ cultures/people’s lives depend and are subject to on a deal of great and debate on linguistics and society.

The most basic level of linguistic framework

• This would be a story which is a mental model. Those stories are often widely shared and become cognition.
• Stories-we-live-by create influence and commonalities, which are very important to stories and people.
• Stories are not analyzed, and clues are revealed to the ways of language

Factors to question within ecolinguistics

• Question whether progress is good and or bad for society as a whole
• Language provides visual representation of the stories we live by and create a potential point of intervention.

Ecosophy

• The purpose stories-we-live-by is to expose the type of world the analyst wants to see. In addition all critical language has an ethical framework with that framework for evaluating language made explicit.
• Gavriely-Nuri makes her framework explicit with a critical discourse of values with that value being “based on principles and freedoms”
• Ecolinguistic Jorgen Bang uses the similar that is in the personal communication with ecolinguistics for the contribution for culture.
• With the philosophical ethical principles that should consider for their sustainability and well-being.
• Each philosophiacal principle has each set of ideals that help the ecolinguist judge these with consideration for the interrelationship.
• Naess uses ecosophy that creates ecological philosophy that creates ecological consideration
• Since Ecosophy includes norms the should be ecolinguistics that are not correct with however been judged whether with that there no consistencies and assumptions.

Schools of though that help ecosystems

• There are many schools of thought that Ecosystems and run along sectors from the human centre of life from that including human and from local to socialist.
• The frameworks are and the way of how aligned along the spectra to conservative
• There is philosophy the the idea that technology that is for the human’s own benefit and the human ingenuity that overcome the environmental resources that create sustainable environment.
• A more political view exist within the ecological destruction that exists in the oppressive view between the ecosystem and that domination.
• This includes the focus for domination but the focus on the connection for women between the cause of creation between the earth and humans from creating societal development
• Deep ecology has also has the same idea to humans and resources as the other ecosystem
• Humans can use the resources to thrive instead of harming and creating the world that is worth living as human
• Humans can use their ecosystem and community to thrive instead of the turbulent inter economical state for transition.
• The goal from the mountain is to discover human and natural resources and not for conflict and damage with the ecosystem to give more chance of long run survival.
• And will it affect the world if one human would to destroy themselves in a long run if the whole community is not sustainable.
• All and build to create something new Gary Snider a personal poet and scholar has built a personal social ecology

The content explores the connection between ecology and language, particularly how language can be used to critique damaging social and ecological effects of financial structures. It analyzes everyday texts within the context of ecological concerns. The work aims to resist consumerism and ecological unsustainability.