#ecolinguistics

« [There are] four stories at the heart of western imperial civilisation [that] 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. [...T]he 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’. 

Our ecolinguistics can reveal our beliefs. Linguist Michael Halliday argues that inherent in the very anthropocentric grammar of our languages is the ideology that humans are special beings quite apart from the rest of the natural world, and that unlimited growth and human exploitation of natural resources are normal and unremarkable. Halliday points out, for example, that in English we use special pronouns for people, but a dehumanizing “it” for everything else. We not only refer to oil, energy, water, air, trees, and suchlike as resources, but we also tend to use mass and uncountable nouns for them, suggesting they’re inexhaustible. In pairs of contrasting words, the “growth” word is always regarded as neutral: “It is always: how fast is the car (not how slow), how high is the building (not how low), how big is her income (not how small).” It would be marked to say it the other way around. We don’t generally notice these ideological assumptions we make, but our language reveals how we see the world as a culture.

« When profits at three large retailers (Tesco, Morrisons and Marks & Spencer) were lower than expected at Christmas 2013, the newspapers reported this in January 2014 with negative appraising items such as ‘appalling’, ‘slump’, ‘horror show’, ‘decline’, ‘poorer’, ‘sober- ing’, ‘plagued’ (Daily Mail); ‘plunged’, ‘suffered’, ‘difficult’ (The Independent); ‘fears’, ‘disastrous’, ‘turmoil’ (Daily Telegraph); ‘dire’, ‘headache’ (The Guardian); ‘hurt’, ‘deteriorating’, ‘disappointed’ (Financial Times); ‘gloomy’, ‘worries’ (Reuters); ‘worst’, ‘dismal’, ‘decline’ (Evening Standard).