Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By PDF

ECOLINGUISTICS The increasingly rapid destruction of the ecological systems that support life is calling into question some of the fundamental stories that we live by: stories of unlimited economic growth, of consumerism, progress, individualism, success and the human domination of nature. Ecolinguistics shows how linguistic analysis can help reveal the stories we live by, open them up to question, and contribute to the search for new stories. Bringing together the latest ecolinguistic studies with new theoretical insights and practical analyses, this book charts a new course for ecolinguistics as an engaged form of critical inquiry. Featuring: a framework for understanding the theory of ecolinguistics and applying it practically in real life exploration of diverse topics from consumerism in lifestyle magazines to Japanese nature haiku a comprehensive glossary giving concise descriptions of the linguistic terms used in the book discourse analysis of a wide range of texts including newspapers, magazines, advertisements, ﬁlms, non-ﬁction books and visual images. This is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working in the areas of Discourse Analysis and Language and Ecology, as well as anyone interested in the search for new stories to live by. Arran Stibbe is a Reader in Ecological Linguistics at the University of Glouces- tershire where he teaches ecolinguistics, discourse analysis, ethics and language, and communication for leadership. This page intentionally left blank ECOLINGUISTICS Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By Arran Stibbe Routledge Routledge Routledge Routledge Routledge First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Arran Stibbe The right of Arran Stibbe to be identiﬁed as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Every eﬀort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the ﬁrst opportunity. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identiﬁcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Stibbe, Arran, author. Ecolinguistics : language, ecology and the stories we live by / by Arran Stibbe. pages cm 1. Ecolinguistics. I. Title. P39.5.S75 2015 306.44–dc23 2014038015 ISBN: 978-0-415-83781-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-83783-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-71807-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii 1 Introduction 1 The stories we live by 3 The ‘eco’ of ecolinguistics 6 The ‘linguistics’ of ecolinguistics 9 Ecosophy 10 The ecosophy of this book 13 2 Ideologies and discourse 22 The discourse of neoclassical economics 35 3 Frames and framing 46 The framing of development 54 4 Metaphors 63 The CORPORATION IS A PERSON metaphor 75 5 Evaluations and appraisal patterns 83 Appraisal and the weather 96 6 Identities 105 Identity, gender and the body in Men’s Health magazine 118 vi Contents 7 Convictions and facticity patterns 127 Facticity in the climate change countermovement 138 8 Erasure 145 Erasure in the language of ecosystem assessment 155 9 Salience and re-minding 161 Salience in New Nature Writing 174 10 Conclusion 183 Theory 184 Criticisms 188 The gathering 192 Appendix: Sources of data 194 Glossary 200 Index 208 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the School of Humanities at the University of Gloucestershire for speciﬁc support while writing this book, as well as general support for ecolinguistics over many years. I am grateful to my students, who year after year have asked questions, analysed original data, made insightful observations and contributed to the development of ecolinguistics. I am also grateful to Chloe Phillips and Evan Lewis for their helpful comments on the draft manuscript. I would like to express my appreciation to the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan for permission to include Figure 2.1, to Seiko Harada for Figure 3.1, to Trengayor Wood Works for Figure 3.2, Berrett-Koehler publishers for Figure 4.1, Mark Achbar for Figure 4.2, the Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH (gross national happiness) research for Figure 5.3, to Compassion in World Farming for images shown in Figures 9.1 to 9.7, and to Sort of Books for Figure 9.8. I am particularly grateful to Daisy Livingston from Compassion in World Farming for her help in obtaining the animal images. Some sections of this book have drawn from, updated, and adapted, extracts from material which has been previously published. I would like to express thanks to the publishers of this material for granting permission to use it. Chapters 1 and 2 have drawn from Stibbe, A. 2014 An ecolinguistic approach to critical discourse studies, Critical Discourse Studies 11(1): 117–28. Chapter 2 has also drawn brieﬂy from Stibbe, A. 2009 Advertising awareness, in A. Stibbe (ed.) The handbook of sustainability literacy, Dartington: Green Books. Chapter 3 has drawn from Stibbe, A. 2015 Reframing development narratives: the changing frames of caring for the world and its people, in F. Zunino and A. Fill (eds) Talking about nature and culture, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Chapter 4 has made use of extracts from Stibbe, A. 2014 The corporation as person and psychopath: multimodal metaphor, rhetoric and resistance, Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 6(2): 114–36. Chapter 8 has drawn from Stibbe, A. 2014 Ecolinguistics viii Acknowledgements and erasure, in C. Hart and P. Cap (eds) Contemporary critical discourse studies, London: Bloomsbury. Finally I must say thank you to my family – Ryoko, Sen and Kaya – for their incredible support, and most particularly to Shirl for helping me sort out a wide range of problematic issues and improve the draft manuscript. 1 INTRODUCTION Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories that individuals or nations live by and you change the individuals and nations themselves. (Ben Okri 1996: 21) Stories bear tremendous creative power. Through them we coordinate human activity, focus attention and intention, deﬁne roles, identify what is important and even what is real. (Charles Eisenstein 2011: 2) When ﬁrst encountered, ecolinguistics is sometimes met with baﬄement. It is about ecology, and it is about language, but these two initially appear to be entirely separate areas of life. A cursory explanation is that language inﬂuences how we think about the world. The language of advertising can encourage us to desire unnecessary and environmentally damaging products, while nature writing can inspire respect for the natural world. How we think has an inﬂuence on how we act, so language can inspire us to destroy or protect the ecosystems that life depends on. Ecolinguistics, then, is about critiquing forms of language that contribute to eco- logical destruction, and aiding in the search for new forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world. This is a superﬁcial explanation but at least starts to create connections in people’s minds between two areas of life – language and ecology – that are not so separate after all. Ecolinguistics is very much more than this though. First, there are a number of diﬀerent approaches with very diﬀerent aims, goals and methodologies. Second, the analysis goes far deeper than commenting on individual texts such as advertisements or nature books. Ecolinguistics can explore the more general patterns of language that inﬂuence how people both think about, and treat, the world. It can investigate the stories we live by – mental models that inﬂuence behaviour and lie at the heart of 2 Ecolinguistics the ecological challenges we are facing. There are certain key stories about eco- nomic growth, about technological progress, about nature as an object to be used or conquered, about proﬁt and success, that have profound implications for how we treat the systems that life depends on. As Thomas Berry (1988: 123) puts it: We are in trouble just now because we don’t have a good story. We are between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we ﬁt into it, is no longer eﬀective. Yet we have not learned the new story. We have still not learned a new story, even though the conditions of the world make it even more important to do so than at the time Berry wrote this. The link between ecology and language is that how humans treat each other and the natural world is inﬂuenced by our thoughts, concepts, ideas, ideologies and worldviews, and these in turn are shaped through language. It is through language that economic systems are built, and when those systems are seen to lead to immense suﬀering and ecological destruction, it is through language that they are resisted and new forms of economy brought into being. It is through language that consumerist identities are built and lives orientated towards accumulation, and it is through language that consumerism is resisted and people are inspired to ‘be more rather than have more’. It is through language that the natural world is mentally reduced to objects or resources to be conquered, and it is through language that people can be encouraged to respect and care for the systems that support life. In critiquing the damaging social and ecological eﬀects of ﬁnancial structures, Berardi (2012: 157) states that: Only an act of language can give us the ability to see and to create a new human condition, where we now only see barbarianism and violence. Only an act of language escaping the technical automatisms of ﬁnancial capitalism will make possible the emergence of a new life form. Linguistics provides tools for analysing the texts that surround us in everyday life and shape the kind of society we belong to. These tools can help reveal the hidden stories that exist between the lines of the texts. Once revealed, the stories can be questioned from an ecological perspective: do they encourage people to destroy or protect the ecosystems that life depends on? If they are destructive then they need to be resisted, and if beneﬁcial they need to be promoted. The role of this book is to bring together a range of theories from linguistics and cognitive science into a linguistic framework to reveal the stories we live by; to develop an ecological framework for judging those stories against; and to put the linguistic and ecological frameworks into action in analysing a wide range of texts from diﬀerent areas of life. This book is based on one key premise: that ecolinguistics can play a valuable role in exposing and questioning the stories we live by, and contribute to the search for new ones. This is only possible if a large number of people, from a wide variety of backgrounds, undertake ecolinguistic inquiry, from major academic research Introduction 3 projects to personal exploration. This book, then, is for linguists, geographers, biologists and academic researchers from diverse subject areas. It is for students at all levels, educators, sustainability oﬃcers in companies, those working in environ- mental organisations, and those involved in a more personal inquiry into their own place and role within an unsustainable society. It is for everyone who is engaged in an inquiry into the industrial society around them, everyone who is questioning why that society is unsustainable and how it can be changed. The stories we live by As evidence of the scale of the ecological issues we are facing in the twenty-ﬁrst century emerges, and the scale of the response required becomes clearer, there are increasing calls to go beyond attempts to address isolated symptoms with technical solutions and instead consider the deeper social and cultural causes of the problems we face. Growing inequality, climate change, biodiversity loss, alienation from nature and loss of community are bringing into question the fundamental stories that industrial societies are based on. David Korten (2006: 248) describes four stories at the heart of western imperial civilisation which he claims have profound ecological implications. There is the ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money, the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us, the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination, and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism. These stories, he maintains, perpetuate injustice and lead to both alienation from life and environmental destruction. Chet Bowers (2014: 27) describes how the root metaphors of ‘individualism, progress, economism, and anthropocentrism have merged into a powerful process of conceptual and moral legitimation’. Stories such as these, he claims, carry forward ‘the deep assumptions of an ecologically unsustainable culture’. For Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine (2009) the most dangerous story that we live by is ‘the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconﬁned by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures’. These are not, however, stories in the usual sense of narratives. They are not told in novels, read to children at bedtime, shared around a ﬁre, or conveyed through anecdotes in formal speeches. Instead they exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us – the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline proﬁts are up, or the advertisements promising us that we will be better people if we purchase the unnecessary goods they are promoting. Underneath common ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies are stories about unlimited economic growth as being not just possible but the goal of society, of the accumulation of unnecessary goods as a path towards self-improvement, of progress and success deﬁned narrowly in terms of technological innovation and proﬁt, and of nature as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited. 4 Ecolinguistics To give an example of how a story can be told ‘between-the-lines’, consider the 2013 BBC documentary ‘What makes us human?’, summarised on the BBC website as: Professor Alice Roberts investigates exactly what makes us diﬀerent from the animal kingdom. What is it that truly makes us human? (ML12 – see Appendix for reference). Behind this phrasing are two stories. The ﬁrst is that humans live outside the animal kingdom, i.e. that humans are not animals. The second is that what makes us human is to be discovered in our diﬀerences from other animals rather than our commonalities. In the documentary, Professor Roberts herself does not use the ﬁrst story, but she does use the second: What is it about our bodies, our genes and our brains that sets us apart? What is it that truly makes us human? Michael has devised an experiment that he believes reveals a speciﬁc piece of behaviour that separates us from chimps, that deﬁnes us as a species, and truly makes us human (ML13 – transcribed extracts from ‘What makes us human?’). Neither of these extracts directly states that ‘it is in our diﬀerences from other animals that we can discover what makes us human’; instead it is just assumed as the background story necessary to semantically link the two questions in the ﬁrst extract, and the three coordinated statements in the second. The story is a pervasive one, told between the lines by many people, in many contexts. Noam Chomsky (2006: 88), for instance, wrote: When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the ‘human essence’, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man. This uses apposition (the equating of two concepts by placing them immediately after each other) to represent the essence of being human as identical to human uniqueness. The deﬁnite article the in the ‘human essence’ leaves no space for qualities we share with other animals to also be considered part of our essence. The idea that our humanity lies in our uniqueness from other animals is just a story, however, and other stories are possible. The danger in focusing on diﬀerence is that the story can obscure some of the important things that humans and other animals have in common: having emotions, being embodied, bonding socially with others, and most importantly, being dependent on other species and the environment for our continued survival. Plumwood (2007) strongly criticises this story: Arguably, the distinguishing feature of western culture, and perhaps also the chief mark of its ecological failure, is the idea that humankind is radically Introduction 5 diﬀerent and apart from the rest of nature and from other animals. This idea, sometimes called Human Exceptionalism, has allowed us to exploit nature and people more ruthlessly (some would say more eﬃciently) than other cultures, and our high-powered, destructive forms of life dominate the planet. In seeking solutions to the ecological challenges we face, we may have to explore and reconsider some of the fundamental stories that underlie our culture, including stories about who we are as humans. The focus in this book on stories we live by is a way of bringing together a diversity of approaches to ecolinguistic analysis into a single framework. When ecolinguists examine ideologies, metaphors, frames and a variety of other cognitive and linguistic phenomena, what they are doing is revealing and uncovering the stories that shape people’s lives and shape the society in which we live. In its traditional sense, the word ‘story’ refers to a narrative which has a clear begin- ning, middle and end, and takes place over time. When engaging with a story in this traditional sense, readers can recognise it as a story by its structure and context, and hence treat it as just one possible perspective or interpretation of the world around us. The stories we live by are diﬀerent, however. We are exposed to them without consciously selecting them or necessarily being aware that they are just stories. They appear between the lines of the texts which surround us in everyday life: in news reports, advertisements, conversations with friends, the weather forecast, instruction manuals or textbooks. They appear in educational, political, professional, medical, legal and other institutional contexts without announcing themselves as stories. In commenting on the ‘story of human centrality’, Kingsnorth and Hine (2009) state that ‘What makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have for- gotten that it is a story’. Similarly, David Loy (2010: 5) describes how ‘unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as the world’. Macy and Johnstone (2012: 15) describe the ‘business-as-usual’ story that sees economic growth and technological development as the way forward for society, and comment that ‘When you’re living in the middle of this story, it’s easy to think of it as just the way things are’. The stories we live by are embedded deeply in the minds of individuals across a society and appear only indirectly between the lines of the texts that circulate in that society. They are therefore not immediately recognisable as stories, and need to be exposed, subjected to critical analysis, and resisted if they are implicated in injustice and environmental destruction. Midgley (2011: 1) calls stories in this sense the ‘myths we live by’. By myths she means ‘imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world’. Indeed, Kingsnorth and Hine (2009) use the terms myth and story interchangeably: ‘We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from “nature”.’ Robertson (2014: 54) uses the term ‘paradigm’ in a similar sense to refer to ‘a fundamental framework for understanding the world, a coherent set of assumptions and concepts that deﬁnes a way of viewing reality’. Of particular concern for Robertson is the paradigm of ‘economic growth’. She 6 Ecolinguistics describes how ‘Growth as the core economic paradigm has been developing for sev- eral hundred years and has become solidly entrenched since the last century’. Berardi (2012: 131) emphasises the rhythmic nature of patterns using the term refrain, to mean the repetitions of gestures and signs that pervade and discipline society such as ‘the refrain of factory work, the refrain of salary, the refrain of the assembly line’. He states that ‘Now we need refrains that disentangle singular existence from the social game of competition and productivity’ (2012: 146). Martusewicz et al. (2011: 66) write of root metaphors, which ‘structure and maintain a “that’s just the way it is” perception of the world … a deeply ingrained set of ideas that structures how one sees, relates to and behaves in the world’. From this point, the term stories-we-live-by, hyphenated to show that it is a technical term, will be used to convey a similar concept to what these authors refer to as myths, paradigms, refrains and root metaphors. Speciﬁcally, the terms story and stories-we-live-by are deﬁned as follows for the purposes of this book: Stories are cognitive structures in the minds of individuals which inﬂuence how they perceive the world. Stories-we-live-by are stories in the minds of multiple individuals across a culture. Cognitive structures are mental models that exist in the minds of individuals – for example, a model of the world where humans are separate from and superior to other animals, or a model where humans are surrounded by an environment. Of key interest are mental models that are shared widely within a culture because these models are likely to have a strong inﬂuence on how the culture treats the ecosys- tems that support life. Since the models are in the mind they cannot be examined directly, but we can receive clues to their existence and structure through the language that people use. For simplicity, the deﬁnition above uses the word ‘talk’ but the stories-we-live-by manifest themselves not just in particular ways of talking but also writing, singing, drawing, taking photographs, ﬁlming, dressing and many other ways that we express ourselves. All are of interest and importance, although this book focuses primarily on language. Importantly the stories-we-live-by inﬂuence how we act in the world – if nature is seen as a resource then we may be more likely to exploit it, or if economic growth is seen as the primary goal of politics then people’s wellbeing and the ecosystems which support life may be overlooked. The role of the form of eco- linguistics described in this book is to analyse texts to expose the underlying stories, and then consider carefully how they encourage us to act. If they encourage respect and care for the ecosystems that support life then they need to be promoted, and if they encourage ecological destruction then they need to be resisted. The ‘eco’ of ecolinguistics The story of human distinctiveness has been central to humanities subjects in the past. These areas of scholarly inquiry have traditionally studied and celebrated Introduction 7 rationality, language, a sense of history, religion, culture and literature as aspects which distinguish us from, and, implicitly, make us better than, animals. Orr (1992: 145) goes so far as to claim that ‘For the past ﬁve hundred years, our sciences, social sciences and humanities alike have been committed to extending and celebrating the human domination of nature’. However, as awareness of the ecological embedding of humans and human societies has risen to the level of urgent and immediate concern there has been an ‘ecological turn’ in humanities and social science subjects. No longer is the object of study – whether the mind, the human, society, culture or religion – seen in isolation, but as an inextricable and integral part of a larger physical and living world. This has helped these subjects become more accurate in their inquiry, since undoubtedly human minds, cultures and society are shaped by the natural world that they arose from and are part of. But more practically, it has helped give a role to humanities and social science in addressing some of the overarching ecological challenges that humanity is facing in the twenty-ﬁrst century: biodiversity loss, food security, climate change, water depletion, energy security, chemical contamination, alienation from nature and the social justice questions that both contribute to and arise from these issues. The ecological turn has seen the rise of ecocriticism (Garrard 2014), ecopoetics (Knickerbocker 2012), ecofeminism (Adams and Gruen 2014), ecopsychology (Fisher 2013), ecosociology (Stevens 2012), political ecology (Robbins 2012) and environmental communication (Cox 2012). Environmental communication has a particular focus which unites researchers, and which Milstein et al. (2009: 344) summarise as follows: Research and theory within the ﬁeld are united by the topical focus on com- munication and human relations with the environment. Scholars who study environmental communication are particularly concerned with the ways people communicate about the natural world because they believe such communication has far-reaching eﬀects at a time of largely human-caused crises. For ecocriticism, Glotfelty (2014) describes how, despite a broad scope of inquiry: all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, aﬀecting it and aﬀected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, speciﬁ- cally the cultural artifacts language and literature … Most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet’s basic life support systems. But what of ‘ecolinguistics’? Certainly the term ‘ecolinguistics’ has been used since at least the 1990s (Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001: 1), and the word ‘ecology’ has been incorporated in linguistic accounts since (at least) Einar Haugen’s work in the 1970s (e.g. Haugen 1972). However, the term ‘ecolinguistics’ has been applied to a 8 Ecolinguistics wide range of approaches and interests, some more relevant than others to the larger ‘ecological turn’ in humanities and social science. The term ‘ecolinguistics’ has been used to describe studies of language interaction and diversity; studies of texts such as signposts which are outdoors; analysis of texts which happen to be about the environment; studies of how words in a language relate to objects in the local environment; studies of the mix of languages surrounding pupils in multicultural schools; studies of dialects in particular geographical loca- tions, and many other diverse areas. The multiplicity of approaches arises from diﬀerent understandings of the concept of ‘ecology’, from a very broad concept of ‘the interaction of some things with other things’ to narrow concepts such as ‘related to environmentalism’. Steﬀensen and Fill (2014: 7) identify four diﬀerent interpretations of ecology that lie behind the diﬀerent approaches. The ﬁrst approach sees language as existing in a symbolic ecology, where diﬀerent languages interact with each other in a given location. The second approach sees language as part of a sociocultural ecology where it shapes societies and cultures. The third approach is concerned with cognitive ecology and how the cognitive capacity of organisms aﬀects how they adapt to their environment. Finally, there is a natural ecology which is concerned with the relationship of language to its biological and physical environment. It is within this ﬁnal form of ecology that Steﬀensen and Fill (2014: 9) ask the key question at the heart of this book: ‘Do linguistic patterns, literally, aﬀect the survival and wellbeing of the human species as well as other species on Earth?’ Ecology in this book, then, is very much the ecological science concept of the interaction of organisms with each other and their physical environment. The focus on ‘organisms’ does not mean that the human is forgotten, as is sometimes the case in ecological science where the focus is on animals and plants in pristine environments remote from the inﬂuence of humans. Humans are, after all, the object of study for humanities and are organisms too. It is therefore human ecology (Gare 2002) that is of interest, which can be deﬁned as the interaction of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment. Language, culture, human cognition, stories and texts play a role in human ecology to the extent that they inﬂuence human behaviour, and hence the ways that humans interact with each other and the larger natural world. This view of ecology alleviates the need to split ecology up into a ‘natural ecology’, as if humans were not part of the natural world, or a ‘symbolic ecology’, as if symbols interacted with each other in the same way that organisms do. Sociocultural forces and cognition are, of course, of central importance, but do not need to be viewed as a separate ‘sociocultural ecology’ or ‘cognitive ecology’. Instead they can be viewed as factors inﬂuencing human behaviour and therefore having an impact on the ecology of interacting organisms. For example, rather than considering a piece of environmental legislation as existing within a ‘symbolic ecology’ it can be seen as inﬂuencing actual physical ecology through its very real consequences for how people treat life-supporting ecosystems. There are many forms of interaction between organisms that could be studied, but ecology is concerned speciﬁcally with the literally vital ones, i.e. ones which are Introduction 9 necessary for the continuation of life. It is because of the connection between ecology and the continuing survival of life that the term is often used with a nor- mative (moral) orientation towards protection of the ecological systems that life depends on. Although some forms of ecology disguise their normative dimension, Robbins (2012: 19) argues that ‘apolitical ecologies, regardless of claims to even handed objectivity, are implicitly political’. Robbins’s own form of political ecology ‘is simply more explicit in its normative goals and more outspoken about the assumptions from which its research is conducted’. Ecolinguistic studies also have normative goals, whether or not they are expressed explicitly, in the same way that medical science has an orientation towards the goal of health, or conservation biology has a goal of saving species from extinction. The normative goals that this book are based on will be discussed in the later section ‘The ecosophy of this book’, but for now we can say that the ‘eco’ of the form of ecolinguistics described in this book refers to: the life-sustaining relationships of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment, with a normative orientation towards protecting the systems that humans and other forms of life depend on for their wellbeing and survival. The ‘linguistics’ of ecolinguistics In this book, the ‘linguistics’ of ecolinguistics is simply the use of techniques of linguistic analysis to reveal the stories-we-live-by, opening them up to question and challenge from an ecological perspective. Theories that interrogate language to reveal the foundations of cultures and societies have been gaining in prominence. There has been important work in Critical Discourse Analysis which exposes the role of language in promoting racism, sexism and oppressive power relations (e.g. van Dijk 2008; Fairclough 2014), and in cognitive linguistics, which examines both the general ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoﬀ and Johnson 1980) and the cognitive frames that play such an important role in political life (Lakoﬀ 2004). While these theories and frameworks tended in the past to focus exclusively on human relations with other humans, they can also be adapted and applied to wider ecological issues, as more recent studies have increasingly started to demonstrate (e.g. Alexander 2009; Nerlich 2010; Larson 2011; Milstein and Dickinson 2012). The relationship between language and the underlying stories that societies, cultures and people’s lives are built on is a highly complex one, and subject to a great deal of debate within the literature on linguistics and philosophy. The approach of this book is to build a simpliﬁed framework for analysing the stories- we-live-by through drawing together a number of linguistic theories. These include Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 2003); frame theory (Lakoﬀ and Wehling 2012); metaphor theory (Müller 2008); appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005); identity theory (Benwell and Stokoe 2006); fact construction (Potter 1996) and theories of erasure and salience (drawing on van Leeuwen 2008). All of these theories can be seen as analysing language to reveal underlying stories, although they use a range of diﬀerent terms to describe what they do. 10 Ecolinguistics In the linguistic framework of this book, the most basic level is the ‘story’ – a mental model within the mind of an individual person. A story of ‘progress’ for example, may consider the past negatively as a brute struggle for survival, the pre- sent as a great improvement due to technological innovation, the future as even more promising, and further industrialisation and technological innovation as what we should aim for. Each person will have their own collection of stories in their minds, but some stories, like that of progress, are shared by large numbers of people. They do not just exist in individual people’s minds, but across the larger culture in what van Dijk (2009: 19) refers to as social cognition. The stories-we-live-by are, therefore, cognitive structures which inﬂuence how multiple people think, talk and act. The story of progress has a fairly simple struc- ture – a direction (forwards or backwards), an evaluative orientation (forwards is good and backwards is bad), certain elements which are mapped onto ‘forwards’ (e.g. technological innovation or industrialisation), certain elements which are mapped onto backwards (e.g. living closer to nature), and a sense that progress is inevitable and unstoppable. This structure could inﬂuence people’s thinking, e.g. their reasoning process in deciding whether or not to support industrialisation of a green area. It could inﬂuence how they talk, e.g. in using expressions like ‘you can’t stop progress’. And most importantly, it could inﬂuence how they act, for example in purchasing the latest technology or agreeing to development of a green area. In this way the story has an impact on people’s lives and how they treat the ecosystems that support life. Since the stories are mental models they cannot be analysed directly, but we can get clues to them through analysing common ways that people use language. For example, by examining what people represent as ‘moving forwards’ and what they represent as ‘going backwards’ it is possible to get clues to the underlying story of progress that exists in people’s minds, and then question whether ‘progress’ is a beneﬁcial story or not in terms of the actions it encourages. Although other modes such as visual images also provide clues to the stories-we- live-by, language is particularly revealing. It is important also because it is a key mechanism by which stories are transmitted across generations and across cultures and therefore a potential point of intervention. As the quote which opened this chapter describes, ‘change the stories that individuals or nations live by and you change the individuals and nations themselves’ (Okri 1996: 21). The ‘linguistics’ of the form of ecolinguistics described in this book uses a variety of linguistic theories to analyse patterns in language in an attempt to reveal the underlying stories-we- live-by, as a step towards changing them. Ecosophy The purpose of revealing, exposing or shedding light on the stories-we-live-by is to open them up to question and challenge – are these stories working in the current conditions of the world or do we need to search for new stories? Whether or not the stories are considered to be ‘working’ depends on the ethical vision of Introduction 11 the analyst, i.e. on whether the stories are building the kind of world that the analyst wants to see. Clearly, all critical language analysts have an ethical framework that they use for evaluating the language they are analysing, whether or not it is made explicit. An analysis of racist language, for instance, is likely to be conducted within a framework which sees racism as something negative that needs to be worked against rather than just an object for disinterested analysis of the technicalities of language. Only some- times is the ethical framework made explicit, however. Gavriely-Nuri (2012: 83) makes her framework explicit when she calls for a Cultural Critical Discourse Analysis based on ‘values, attitudes and behaviours based on the principles of freedom, justice and democracy, all human rights, tolerance and solidarity’. This form of analysis is explicitly direc- ted at exposing mainstream discourses which work against these values, and searching for ‘discursive tools that practically promote the “culture of peace”’. Like many philoso- phical frameworks used in linguistics, however, the framework does not speciﬁcally mention ecological issues. Democracy, justice and solidarity do not automatically lead to sustainable levels of consumption, and peace in a society that exceeds environ- mental limits will be short lived. Indeed, contamination and over-exploitation of nat- ural resources is one of the key drivers behind war, as Hiscock (2012) shows. The ecolinguist Jørgen Bang uses a philosophical framework similar to that of Gavriely-Nuri, but does include ecological consideration. For Bang (personal communication, July 2014), ecolinguistics is based on: contributing to a local and global culture in which (i) co-operation, (ii) sharing, (iii) democratic dialogue, (iv) peace and non-violence, (v) equality in every sphere of daily life, and (vi) ecological sustainability are the fundamental features and primary values. If this framework were employed, then stories would be judged on the degree to which they encourage cooperation or competition, sharing or greed, peace or violence, and ecological sustainability or destruction. Larson (2011: 10), in his ecolinguistic analysis of metaphor, uses a philosophical framework of ‘socio- ecological sustainability’ and considers ‘whether the metaphors we have chosen will help us on the path of sustainability or lead us further astray’. He describes his ethical vision of sustainability through statements such as the following: … we seek not just ecological sustainability, but a more encompassing socioecological sustainability. We want a sustainable relationship between humans and the natural world rather than a sustained ecological system without humans which, to many of us, would be a sign of failure … are the metaphors we choose fertile, or eﬀective, for socioecological sustainability? (Larson 2011: 17) Each ecolinguist will have their own set of philosophical principles they use to judge stories against, reﬂecting their own values and priorities, but all will have in common a consideration of the interrelationships of humans with other organisms 12 Ecolinguistics and the physical environment. Naess (1995) uses the term ecosophy (a shortening of ‘ecological philosophy’) to describe a set of philosophical principles which include ecological consideration. He expresses it like this: By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony … openly nor- mative it contains norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of aﬀairs … The details of an ecosophy will show many variations due to signiﬁcant diﬀerences concerning not only the ‘facts’ of pollution, resources, population, etc. but also value priorities. (Naess 1995: 8) Since the ecosophy includes ‘norms’ and ‘value priority announcements’ there is not one ‘correct’ ecosophy that ecolinguistics should be based on. Ecosophies can, however, be judged by whether evidence conﬁrms or contradicts the assumptions about the state of the world that they are based on, or whether there are any internal inconsistencies. There are many possible schools of thought that can be drawn on in forming an ecosophy, and they tend to run along three spectra. The ﬁrst spectrum is from anthropocentric (human centred) to ecocentric (centred on all life including humans). The second spectrum is from neoliberal at one end to either socialist, localist or anarchist at the other. The third spectrum is from optimistic to pessimistic. Inter- estingly, the three spectra broadly align with each other, so conservative neoliberal frameworks tend to be optimistic and anthropocentric, while politically radical approaches tend towards pessimism and ecocentrism. It is useful to give a brief outline of some philosophical perspectives, to illustrate how the frameworks align along the spectra. At the most politically conservative end is ‘cornucopianism’. This philosophy considers that human ingenuity and ever advancing technology will overcome environmental and resource issues. Humans should therefore continue with and accelerate industrial progress for the sake of human (and only human) beneﬁt (e.g. Lomborg 2001; Ridley 2010). Then there is a cluster of perspectives under the umbrella of ‘sustainable development’, which attempt to combine economic growth with environmental protection and social equity (e.g. Baker 2006). These vary from more conservative positions, where economic growth is the priority, to approaches which more fully consider social and ecological factors. Social ecology (e.g. Bookchin 1994, 2005) is a more politi- cally radical perspective which sees the roots of ecological destruction as existing in oppressive social hierarchies. In this perspective, humans will continue dominating nature and treating it as a resource until they stop dominating each other and treating each other as resources. Ecofeminism (e.g. Adams and Gruen 2014) also locates the cause of ecological crisis in domination, but focuses on the parallels between the oppression of animals and the environment and men’s domination of women. One of the aims of ecofeminism is to change society so that the ecological sensitivity gained by women through their practical role in subsistence and community building is valued and used in rebuilding more ecological societies. Introduction 13 Deep ecology (e.g. Drengson and Inoue 1995) recognises the intrinsic worth of humans, plants, animals, forests and rivers, that is, their value beyond direct, short-term use for humans. Recognising worth in nature, it is argued, is likely to encourage people to protect and preserve the conditions that support all life, including human life. The Transition Movement (Hopkins 2008) is based on a philosophy of ‘resi- lience’ as a key goal, as both climate change and the depletion of oil lead to an inevitable decline in the ability of the earth to support human life. Transition is localist in encouraging communities to regain the bonds and skills to look after each other and fulﬁl their own needs outside of a turbulent and unreliable inter- national economy. The Dark Mountain Project (Kingsnorth and Hine 2009) sees even the hope of resilience as overly optimistic, and aims at generating new stories for survivors to live by after the inevitable collapse of industrial civilisation. The aim of the Dark Mountain Project is to discover stories which do not repeat the same errors of the past and consider humans as part of the natural world rather than conquerors of it. Deep Green Resistance (McBay et al. 2011) sees industrial civilisation as evil due to the damage and suﬀering it causes both humans and other species. Rather than waiting for industrial civilisation to destroy itself, Deep Green Resistance aims to hasten its destruction through carefully planned sabotage. At the far other end of the spectrum there is the semi-serious Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT 2014), with a utilitarian philosophy that it would be better for one species (homo sapiens) to become extinct (voluntarily through a global decision not to have children) rather than the millions of species that humans are driving to extinction. This is radically ecocentric, and pessimistic since it views any continuation of human life as a threat to the ecosystems that support life. An individual ecolinguist will survey the wide range of possible ecosophies described in the literature, consider them carefully in light of available evidence and their own experience of human communities and the natural world, and build their own ecosophy through combining them, extending them or creating some- thing entirely new. Gary Snyder, ecocritic, poet and philosopher, for instance, has built a personal ecosophy which combines and extends social and deep ecology (Messersmith-Glavin 2012). The ecosophy has to be scientiﬁcally possible – for example an extreme version of sustainable development that promoted economic growth everywhere, even in the richest of countries, could be argued to be impossible given environmental limits. It has to be plausible, which the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is clearly not since it relies on everyone in the world agreeing not to have children. And it has to be aligned with the available evidence: Transition, for example, is dependent on evidence that oil production is due to peak and decline, that climate change is occurring, and that both will have a serious impact on human society. The ecosophy of this book This section brieﬂy summarises the ecosophy that this book is based on. Ecosophies are complex and sophisticated, changing and evolving as the analyst is exposed to 14 Ecolinguistics new ideas, discovers new evidence and has new experiences. The summary of an ecosophy is therefore necessarily partial and incomplete, but this section gives at least an indication of the framework used. The summary follows Naess (1995) in starting with one word that sums up the ecosophy and then adding explanatory detail as concisely as possible. Ecosophy in one word: Living! Explanation Valuing living: The exclamation mark in Living! is normative, indicating ‘to be valued/celebrated/respected/aﬃrmed’, and it applies to all species that are living. This is a value announcement but is based on the observation that beings value their lives and do whatever they can to continue living. The ‘valuing’ takes place in diﬀerent ways: consciously, instinctively and almost (but not quite) mechanically, from a pedestrian watching carefully for cars, to a sparrow taking ﬂight at the sound of a fox, or a snow buttercup following the arc of the sun to soak up life giving rays. Wellbeing: Living! is not the same as ‘being alive’ since there are conditions which reduce the ability to value living, such as extreme exploitation, enclosure in factory farms or illness due to chemical contamination. The goal is not just living in the sense of survival but living well, with high wellbeing. Although wellbeing applies to all species, high wellbeing for humans is a sine qua non, since no measure to address ecological issues that harms human interests is likely to be adopted. Now and the future: The temporal scope of Living! is not limited to the present, so includes the ability to live with high wellbeing in the present, in the future, and the ability of future generations to live and live well. Care: While respect for the lives of all species is central, continued ‘living’ inevitably involves an exchange of life. There will therefore be those who we stop from living, and those whose lives we damage in order to continue our own lives and wellbeing. The ethical aspect of the ecosophy deals with this through empathy, regret and gratitude (i.e. care), rather than an attempt to preserve moral consistency by considering those we harm as inferior, worthless or just resources. Empathy implies awareness of impacts on others, regret implies minimising harm, and gratitude implies a duty to ‘give back’ something to the systems that support us. Environmental limits: If human consumption exceeds the ability of natural resources to replenish themselves then this damages the ability of ecological systems to support life (and living) into the future. Equally, if consumption leads to more waste than can be absorbed by ecosystems, the excess waste will prevent beings from living or living with high wellbeing. To keep within environmental limits an immediate and large-scale reduction of total global consumption is necessary. Social justice: Currently, large numbers of people do not have the resources to live, or to live with high wellbeing. As global consumption levels drop Introduction 15 (either voluntarily or through resource exhaustion) resources will need to be redistributed from rich to poor if all are to live with high wellbeing. Resilience: Signiﬁcant ecological destruction is already occurring and more is inevitable given the trajectory of industrialised societies. It is therefore necessary to adapt to environmental change, increase resilience to further changes, and ﬁnd new forms of society as current forms unravel. This is necessary in order to allow the continuation of living with high wellbeing (as far as possible) even as the earth becomes less hospitable for life. The ecosophy draws (a) from deep ecology in being ecocentric (giving consideration to other species as well as humans), although there is a pragmatic emphasis on human wellbeing; (b) from social ecology in being orientated towards social justice; (c) from sustainable development in considering future generations; and (d) from Transition and the Dark Mountain Project in recognising and responding to inevitable environmental change. The ethic of care is derived from feminist ethics (Peterson 2001: 133), and ‘respectful use’ of animals, plants and nature draws on Plumwood’s (2012: 81) ‘eco- logical animalism’. Respectful use acknowledges that while other beings and natural systems are a means for continuing human survival, they are also ends in themselves. Although ecosophies are fundamentally a statement of values and assumptions, they also need to be based on evidence, and adapted as further evidence emerges. There is a signiﬁcant amount of scientiﬁc evidence of environmental limits, the ecological damage already done which needs adapting to, and the scale of reduction in con- sumption necessary to minimise further damage (e.g. Alcamo and Bennett 2003; UNEP 2012; Stocker 2014). There is also evidence about the kind of attitudes and values which encourage people to behave in particular ways. The ecosophy above, for example, is strongly based on intrinsic or ‘larger-than-self’ values, i.e. care for other people and other species. Crompton (2010: 84) reviews extensive evidence that intrinsic values are correlated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour, whereas extrinsic values (such as a focus on personal enrichment, proﬁt or status) are associated with envir- onmentally destructive behaviours. The ecosophy is also based on redistribution of resources as a path towards wellbeing for all, and this is backed up by evidence from Wilkinson and Pickett (2010: 29) in their book The spirit level. They found that whatever the total income of a country is: The evidence shows that reducing inequality is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment, and so the real quality of life, for all of us … this includes the better-oﬀ. Importantly, this is just one ecosophy, and each ecolinguist will have their own ecosophy that they use for analysing language. No claim is made that this particular ecosophy is the right, correct or most suitable one for ecolinguistics as a whole to be based on. Instead, this book shows how texts and stories can be analysed linguistically with an ecosophy. 16 Ecolinguistics After linguistic analysis reveals stories, they are judged according to the ecosophy. For this book, stories which value and celebrate the lives and wellbeing of all species, promote human wellbeing, call for reduction of consumption, and promote redis- tribution of resources are appraised positively. On the other hand, stories which treat people or the natural world as resources to be exploited, promote inequitable distribution of resources, or promote extrinsic values such as proﬁt-maximisation or status enhancement through accumulation of material possessions are challenged. The aim is to contribute to eﬀorts to raise awareness of – and resist – ecologically destructive stories, and promote uses of language which tell diﬀerent stories that encourage people to protect the systems that life depends on. Organisation of this book The organisation of this book may at ﬁrst bear a resemblance to the ‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’ (Borges 1999: 231). In Borges’s imagined tome, animals are divided up into various types including ‘those that belong to the emperor’, ‘embalmed ones’, ‘those that are trained’, ‘suckling pigs’, ‘mermaids’, ‘stray dogs’, and ‘those that tremble as if they were mad’. This is not a book about animals, but about stories. It divides these stories up into diﬀerent types: there are stories shared by members of a group, stories which use one area of life to describe another, stories about what it means to be a particular kind of person, and stories about whether something is good or bad, true or false, worthy or unworthy of consideration. There are eight types of story in total, which this book labels as ideologies, framings, metaphors, evaluations, identities, convictions, erasure and salience. These are summarised in Table 1.1. The reason for focusing on these particular kinds of story is a pragmatic one: because there are useful linguistic and cognitive theories available for analysing them. There is Critical Discourse Analysis for analysing ideologies, cognitive science for framings and metaphors, and theories of facticity, appraisal, identity and salience for the other kinds of story. All of these theories can be used to examine the language that surrounds us in everyday life, notice patterns in that language, and discover clues to underlying stories. The stories are important because they inﬂuence how individuals think, and if they are spread widely across a culture then they can become stories-we-live-by and inﬂuence prevailing modes of thought in the whole society. The division into types of story should not be thought of as deﬁnitive – there are other ways that cognitive structures could have been classiﬁed, and there are other types of story that could have been included (e.g. scripts, image schemas, conceptual blends or narratives). The division serves the purposes of this book, however, and is presented as a base to adapt and extend in the future. Each chapter takes one of these forms of story in turn and begins by describing the theory behind it and providing some practical deﬁnitions. It then draws from the ecolinguistics literature to discuss ways that previous studies have analysed this type of story in the past. A key part of each chapter consists of practical analyses of Introduction 17 TABLE 1.1 Eight forms that stories take, and their linguistic manifestations Chapter Form of story Manifestation (cognitive, i.e. in people’s minds) (in language) 2 ideology a story of how the world is discourses, i.e. clusters of and should be which is shared linguistic features characteristically by members of a group used by the group 3 framing a story that uses a frame trigger words which bring a frame (a packet of knowledge about to mind an area of life) to structure another area of life 4 metaphor a story that uses a frame to trigger words which bring a (a type of structure a distinct and clearly speciﬁc and distinct frame to framing) different area of life mind 5 evaluation a story about whether an appraisal patterns, i.e. patterns of area of life is good or bad language which represent an area of life positively or negatively 6 identity a story about what it means to forms of language which deﬁne be a particular kind of person the characteristics of certain kinds of people 7 conviction a story about whether a facticity patterns, i.e. patterns of particular description of the linguistic features which represent world is true, uncertain or false descriptions of the world as true, uncertain or false 8 erasure a story that an area of life is patterns of language which fail to unimportant or unworthy of represent a particular area of life consideration at all, or which background or distort it 9 salience a story that an area of life is patterns of language which give important and worthy of prominence to an area of life consideration a range of texts to illustrate the theory in action. The example texts are drawn from neoclassical economics textbooks, agribusiness manuals, ecology reports, news- papers, environmental campaigns, nature writing, Japanese poetry, documentary ﬁlms, political reports, advertisements and lifestyle magazines. The speciﬁc texts were chosen ﬁrst because they were considered representative of larger patterns of language in society, and second because they were considered important, either in forging and perpetuating the ecologically destructive stories-we-live-by, or in challenging those stories and providing new stories that we could live by. Although a wide variety of methods are used, the goals of analysis remain the same in each chapter: analysing language patterns in the texts to reveal the under- lying stories-we-live-by. Once revealed, these stories are judged according to the ecosophy of this book. If they are considered to be contributing to ecological destruction they are resisted, and if they are considered beneﬁcial in encouraging behaviour that protects the systems that life depends on then they are promoted. 18 Ecolinguistics There are a number of steps in the analysis – going from the raw data to revealing the patterns in it, identifying how the patterns correspond to underlying cognitive structures (the stories), and then judging these stories according to the ecosophy. Overall, the premise of this book is that ecolinguistic analysis can be useful in exposing the stories-we-live-by, questioning them from an ecological perspective, challenging them, and searching for the new stories that are necessary to thrive in the conditions of the world we face. The book itself aims to encourage linguists to consider ecological issues, and equally importantly to encourage a diverse range of people who are concerned with ecological issues to consider the role of language in both causing and responding to those issues. It aims to be a springboard towards future research by providing an ecological framework, a linguistic framework, a description of previous studies and practical examples of analysis, but without any claims that this is the deﬁnitive ecosophy or the only possible linguistic framework. Finally, it is important to repeat that the approach to ecolinguistics in this book is just one approach among many other valid and useful approaches to ecolinguistics that have a diversity of aims and goals. A note about references to data and glossary This book uses example data from a variety of sources, from economics textbooks to haiku poems. The data is catalogued using a tag consisting of two letters and two numbers, e.g. (ET5:7). The two letters refer to a type of data, e.g. ET = economics textbooks. The two numbers give further information such as a speciﬁc book or issue of a magazine, and the page number. The list below shows the labels and the kind of data they correspond to. The Appendix has full details about the sources of the data. AG: Agribusiness documents EA: Ecosystem assessment reports EC: Ethical consumer magazine EN: Environmental articles, reports, ﬁlms and websites ET: Economics textbooks HK: Haiku anthologies MH: Men’s Health magazine ML: Miscellaneous NE: New economics books and reports NP: News articles related to economic growth NW: New Nature Writing PD: Political documents Extracts from the data appear with bullet points to distinguish them from extracts from academic sources. There is a glossary at the end of the book which contains brief descriptions of most of the linguistic terms used. In general, linguistic terms which appear in italics on ﬁrst use can be found in the glossary. 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The spirit level: why greater equality makes societies stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press. 2 IDEOLOGIES AND DISCOURSE Discourses not only represent the world as it is (or rather is seen to be), they are also … imaginaries, representing possible worlds that are diﬀerent from the actual world, and tied in to projects to change the world in particular directions. (Norman Fairclough 2003: 124) There is one point which all discourse analysts are likely to agree with: that there are ‘diﬀerent – and sometimes radically diﬀerent – accounts of what discourse is’ (Richardson 2007: 21), leading to ‘a bewildering range of overlapping and con- trasting theorizations’ (Fairclough 2003: 124). Rather than using the term in multiple ways, this book uses the term with one clear meaning, even if this means a loss of ﬂexibility. Discourses, then, are deﬁned as follows: Discourses are standardised ways that particular groups in society use language, images and other forms of representation. Members of groups, whether economists, magazine journalists, agriculturalists, environmentalists or nature writers, have characteristic ways of speaking, writing or designing visual materials that are common to the group, in fact, which deﬁne the group. These include selections of vocabulary, grammatical choices, patterns of presupposition and other linguistic features, which, importantly, come together to tell a particular ‘story’ about the world. There are various ways that critical discourse analysts refer to these ‘stories’, including ‘perspectives on the world’ (Fairclough 2003: 124); ‘particular construc- tions or versions of reality’ (Locke 2004: 1); ‘a coherent way of making sense of the world’ (Locke 2004: 5); ‘a practice … of constituting and constructing the world’ (Fairclough 1992a: 64); ‘models of the world’ (Machin and Mayr 2012: 5); Ideologies and discourse 23 ‘meaning-resources … to make sense of the world’ (Kress 2010: 110) and ‘ideologies’ (Richardson 2007: 32). What is key is that the stories are not just transparent descriptions of reality, but instead shape how we perceive reality. Locke (2004: 11) puts this even more strongly, that discourse ‘actually shapes or constitutes the object denoted’, which echoes Foucault’s original formulation that discourses are ‘practices that system- atically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 2013: 54). The ‘economy’, for example, plays a huge role in political life but is a creation of discourse that is only loosely based on the actual physical reality of people exchanging goods. The stories that underlie discourses are, in this book, referred to using the term ‘ideology’, deﬁned as follows: Ideologies are belief systems about how the world was, is, will be or should be which are shared by members of particular groups in society. This does not imply that the ideologies are shared only by members of the groups – in many cases groups are keen for their stories to spread out into the larger culture and become the normal way that people think about an area of life. Ideologies are cognitive, in the sense that they exist in the minds of individual people, but are also shared among a group. As van Dijk (2011: 382) puts it, ideologies are ‘a form of social cognition, that is beliefs shared by and distributed over (the minds of) group members’. Fairclough (2003: 9) gives an example of a particular ideology – ‘the pervasive claim that in the new “global” economy, countries must be highly competitive to survive’. He goes on to say that the ideology is not necessarily untrue but ‘is not the inevitable law of nature it is often represented as being, but the product of a particular economic order which could be changed’. This captures the essence of a ‘story’ – a version, perspective or description of the world which is not necessarily false but is just one possibility among many others. The stories are conveyed through the choice of lexical items, grammatical constructs and other linguistic features that are standardly used by a particular group. To take one particular example, Beckett (2013) shows that the ideology of international competition was highly prevalent in the discourse of UK Con- servative Party politicians in 2012–13 and has been present in the political discourse of other parties, including Labour, during other periods. In the following examples from senior Conservative politicians, the ideology is conveyed through lexical choices that evoke competition including ‘race’, ‘win’, ‘defeat’, ‘keep up’ and ‘fall behind’: Britain is in a global race to succeed today. It is a race with countries like China, India and Indonesia; a race for the jobs and opportunities of the future. So when people say we can slow down on cutting our debts, we are saying no. We can’t win in this world with a great millstone of debt round our necks (David Cameron in PD8; see Appendix for reference). 24 Ecolinguistics And the truth is some western countries won’t keep up, they won’t make the changes needed to welfare and education and tax, they’ll fall further and further behind, they’ll become poorer and poorer (George Osborne in PD9). What is of interest in discourse analysis is not just speciﬁc texts like those of Cameron and Osborne above, which are transient, but the patterns of linguistic features that run across multiple texts and subtly convey the same ideology over and over again. In ecolinguistic analysis of an ideology, the question is not whether it is true but whether it encourages people to preserve or destroy the ecosystems that support life. There is, of course, no objective algorithm for determining whether ideologies are destructive or beneﬁcial, so what ecolinguists actually do is to assess whether the ideology is compatible with their ecosophy or works against it. For example, the ecosophy in this book calls for a global reduction in con- sumption and a redistribution from rich to poor, so a story which sets up rich countries as competing with poorer ones to have a bigger economy stands in opposition to this ecosophy. Since ideologies are presented as obvious truths about the world, it is possible not to notice that they are only stories. The aim of analysis is to investigate ‘how ideologies can become frozen in language and ﬁnd ways to break the ice’ (Bloor and Bloor 2007: 12), or ‘denaturalising the language’ (Machin and Mayr 2012: 5). Once it becomes clear that a particular story is not the only one possible, and that it is a story that is causing great harm, then it becomes possible to ‘engage in acts of dissent – to take issue with these constructions and to resist the storied meanings’ (Locke 2004: 6). For ecolinguistics, the most important discourses to resist are ones which convey ideologies that strongly oppose multiple aspects of the ecosophy, i.e. are considered to play a role in ecological destruction, and are highly widespread. In this book, such discourses are referred to as destructive discourses. Destructive discourses Of the many discourses which can be considered destructive, economics discourses are perhaps the most inﬂuential. Gare (2002: 132) goes as far as saying that ‘The dominant discourse in the medieval world was theology, in the modern world, science, and now the discourse that deﬁnes reality for most people is economics’. Economics has become ‘the prime interpreter of society to its members, providing them with the concepts in terms of which they were able to deﬁne and legitimate their relationships to each other, to society and to nature’ (Gare 1996: 144). Although dominant economics discourses may not refer to nature in any way, they still set up relationships between people and nature, even if these are alienated and destructive ones. Economics discourses have been an issue in ecolinguistics from early in the development of the discipline. Halliday (2001) discusses the way that language is frequently used to represent economic growth as a fundamental goal of society. Ideologies and discourse 25 He criticises these representations because unlimited growth on a ﬁnite planet can only lead to the exhaustion of resources and destruction of the ecosystems that support life. Goatly (2000: 278) similarly criticises language which promotes growth, and recommends that: In cases of mature economies such as Japan, Switzerland or Singapore, the metaphor of ‘cancer’ can be justiﬁably substituted for ‘growth’. It draws attention to the fact that growth in an already mature economy threatens the life-support systems of the planet. Chawla (2001: 119) describes the importance of economics discourses, stating that: The predominance of economic aﬀairs in everyday life, the preoccupation with productive eﬃciency, and the maximisation of the satisfaction of a person’s needs through the purchase of commodities is closely related with the fasci- nation with counting and measuring … The wellbeing of society is measured in terms of an uninterrupted growth of consumer goods and permanently rising levels of production and consumption. Because of the focus on quantiﬁcation within economics discourse, and the ease by which spending can be quantiﬁed, economics discourses orient ‘all aspects of a person’s endeavours for the achievement of personal satisfaction towards the con- sumption of commodities’ (Chawla 2001: 120). This runs counter to the ecosophy of this book not only because it encourages excess and unnecessary consumption, with all the environmental damage which ensues, but because it obscures all those paths to wellbeing that do not involve consumption. Chawla also describes how the advertising industry ‘promotes dissatisfaction with each level of consumption attained’. Clearly, the discourse of advertising, with its main role of persuading the con- sumer to buy something that they had not previously considered necessary, is one of the most ecologically destructive of discourses. However, there is the question of whether, given the great variety of advertisements, there is a distinct ‘discourse of advertising’ to analyse. Cook (2001: 5) points out that ‘Attempts to deﬁne ads as a discourse type run into severe trouble when they look for textual or contextual features, or combinations of features, which all ads have in common’. What we can ﬁnd, however, are particular groups of advertisements which share common fea- tures that tell the same story. It therefore makes sense to talk about ‘discourses of advertising’ in the plural, and investigate the underlying stories that particular types of advertisement tell about the world. One key story that advertisements tell is that PURCHASE OF A PRODUCT IS A SHORTCUT TO WELLBEING. An example is a vitamin advertisement which shows a woman deeply peaceful in a yoga posture, but suggests ‘For the inner journey, take an alternative route’ (ML2:1). The question is: why buy a product which is unli- kely to lead to a deep state of peace, with money that needs to be earned in a 26 Ecolinguistics stressful job, when all that is necessary is a few stretches to actually feel more peaceful? Another advertisement, for bathroom cleaner, shows a glorious picture of nature but has labels like ‘grumpy bull’ and ‘barbed wire’, with a caption at the bottom that reads ‘Enjoy the freshness of the outdoors in the safety of your own home’ (ML2:2). This suggests that the synthetic aromas of bathroom cleaners are a convenient substitute for the freshness of nature. Similarly, a mobile phone advertise- ment on video shows hundreds of people enjoying a moment of real connection and joy as they dance together at a train station in London, followed by the message ‘Life’s for sharing’ (ML2:3). This makes it seem as if talking on a mobile phone is a substitute for genuine face-to-face and body-to-body communication. As Eisenstein (2013: 20) comments: [Advertisers are] selling sports cars as a substitute for freedom, junk food and soda as a substitute for excitement, ‘brands’ as a substitute for social identity, and pretty much everything as a substitute for sex, itself a proxy for the intimacy that is so lacking in modern life. In general, these advertisements show something that would give people genuine satisfaction without costing anything, like yoga exercises, walks in the countryside or dancing, but then imply that the purchase of a product is a convenient substitute for those things. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 186) describe the visual techniques that advertisements use to link products with desirable activities: In such texts the upper section visualises the ‘promise of the product’, the status of glamour it can bestow on its users, or the sensory fulﬁlment it can bring. The lower section visualises the product itself, providing more or less factual information about it … with products placed ﬁrmly in the realm of the real … and with the top section as the realm of the consumer’s supposed aspirations and desires. Sometimes the relationship between the product and the desirable activity is more complex, as the following example from a vacuum cleaner advertisement demonstrates: Life isn’t always neat and tidy. It’s about laughing, crying, loving, dancing, maybe even shouting. So we’ve developed the new QuickClick tool change system and the ComfoGlide ﬂoor tool, to save you energy and time to enjoy what we’ve all been put into the world to actually do. Live (ML2:4). In this case, the purchase of the product is seen as a path towards desirable activities (through saving time) rather than a substitute for them – a story of PURCHASE OF PRODUCTS LEADS TO WELLBEING. Perfume advertisements frequently tell this story, by representing the product as a path towards gaining a loving relationship. Gargan (2007) found that a lexical set related to love commonly appears in the discourse of Ideologies and discourse 27 perfume advertisements, e.g. ‘fragrance of love’, ‘journey of love’, ‘magic romance’, ‘cherish’, ‘darling’ and ‘love’. She points out that the advertisements do not make explicit truth claims such as ‘if you purchase this perfume you will ﬁnd the perfect partner’, which could be dismissed as untruthful, but instead picture the perfume with a single word like ‘love’ or ‘romance’ or a picture of a loving couple in order to more subtly imply it. Gargan also refers to studies which show that many perfumes are toxic and have a negative impact on the environment. Certain advertisements, then, seem designed to distract us away from things that are both free and contribute to wellbeing, and direct us instead towards the purchase of unnecessary and environmentally damaging products. Advertisements do not just work in isolation, however. Lifestyle magazines and aspirational television programmes are designed to encourage a ‘buying mood’, often by manufacturing dissatisfaction which can be addressed by the products in the advertisements. This is doubly important for the ecosophy of this book, since the manufacturing of dissatisfaction both works against wellbeing and encourages excess consumption. Slater (2007) examines the discourse of the consumer magazine, Stuﬀ, showing how the magazine sets up the masculine identity of the ‘gadgeteer’. It encourages male readers to deﬁne their identity and their masculinity by the gadgets that they own. He describes how the magazine reviews products with hyperbolic descriptions such as ‘loaded with features to make a masculine gadgeteer sweat with excitement’ which link owning electronic devices with being masculine. A very diﬀerent discourse which can be classiﬁed as destructive according to the ecosophy of this book, is that of industrial agriculture, particularly the animal pro- duct industry. While Fairlie (2010) describes how some small-scale farming systems can produce meat in ways that are relatively benign from an ecological perspective, there is extensive evidence that factory farming consumes large amounts of resources, produces signiﬁcant pollution and causes harm to the wellbeing of animals (Baroni et al. 2006; Marlow et al. 2009; Henning 2011). Glenn (2004: 65) oﬀers a critical analysis of how ‘particular overlapping discursive strategies constructed by the factory farming industry help create, sustain and per- petuate a practice that is cruel and environmentally dangerous’. Her analysis shows how a range of linguistic devices construct animals as commodities, including the expression ‘grain- and roughage-consuming animal units’ and the term ‘beef cows’, which prematurely represents animals who are still alive as food. She investigates ‘double speak’, where cramped cages are called ‘individual accommodation’; where partitions that stop animals moving their bodies are for ‘privacy’; where the killing of smaller, less proﬁtable, animals is ‘euthanasia’; where an iron-deﬁcient formula fed to veal calves to keep their liver white is referred to as ‘milk-fed’, ‘special fed’ or ‘fancy fed’, and where singing farm animals appear happily in advertisements. In general, the industry discourses Glenn describes help to perpetuate an envir- onmentally damaging farming method through the ideologies FACTORY FARMING IS BENEFICIAL TO ANIMALS and ANIMALS ARE OBJECTS. There have been other studies of animal industry discourse which have reached similar conclusions. Trampe (2001: 238–9), for instance, ﬁnds that in the discourse 28 Ecolinguistics of industrial agriculture, ‘Living beings are treated in accordance with the economic- technological ideology like objects that are produced, managed, optimised and utilised’, euphemisms disguise damaging practice, and more environmentally friendly traditional farming techniques are represented negatively as being old-fashioned. He concludes that ‘the language-world-system of industrialised agriculture demonstrates that humans are about to lose contact with their natural environment thus endangering their very survival’. Particular discourses of economics, consumerism, advertising and intensive agri- culture can therefore be labelled destructive discourses, since the ideologies they convey oppose the principles of the ecosophy. The way of dealing with destructive discourses is through resistance. Resistance consists of raising awareness that the ideology conveyed by the discourse is just a story, and that the story has harmful eﬀects – what Fairclough (1992b) calls Critical Language Awareness. It is most eﬀective when those most respon- sible for using destructive discourses become aware of the damaging eﬀects of the ideology they are unwittingly promoting. For example, resistance could focus on encouraging politicians to become aware that the ideology of economic growth as the key goal for society is just one possible story, and that there are other possible stories which may have a less destructive impact on the systems that support life. An optimistic perspective is that, in general, people do not want to contribute to social injustice and ecological destruction – these are side eﬀects of ideologies which have a narrow focus on other goals. If aware of the potentially destructive eﬀects of a story, some people within the area responsible for the story may call for change. An example of this is the poultry industry publication Poultry Science which published an article that extensively referred to ecolinguistic research and came to the following conclusion: Scholars (Stibbe 2003; Linzey 2006) have suggested that industry discourse characterises animals in ways that objectify them and obscure morally relevant characteristics such as animal sentience … Although an analysis of discourse may seem odd and irrelevant … this type of examination is illuminating in some potentially beneﬁcial ways … It may be necessary to reconsider several aspects of animal production relative to ideology, discourse, and practice. Transparency of contemporary animal production practices and a real ethic of care and respect for animals must be embodied not just in our practices but also in the internal and external discourse of animal agriculture. (Croney and Reynnells 2008: 387, 390) The importance of this extract is that it is from within the industry itself, and calls for a change not just at the level of language but also in ‘our practices’, i.e. the practices of the industry. In a later work, Croney (2010: 105) extends these considerations to the veterinary profession: veterinarians, especially those working with farm animals … are likely to be viewed as members or extensions of animal agriculture and have their dis- course scrutinised and criticised accordingly. Thus, the veterinary community, Ideologies and discourse 29 like the animal agricultural community, should critically examine its own discourse practices along with its implications for perceived and actual impacts on animal welfare. If those responsible for using destructive discourses are unwilling to change, then Critical Language Awareness can be directed at putting pressure on them through raising the awareness of key stakeholders such as customers or voters. Ecolinguistics, then, can scrutinise the discourse of groups such as veterinarians, agribusiness executives, economists, lifestyle magazine journalists, politicians and advertisers to raise awareness of potentially harmful ecological impacts of the ideologies conveyed. Resisting a dominant destructive discourse is calling for a decrease in the use of the discourse based on a convincing account of the harm it causes, opening up space for other, potentially more beneﬁcial, alternatives. Ambivalent discourses The majority of discourse analysis in ecolinguistics has focused on the more positive, though still problematic, discourses of environmentalism, ecology, conservation, sustainability and green advertising. While these discourses have a positive aim of dealing with some of the ecological problems caused by destructive discourses, they arise from the same society as the destructive discourses and may be inﬂuenced by political or commercial interests. A discourse which genuinely and persuasively calls for a reduction in consumption, for example, is unlikely to be funded by a gov- ernment obsessed with economic growth or to appear in a newspaper or magazine dependent for its proﬁt on creating a ‘buying mood’ for advertisers. Discourses which are genuinely ecocentric in encouraging care for other species may be avoided by governments which focus on the short-term interests of those beings who vote, i.e. humans. Mainstream ‘green’ discourses are often, therefore, ambivalent discourses, in that they contain some aspects which align with the analyst’s ecosophy and some which oppose it. Ecolinguists have analysed a range of ambivalent discourses, including the discourse of environmentalism (Benton-Short 1999; Harré et al. 1999); corporate greenwash (Alexander 2009; Ihlen 2009); natural resources (Meisner 1995; Kurz et al. 2005); zoos (Milstein 2009); and sustainability (Kowalski 2013). Harré et al. (1999) give the collective name of ‘Greenspeak’ to such discourses, which echoes George Orwell’s sinister concept of ‘Newspeak’. The discourses are criticised for aspects such as (a) representing plants, animals, rivers and forests as resources in the same way as the destructive discourses of agribusiness, i.e. as objects to be exploited; (b) representing solutions to environmental problems in small activities such as recycling, which individuals can accomplish without reducing the overall consumption of society; and (c) hiding agency to disguise blame for ecological destruction. Mühlhäusler (2003: 134), for example, writes that ‘Once metaphorised into an object, a concept such as pollution can … be studied in isolation from its makers or its eﬀects and, as already has happened, it can become a commercial commodity’. 30 Ecolinguistics The discourse of zoos can be considered ambivalent because on the one hand it emphasises connection with nature and conservation, but on the other it tears animals away from their original ecosystems and oﬀers them up in caged isolation as ‘others’ to be gazed at. Milstein (2009: 164) describes three main tensions: I argue that the three tensions within zoo institutional discourse, the dialectics of mastery-harmony, othering-connection and exploitation-idealism, may be found at the interpersonal and intrapersonal scale. In her analysis, Milstein considers not just the linguistic messages given by zoos, but also the messages conveyed by the physical layout of the cages, ﬁnding that ‘conservation messages also in many ways conﬂict with overall approaches to visual,

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