Abstract
This article is based on two assumptions which have already been evidenced in the literature of environmental discourse analysis. The first is that the normal congruent active material process clause (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), if the empathy hierarchy (Langacker 1991) is imposed upon it, tends to represent humans as acting in a unidirectional way upon a passive environment (Goatly 2002, 2007). The second is that much pro-environmental discourse, such as the Worldwatch Institute’s reports, for the most part adopts this grammar and thereby undervalues the power of nature as a force independent of humans but with power over them (Goatly and Hiradhar 2016). This article builds on work already done in Goatly (2000, 2007) and Goatly and Hiradhar (2016) on non-congruent grammar, co-ordination, along with personification and other forms of metaphor, to represent the human-nature relationship in ways which are more in keeping with modern science, and more helpful from an ecological viewpoint. The poetic texts discussed are taken from Wordsworth’s The Prelude , Edward Thomas’ Collected Poems and Alice Oswald’s Woods etc. Besides the use of grammatical co-ordination and metaphor/literalisation to blur the human nature boundary, they illustrate the use of nominalisations, ergative verbs, the activation of tokens and existents, the emphasis on nature as sayer and experiencer, rather than goal, which is a grammar (and use of metaphor) quite different from the patterns in so-called environmental and news discourse.
Highlights
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently warned us: Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history
This section summarises work on the mismatch between standard lexico-grammatical representations and modern scientific theory, and possibilities of using metaphor and grammatical modifications to improve this representation (Goatly 2007)
The importance and problem of metaphor for ecological Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is evident in the word environment itself
Summary
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently warned us: Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. Melting permafrost would release methane (a far more dangerous greenhouse gas than CO2), multiplying these threats. In these circumstances pro-ecological Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) should be prioritised over anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist CDA. As a contribution to ecological CDA this paper asks how vocabulary and grammar represent ecology/the environment and the ways humans relate to it. It demonstrates that so-called environmental texts reinforce an unhelpful representation, emphasising human power over nature, and treating nature as natural capital. Its main purpose is to demonstrate that poems by Wordsworth, Edward Thomas and Alice Oswald represent nature in alternative ways, more conducive to ecological and human survival
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