Environmental Discourses

Abstract

Discourses concerned with the perceived global environmental crisis have increased dramatically over the past couple of decades. This review consists of an ethnographic analysis of the principal components of environmental discourses as well as a discussion of the approaches employed to analyze them. These include linguistic discourses (ecolinguistics, ecocritical linguistics, discourse analysis) as well as approaches developed within other disciplines (anthropology, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology). Over the years, the structural properties of environmental discourses have developed into a distinct discourse category. It remains unclear to what extent the numerous environmental discourses and metadiscourses significantly contribute to improving the health of the natural environment.

Breaking the connections: reducing and removing environmental health risk in the Canadian nuclear power industry

“…As others have observed, public discourses are now best observed in technological media with annual reports and incident data seldom being widely circulated in print (Muhlhausler and Peace [8]). …”

Images of Environmental Management: Competing Metaphors in Focus Group Discussions of Swedish Environmental Quality Objectives

“…Earlier studies have demonstrated that metaphorical language is a salient feature of environmental discourse (e.g., Bell 2005;Harré et al 1999;Mühlhäusler and Peace 2006;Philippon 2004). The use of metaphors is often regarded as necessary to explain complex environmental phenomena otherwise very difficult for non-experts to understand.…”

The contested concept of sustainable aviation

“…Mühlhäusler and Peace (2006) argue that 'one important discourse goal is to locate the speaker on the high moral ground' and the expectation was that speakers would contest morality within their speeches. This certainly turned out to be the case in the analysis of the discursive event.…”