Ecolinguistics

Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By

Arran Stibbe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000293654
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Sociolingüística

Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By is a ground-breaking book which reveals the stories that underpin unequal and unsustainable societies and searches for inspirational forms of language that can help rebuild a kinder, more ecological world. This new edition has been updated and expanded to bring together the latest ecolinguistic studies with new theoretical insights and practical analyses.

The book presents a theoretical framework and practical tools for analysing the key texts which shape the society we live in. The theory is illustrated through examples, including the representation of environmental refugees in the media; the construction of the selfish consumer in economics textbooks; the parallels between climate change denial and coronavirus denial; the erasure of nature in the Sustainable Development Goals; creation myths and how they orient people towards the natural world; and inspirational forms of language in nature writing, Japanese haiku and Native American writing. This edition provides an updated theoretical framework, new example analyses, and an additional chapter on narratives.

Accompanied by a free online course with videos, PowerPoints, notes and exercises (www.storiesweliveby.org.uk), as well as a comprehensive glossary, this is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working in the areas of Discourse Analysis, Environmental Studies and Communication Studies.

1
Introduction

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, p. 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 ecological 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 more than this, though. The analysis goes 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 which influence behaviour and lie at the heart of the ecological challenges we are facing. There are certain key stories about economic 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, p. 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 are now in a position where the old stories are crumbling due to coronavirus and the increasingly harmful impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss. There has never been a more urgent time or greater opportunity to find new stories.

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 exploited, 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, p. 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 revealing the hidden stories that exist between the lines. 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 they are beneficial then they need to be promoted. This book aims to bring together theories from linguistics and cognitive science into a framework which can be used for revealing the stories we live by, judging them from an ecological perspective, and contributing to the search for new stories to live by.

The stories we live by

As evidence of the scale of the ecological issues we are facing 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, the pandemic, alienation from nature and loss of community are bringing into question the fundamental stories that industrial societies are based on. As Ben Okri (1996, p. 21) points out: ‘Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories that individuals or nations live by and you change the individuals and nations themselves’.

David Korten (2006, p. 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. For Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine (2009), the most dangerous story of all 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’. Martin Lee Mueller (2017, p. xiii), in his thought-provoking book Being Salmon, Being Human, expresses the damaging consequences of current stories:

We inhabitants of industrial civilisation still live inside a human-centred story … it shapes our encounters with other-than-human living creatures, as well as with the larger planetary presence. This is the story of the human as a separate self. The human-centred story is causing the ecological web to come undone … We are in the midst of a systemic ecocide … This is the time to abandon humanity-as-separation, and to aid forth the emergence of entirely different stories to live by.

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 of unlimited economic growth as the main 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.

To give an example of how a story can be told ‘between the lines,’ consider the BBC Horizon 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. (ML12 – 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 to link 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, p. 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.

The idea that our humanity lies in our uniqueness from other animals is just ...