Nature Talk in an Appalachian Newspaper: What Environmental Discourse Analysis Reveals about Efforts to Address Exurbanization and Climate Change

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian J. Burke ◽  
Meredith Welch-Devine ◽  
Seth Gustafson
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek

This chapter focuses on the environmental discourse of limits and survival and how it set the apocalyptic horizon of environmentalism. Population biologists and ecologists use the concept of ‘carrying capacity’ — the maximum population of a species that an ecosystem can support in perpetuity. When the population of a species grows to the point where carrying capacity is exceeded, the ecosystem is degraded and the population crashes, recovering only if and when natural processes restore the ecosystem to its previous capacity. One complicating factor when it comes to applying population biology to human societies is the possibility of economic growth. The chapter first considers the origins of survivalism before discussing the political philosophy of survival, discourse analysis of limits and survival, and limits and survival in practice. It also examines the challenges confronting the limits discourse, including the lack of international action on climate change.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
U. T. Okpara ◽  
L. C. Stringer ◽  
A. J. Dougill

Abstract. The science of climate security and conflict is replete with controversies. Yet the increasing vulnerability of politically fragile countries to the security consequences of climate change is widely acknowledged. Although climate conflict reflects a continuum of conditional forces that coalesce around the notion of vulnerability, how different portrayals of vulnerability influence the discursive formation of climate conflict relations remains an exceptional but under-researched issue. This paper combines a systematic discourse analysis with a vulnerability interpretation diagnostic tool to explore (i) how discourses of climate conflict are constructed and represented, (ii) how vulnerability is communicated across discourse lines, and (iii) the strength of contextual vulnerability against a deterministic narrative of scarcity-induced conflict, such as that pertaining to land. Systematically characterising climate conflict discourses based on the central issues constructed, assumptions about mechanistic relationships, implicit normative judgements and vulnerability portrayals, provides a useful way of understanding where discourses differ. While discourses show a wide range of opinions "for" and "against" climate conflict relations, engagement with vulnerability has been less pronounced – except for the dominant context centrism discourse concerned about human security (particularly in Africa). In exploring this discourse, we observe an increasing sense of contextual vulnerability that is oriented towards a concern for complexity rather than predictability. The article concludes by illustrating that a turn towards contextual vulnerability thinking will help advance a constructivist theory-informed climate conflict scholarship that recognises historicity, specificity, and variability as crucial elements of contextual totalities of any area affected by climate conflict.


2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (04) ◽  
pp. A01 ◽  
Author(s):  
Therese Asplund

This article examines communicative aspects of climate change, identifying and analysing metaphors used in specialized media reports on climate change, and discussing the aspects of climate change these metaphors emphasize and neglect. Through a critical discourse analysis of the two largest Swedish farm magazines over the 2000–2009 period, this study finds that greenhouse, war, and game metaphors were the most frequently used metaphors in the material. The analysis indicates that greenhouse metaphors are used to ascribe certain natural science characteristics to climate change, game metaphors to address positive impacts of climate change, and war metaphors to highlight negative impacts of climate change. The paper concludes by discussing the contrasting and complementary metaphorical representations farm magazines use to conventionalize climate change.


2021 ◽  
pp. 3-24
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek

This chapter introduces the politics of the Earth, which has featured a large and ever-growing range of concerns, such as pollution, wilderness preservation, population growth, depletion of natural resources, climate change, biodiversity loss, and destabilization of the Earth system. It explains how the issues of Earth’s politics are interlaced with a range of questions about human livelihood, social justice, public attitudes, and proper relation to one other and other entities on the planet. It also discusses the consequences of discourses for politics and policies. The chapter clarifies how environmental issues like ecological limits, nature preservation, climate change, biodiversity, rainforest protection, environmental justice, and pollution are interconnected in all kinds of ways. It develops an environmental discourse analysis approach and shows how this approach will be applied in subsequent chapters, beginning with the positioning of environmental discourses in relation to the long dominant of discourse of industrialism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mirzoeff

This article explores what Grace Lee Boggs called {r}evolution—the horizontal construction of autonomous power from below by multiple subjects—in the context of anthropogenic climate change. This is a decolonial uprising from Haiti to Detroit against petrocracy, or the mutually reinforcing rule of fossil fuels and monotheism. I pursue a decolonial reading of the Holocene/Anthropocene geological epochs through an anarchaeological, visual, and discourse analysis of the excavations at Tell-es-Sultan, asserted to be the site of the biblical Jericho, to reconsider the “human.” The article interacts present-day, on-site conditions at the Palestinian refugee camp ‘Ein-as-Sultan with Kathleen Kenyon’s famous excavations (1952–1958), her discoveries and the museology associated with them, and the geopolitical and religious claims made for the site. I conclude by analyzing how “Detroit” is becoming the floating name for the non-continuous spaces of the displaced world, where displacement, drought, and counterinsurgency intermingle to deadly effect.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 851
Author(s):  
Hecong Wang ◽  
Rui Zhai ◽  
Xinyu Zhao

Ecological discourse analysis could reflect the relationship between language and environmental issues and awake people’s consciousness to protect our earth. According to Systemic-Functional linguistics, language is not only a means of action but also a means of reflection. This study aims to use Systemic-Functional linguistics to analyze the United Nation’s general-secretary’s remarks on climate change and reveal the ecological ideologies from the perspective of Ecolinguistics, appealing for people’s ecological values, and lead them to act ecologically and think ecologically (Huang Guowen, 2016) in their daily life.


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