Greenspeak: a study of environmental discourse

Language is ou r only key to the correct and comple t e u nderstanding of the l i fe and thought of a people. - W.

Pitt Rivers, BAAS 1912, p.

186

GREENSPEAI< _

A Stud__,_y of Environmental Discourse __

---

l Rom Harre jens Brockmeier Peter Mi.ihlhausler

SAGE Publications

lntcrna/tona! Educat;onal and Profcsstonal Puohsller Thousand Oaks London New Delhi

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Harr�. Rom Greenspeak: A study of environmental discourse I by Rom Harr�. Jens Brockmeier, and Peter Miihlhausler. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-76 1 9- 1 704-7 (cloth: acid-free paper) ISBN 0-76 1 9- 1 705-5 (pbk.: acid-free paper) I. Environmentalism. 2. Environmental sciences-Philosophy. I. Harre , Rom. I I . Miihlhausler, Peter. Ill. Title. GE I 95.B76 1 998 1 79'. 1 -ddc2 1 98- 1 9703

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Contents

vii

Preface I.

Env ironmental Discourses

2.

Linguistic Foundations

21

3.

Rhetorical Uses of Science

51

4.

Environmental Narratives

69

5.

Th e Power o f Metaphor

91

6.

Temporal Dimensions

1 19

7.

Ethno-Ecology

137

8.

Linguistics

Environmentalism

161

9.

The Moral and Aesthetic Domain

1 73

B i bliography

1 89

Index

1 99

About the Authors

203

as

Preface

T

he topic of this book is the discourse of environmental ism. We have coi ned the term 'Greens peak' as a catch-all term for all the ways in which issues of the environment arc presented, be it in written , spoken or pictorial form . We addressed this topic in a number of lectures held at Linacre College (Oxford ) between 1 992 and 1 994. These classes ran parallel to the annual Linacre Lectures series (Cartledge, 1 992), which have been directed to a variety of environmental issues. Our series, like the Linacre Lectures, reflects the strong commitment of the col lege to the deve lopment of environmental awareness. It is not accidental that the dialects of Greenspcak found in the Linacre Lectures series form an important part of our data. In our perception, the papers in the Cartledge collection offer us a credible way out of the predica­ ment of having to choose from an ever-growing body of Grcenspeaki ng and Greenwriting. The flood of Greenspeak documents is so great as to be unmanageable as a corpus of material for analysis. We have had to be very selective i n picking what we take to be typical examples of the many genres used in environmental discussions. Discourse directed to the environment, it is well to bear in mind, may comprise the speaking and writing of those in favor of preserving the status quo, as well as the works of critics and reformers . We count oursel ves among the more radical opponents of that conservatism, but our undertaking in these studies is not directed to advocacy. Our project is directed to understanding the means of persuasion and some of the tech­ niques of advocacy used by both conservatives and conservationists . vii

viii

GREEN SPEAK

In addition to the Linacre Lectures referred to above, we have worked with examples drawn from the fol lowing material: •

• • •

•

•

A wide range of items drawn from reports of and contributions to the Rio Summit of l 992

Manifesto of the B ritish Green Party

Statement on the use of nuclear energy by B ritish Nuclear Fuels, pic.

Collection of essays edited by C. C. W. Tay lor ( 1 992) covering a wide range of environmental topics, predominantly from a philosophical point of view Collection of examples of Greenspeak from a variety of sources, begun by Mtihlhliusler in 1 976, including material published in the early part of 1 996 A number of scientific papers from journals such as Scientific American.

S uch pri mary data were supplemented with a growing body of secondary sources, including the important work on green discourse by Carbaugh ( 1 992), a special issue of The Trumpeter (Vol . 9, No. 4, 1 992) titled "Ecologi­ cal Revisionings Through the Medium of Language," and the semi nal work on the greening of systemic l inguistics by Hal l iday ( 1 992) and the lexical studies by Hass ( 1 989). That the study of Greenspeak has come a long way can be seen from the publication in German of a first i ntroductory textbook on ecological l i nguis­ tics (Trampe, 1 990) followed by Fi ll ( 1 993), the Conference on the Discourse of Environmental Advocacy held in Salt Lake City in 1 992, the setting up of the Language and Ecology group at Lancaster University in 1 993, and the I nternational Sy mposium on Language and Ecology held at Klangenfurt University in 1 995. This reflects a growing real ization by students of environ­ mental studies that a many-faceted investigation of language is an essential step i n coming to understand the many ways that our relations with the environment can be expressed . If the study of language is an essential component in the project of understanding the environment, the reverse is no less true . To study languages without paying attention to their embeddedness in natural and cul tural envi­ ronments, as suggested by the seductive but dubious nature-nurture dichot­ omy, is a dangerous limitation on the scope of linguistics. This theme, c al led the "ecology of language," was introduced by Haugen ( 1 972) and has since become an important issue i n linguistics, as can be seen from the debate i n a spec i al issue of Lang uage (no. 2, 1 992), the UNESCO project of a redbook of endangered languages and many similar projects. The diversity of languages and cultural forms i s threatened, just as is the diversity of organic species, with large-scale extinction. B oth types of d iver­ sity can be portrayed as the outcome of adaptive diversification that occ urred

Preface

ix

over very long periods of time. In a sense, the history of diversification is preserved i n the surviving species. The loss of such diversity can be thought of as a kind of loss of memory. We are not so much concerned with the facts of language extinction as with the discursive styles in which these facts are presented , in particular the development of a dialect of Greenspeak as a technical language of li nguistics. Our book focuses on l inguistic and philo­ sophical, on psychological and cultural-historical aspects of environmental discourse, the dialects of Greenspeak . It docs not pretend to be an analysis of environmental phenomena themselves. We would wish to argue, however, that an understanding of environmental phenomena can be greatly enhanced by investigating the nature and uses of one of the main tools employed in exploring environmental matters . Language not only reflects and records but also shapes, distorts and even creates real ities, as we shall show in subseq uent chapters. The loss of languages is also a loss of conceptual resources, some of which, at least, would have had a role to play in refining our linguistic powers to be deployed in dealing with env ironmental issues. We feel that our studies fill a major gap in both environmental ism and environmental discourse. Many writers on environmental matters have ex­ pressed, from time to time, uneasiness with the l i nguistic resources at their disposal. Any inquiry begins with the recognition of a problem . A major task that we have set oursel ves has been to make expl icit the problem of the interconnectivity between environmental discourse and the environment. This entails a principled examination of how languages interact with cultural and natural realities. In undertaking this task we have aimed at gaining an under­ standing of how Greenspeak works , and perhaps with some tentative prescrip­ tions of norms for a persuasive di scourse to which we ourse lves, as a matter of fact, are committed . Our linguistic-philosophical analyses should not be taken as an alternative conception of environmental d i scourse but, rather, as a critical metadi scourse. Revealing how the multiple dialects of Greenspeak ' work' is not a criticism of the h ard and valuable work of environmental discussion and debate, the very project of Greens peaking ! In view of the prevailing changes in envi ron­ mental discourse in Western soc ieties, such an analysis would seem timely indeed. We perceive, in the increasing greening of English and other Western languages, a kind of linguistic Ersatzhandlung, with the very real danger of talk replacing or postponing action. The slide from i nnovative way s of speaking that make visible matters, h itherto passing unnoticed , into cultural commonplaces is usual ly pretty rapid. Not all 'green ' discourse has the same stat us. There are green growth i ndustries, such as green advertising, the status of w hich, v is-a-vis the l i fe sciences and the ethics of env ironmental pol lution , is probl emat ic.

X

GREEN SPEA K

For example, we remain unconvinced by arguments to the effect that the consumption of more and more green products in itself can resolve some of the more fundamental problems of consumer societies. One reason for our skepticism is that what is green or environmentally friend ly here and now may cause damage elsewhere (e.g., clean fuel in British ci ties contri buting to pollution i n the remote countryside) or at future points in time (clean nuclear fuel causing undesirable effects in a 1,000 years' time). Understand ing the complex variables of time and space and their l i nguistic manifestations is a problem for anyone wishing to get a grasp of the conceptual structure of many environmentalist d iscourses. We shall be much concerned with devices of temporal cal i bration of environmentally relevant processes as they are pre­ sented i n both lay and scientific writings. The presentation of environmental matters in a rhetoric of urgency and crisis i nvokes complex temporal structures to the analysis of which we shall devote considerable effort. Spatial concepts too are invoked in spec i al ways in the course of the discursive globalization of environmental ism . Under­ standing the way concepts of time and space are used, and analyzi ng their l i nguistic manifestations, is a recurring theme of this book. Final ly, we suggest that an adequate grasp of environmental matters pre­ supposes an understand ing of interdependencies and connections. As Taylor ( 1 99 1 , p. 3 ) has argued , "the notion of ' i nterrelatedness ' " and the idea that there are no real ly discrete or isolated entities, flies in the face of traditional mechanistic theories. It subverts those dual isms a'isociated w i th the notion that humans arc somehow separate from the natural world and that pol itical and econom ic institutions can safely treat the natural environment as an external factor or 'afterthought' . We feel that the study of interdependencies can profit greatly from an integrationist linguistic perspective, as it is outl ined in Chapter 2 . O u r studies have been an attempt t o chart a terra incognita. No fi nal conclusions can be expected other than that existing human knowledge does not suffice to do j ustice to the issues at hand. Greenspeak invokes science, ethics and economics, but it is neither a scientific nor a moral nor an economic d iscourse. These are its tropes. In the end, we believe the advocates of the greening of the world, the speakers of the dialects of Greenspeak. are united by an aesthetic vision of a world that is a fit place for human beings to inhabit, not only in the sense of being conducive to their health but in the Aristotel ian sense of be ing a place where the characteristic human virtues can flourish. We are particularly gratefu l to Ph i l l ip Baker, who has kindly read and critically commented on an earl ier version of this work to very good effect in eliminating some of our more gross errors. We would also l i ke to pay tribute to those who, over the years, contributed to the di scussions i n our long-

Preface

xi

running seminar. In particul ar, we owe a special debt to Roy Harr i s. Much of the linguistic thinking in this book owes i ts origins to his distinction between surrogational and i ntegrational approaches to language. Thomas Linacre, whose name our college bears, was a classical scholar and physician as well as a grammarian. We are sure he would approve of our attempt to study some aspects of the l anguage with which some of the most pressing issues of our time are expressed and debated. We would like to emphasize that the three authors of this volume have contributed equally to the work, both as members of the long-running seminar at Linacre College, Oxford, and in the writing of this text.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the editors of BioScience, T he New Scientist, The Guardian, The Observer, and Lingua Franca for permission to repri nt material from their publ ications.

Environmental Discourses

T

his book developed out o f our asking questions about the relationship between the various components of human com­

municative activities and what that communication is about in the context of discussions of environmental issues. The rapidly growing body of scientific, economic, moral and aesthetic discourse about the environment can profit from a detailed examination of its ways of using language. In short we believe that ecological and environmental studies need to take a linguistic turn. The authors of this volume come from the disciplines of linguistics and philosophy but have over the past few years studied a substantive body of environmental literature, taught courses in environmental linguistics and attempted in their own lives to make sense of the conflicting stories told about the environment. Unlike some practitioners of linguistics, we do not subscribe to the hy­ pothesis that language exists as a self-contained independent mental organ that can be studied in isolation from its use, functions, users, history and specific contexts of employment in carrying out this or that task. Without wishing to deny the importance of general questions concerning the role of language in cognition and its modes of representation, we believe that con­ siderations of practice and culture arc equally foundational in the study of language. Our approach to language and communication is, in a loose and at this point a nontechnical sense,

ecological. By 'ecological' we mean having

functional relationships with and being part of a wider ecology. We take the perspective that the ecological aspects of language, its personal, cultural, social and temporal embcddedness in and dependency on other aspects of

2

GREEN SPEA K

intentional and normatively constrained human activity are constitutive of i ts existence and to a signi ficant extent determine its nature. There seems no better arena of language use i n which to pursue our investigations of language as a tool kit i nvolved in all sorts of human practices than its realization in the l oose c luster of dialects we could call the 'language of environmental ism' itself: Greenspeak , the whole gamut of l inguistic means employed i n rai sing awareness o f environmental issues i n a range of discourses both radical and conservative. The discussion of how language is used for talking about environmental issues (the language of ecology) will be supplemented by a discussion of how the continued well-being of human languages is itself dependent on ecological factors (the ecology of lan guage). I n this book we intend to focus on a number of aspects of the ecological nature of the language of ecology. We would like to make it c lear that we see ourselves as very much at the beginning of what to us looks an important enterprise-an attempt to create a subdiscipline that has the potential of making both l i ngui stics and philoso­ phy capable of contributing to an informed debate concern ing human survival and the wel fare of our planet. In particular, we wish to raise what we perceive as a general ly rather low level of critical awareness of the way environmental matters are presented, despite, but perhaps because of, the massive flood of environmentalist talk and writing. It will emerge that the environmental case, in its most general form, is both more subtle and more complex than much current ways of Greenspeaking allow. Yet we find the way in which the contextual demands on Greenspeak as a persuasive medium present that case extremely fascinating, for i nstance the currently equivocal attitude to science, which is seen both as a resource and as a threat. Conservationist (radical) Greenspeak has confronted and conti nues to confront sophisticated exploita­ tionist (conservative) Greenspeak. Marx ( 1 970) commented that "a certain innocent trust in the efficacy of words, propaganda and rational persuasion has charac terized the conservation movement [in the United States)" (p. 947) . The point has been reiterated b y Brunner and Oesch I aeger ( 1 994 ) . In com­ menting cri tical ly on the l i nguistic means by which the environmental ist c ase is made, we believe we can make the issues more c learly defi ned and at the same time contribute in a general way to linguistics itself. Part of what is at issue is the choice of mode ls of the communication process itself. We shal l take the term 'communication ' to refer to the produc­ tion of meaning i n the interaction between human beings as it occurs in specific social, cultural and h istorical contexts. We shall be looking on l inguistic resources as instruments for the better performing of certain tasks. It is rarely helpful to study the uses of words as i f they were a condui t through which thoughts are transferred from mind to mind. The locus o f meaning, in our view. is in actual discourse and its cultural context . We shall be concerned

Environmental Discourses

3

with the way everyday speakers of languages such as English can converse about ecological and environmental matters and the role of speakin g and writing in the active engagement of people in conversations about such matters. We shall also try to bring out some of the philosoph ical , psychological and political implications of the ' greening' of languages in the growth of a specific vocabulary for the discussion of environmental matters, and the emergence of characteristic Greenspeak rhetorical dev ices. We shall also examine how the 'greening' of language has encouraged the development of a certain moral and aesthetic sensibi lity that has influenced our forms of public life. However, our concerns are, to an extent, more general since we wish to use Greenspeak as an exemplar for persuasive discourse i n general. We do not think that the devices we are highl ighting i n what follows are characteristic of environmental discourse alone. Language is not the only medium by means of which environmental issues are made determinate , brought to public attention and so on. There are other discursive media, such as graphs, equations, diagrams and photographs which play special roles in Greenspeak presentations. Final ly, we shall high light some of the ways that the philosophy of science and Geistesgeschichte have shaped the h istorical presuppositions of modern 'green ' points of view. We have learned that we need to make very c lear, at the very begi nning of such an enterprise as ours, that work on the way that Greenspeak has devel­ oped as a cluster of loosely related dialects and rhetorical practices is not an ironic criticism of environmentalism, be it conservationist or exploitative. Each of us is a strong supporter of some aspect of or institution comprised within the worldwide growth of environmental sensitivity and practical action in relation to its conservation and improvement. To take an interest in how pistons, cylinders, connecting rods and wheels sustain and make possible travel by train is not to mount an attack on trains. We were astounded when a publisher's reader of an earl ier version of these studies thought that our studies of Green speak amounted to an attack on reformist environmentalism. We shal l return t o reiterate this point from time t o time. C u ltural , Linguistic and Temporal Discourse Language and the Environmental Stance

W hether it be by taking l inguistic, phi losophical, scientific, cultural-historical or psychological perspectives, each of the studies in this book deals in one way or another with ecological matters and the development from ecological awareness to environmentalism. But, of course, we do not tackle things like the 'ecological crisis' as if it were a natural phenomenon. The 'crisis of our times' is at root a discursive phenomenon . It comes about through a sh i ft in

4

GREEN SPE A K

our ways of seeing and assessing what we see, made possible by the taking up into our discursive resources new vocabularies, new judgmental categories, new metaphors and analogies that have promoted awareness of much that was previously overlooked. Our subject matter is the multivoiced fabric in which it becomes possible to describe and to present what we now see as environ­ mental matters as issues of concern . To reformulate our topic with a certain psychological accent: We are i nterested i n the symbol ic means by which the issues of environmental ism are constructed, represented and negotiated. The attitudes, bel iefs, convictions and so on that constitute the content of environ­ mentalist discourse are man i fested in many forms, not only verbal . There are homespun domesti c ceremonies such as a Thanksgiving celebration; there have been massive Greenpeace actions against nuclear testi ng; there are academic seminars on environmental matters ; there have been media spec­ taculars such the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro; there are remote rural communes ; and there are bottle banks outside supermarkets. A l l these are forms o f expression integrated into a fabric o f culture that embeds the i ndividual within a socially shared context of mean ings ( B rockmeier, 1 995 ; Shotter, 1 993). Thus, by considering a broader concept of discourse we can differentiate symbolic, iconic and enactive forms of symbolic interaction, al though in real i ty they are inseparable from other material and symbolic practices. One can call this cultural discourse. 1 In this view, 'discourse ' is not identical with 'language ' ; hence, its analysis cannot be reduced to a study of l anguage only. Rather, to make sense of the l i nguistic resources deployed in and fashioned by a particular conversational moment-l ike the 'language of Rio'-we must consider i t as deeply i ntegrated i nto cultural discourse as a whole, including the spec i fic rules of (self- )presentation in audiovisual mass media. Otherwise, we would not do j ustice to the way a particular media event makes a certain argumentative environment determinate as one crucial constraint on the l an­ guage of Rio. From the point of view of th is broader conception o f cultural discourse, we do not have any di fficulty identifying language as the most sign ificant and dominant 'psychological tool ' in the busi ness of human meaning- making. It is primarily through language (and i ts repertoire of speech acts) that we must try to come to terms with a rapidly changing relationship with our natural (and social) environment. It is not only i n language that g lobal concerns take shape, but it is l anguage that has the prime role in how they are discussed, negotiated, and used for various social and pol i tical i nterests. Even consideri ng the scientific and mathematical models proposed to represent environmental problems, we observe that to define the actual nature of the concerns they grapple with, they re ly on l anguage and on the normative constraints of the proper unfold i ng of a genre of texts. It is not only convenient but advisable to give center stage to the study of environmental ist speaking

Environmental Discourses

5

an d wri tin g, that is to the mapping and interpreting of the m any d i alects of Greensp eak. Wh at as pects of environmental d iscourse will be emphasized'! Comment­ in g on George Eliot's remark that all of us get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, Garrett Hardin ( 1 974) says, "No generation has viewed the prob­ lem of the survival of the human species as seriously as we have. Inevi tably, we have entered this world of concern through the door of metaphor" ( p. 56 1 ) . As we shal l demonstrate in greater detail in our later discussion, metaphors are indeed a highly sensitive discursive too l . Yet they are, of course, not the only device that we use to understand new developments in our real ity-a reality that, at least in part, also emerges as a result of these metaphorical constructions. Greenspeak can also be characteri zed in respect to its various l inguistic forms and genres, such as narratives, conversations, interviews and argumentative (scientific and philosophical, pol itical and moral ) prose ; it i s expressed in texts l i ke manifestos, declarations, publ ic speeches, talk shows, jokes, parodies and d isputes. The focus on language in the man i fold uses in and by which concepts are created, negotiated and mai ntained marks a common thread that runs through al l our studies. Evidently, the understanding of ling uistic features of Green­ speak would be seriously disadvantaged without attention to the cultural and even geographical environment that corre lates to the idea of cultural milieu as the wider context in which language, l i ke al l other psychological tools, is embedded.

T he Advent of Environmentalist Discourse: Greenspeak

It is a well-known phenomenon-discussed, for instance, by language plan­ ners (see Rubin & Jernudd, 1 97 1 )-that in times of rapid technological and conceptual changes, linguistic development tends to lag beh i nd other devel­ opments. The relative speed at which certain structural and lexical devices change, and the rate of transformation of social processes to which they are addressed and for which, to some extent, they provide the medium, is a major problem for sociolinguistics. In recent years we have experienced a conceptual revolution i n how we conceive our relation to the natural world that is commensurable i n its effect on our l ives with the most important events that have occurred in the past. According to Freud (as q uoted in Gould, 1 987), The first [major i ntellectual revolution] was when it was realized that our eanh was not the centre of the universe, but only a speck in a world-system of a

6

G R E EN S PEA K magni tude hardly conceivable . . . . The second was when biological research robbed man [sic] of his particular privilege of having been specially created and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.

But in Gould's ( 1 987) view, there has been a third major revolution that serves to bridge between spatial limitations of human dominion (the Gali lean revolution), and our physical union with all 'lower' creatures (the Darwinian revolution). He [Freud] neglected the great temporal limitation imposed by geology upon human importance-the discovery of 'deep ti me ' . ( pp. 1- 2)

Gould 's list of revolutions can be supplemented by one of the more dramatic claims of modern, that is, 20th century, ecology. ' Deep ' or geol ogical time seems to offer us room to maneuver, so to say. All sorts of trials seem possible, for if there is time enough, mistakes can be corrected and the onward march of progress sustained . But the fourth revolution in our view of our position i n the universe i s that humankind has ended u p in a situation w here there may be no surviving sustainable self-regulating biological systems, thanks to our own activities. Time runs out. 2 If there really are no surviving sel f-regulating systems, then the only way for those systems on which human l i fe depends to survive is by active human care . Even at the l ith hour it may be possible to introduce measures that dece lerate the pace of transformation of the natural environment until it is either manageable within the temporal constrai nts of human practical action or sel f-regulation is once again restored . This insight, the threat to sel f-regulation, has not yet been grasped by all human beings. In many cultures, the linguistic means for informed discourse in an area of ecological and environmental matters remain meager. One of the reasons, one may add, is that even the earl ier revolutions (the Gal ilean and the Darwin ian) together with the discovery of 'deep time ' remain only half digested and are poorly served by the l inguistic resources of most l anguages. That l i nguistic and cultural factors can conspire to make Darwinism i naccessible has been demonstrated by Krementsov and Todes ( 1 99 1 ) for Russia. The recent emergence of the phenomenon of Greenspeak, some of the dialects of which take on apocalyptic forms, as we find in the speeches and writings of nuclear disarmers, for example Bertrand Russell , has resul ted in some public awareness, although as yet the locus of Greens peak is somewhat peripheral , compared with the discourses of religious fundamental ism and of economic growth, despite the presentation of Earth Summit 1 992 as a global media event. It is a domain dominated by a number of specialist groups (environmental policymakers, engineers, biologists, mainly middle-class pressure groups, etc.) rather than the population of the world as a whole. 3 We

Environmental Discourses

7

also note that the development of resources for Greenspeaking is stil l very much a superficial tinkering with the possibilities of Ianguage, just as practical efforts to bring about positive ecological changes, even those in the best interests of every citizen, rarely go to the heart of the matter technically. The most basic and wide-spread metaphors for the linguistic representation of ecological processes and the grammatical means for signaling the relationshi p between humans and their environment are sti ll dominated b y mechanistic, early enlightenment ideas . We shall demonstrate these points i n more detail in what fol lows. It does not fol l ow from the inadequacies of modernist ' reason ' as the persuasive rhetoric for bringing about environmental awareness that the adoption of the postmodernist abrogation of reason w i l l be the best path to fol low.

T he Essential Temporality of Gree nspeak

Environmentalism, above all, links the past with the future. The present is always presented as the sum of the consequences of the past and the necessary platform for the emergence of the future. All environmental discourse encom­ passes a thematic level of temporal concerns. Greenspeak is, above all , a teleological discourse. The future and the past are presented as immanent i n the present. Only in a teleological frami n g does the very idea of t h e imple­ mentation of ' green' policy now make sense . However, there are many shades of this teleology, ranging from the deepest pessimism (the present is big with a disastrous future) to the most upbeat optimism. It is i n terms of possible and immanent futures that individuals often present their i nvolvement in environ­ mentalism. From the point of view of the exposition of its major themes, the content of Greenspeak is essentially temporal. The past offers the lessons that are to be learned in the present and implemented in the future. 'Apocalypse now ' is a dramatic condensation of the past-present-future reference of all environ­ mental discourse. Tenses, time frames and temporal calibrations are pervas ive features of all its dialects and variants. Environmental discourse is i n several respects temporally indexed. Hence, to gain an overview of environmental disco urse, of Greenspeak at large, we shall not only pay attention to the cu ltu ral environm ent and such overt l inguistic aspects as its common tropes but als o look closely i nto how temporality enters so intimately i nto most, i f n ot all, dialects o f Greensp eak. Looking at the temporal positioning of interlocutors in our environmental discourse s, we will discover how temporal references become moral assess­ ment s, and expressions of time are mingled with aesthetic values. They

8

GREENSPEAK

represent signposts t o rather different cultural systems o f temporal concepts . Thi s underlines our view that in realizing specific l i nguistic impl ications ( for example, li near and abstract is 'cold ' and destructive, circular and rhythmical is ' warm ' and protecting) they reveal their meaning only in a particular cultural-historical context. Again, we can study how, in the end, the temporal aspects of Greenspeak come down to ideas of particular forms of l i fe. Not surprisingly, human l i fe, if it is conceived as something in accordance with 'nature', is throughout associated with rhyth mical and circular time forms: It is ' warm ' . Nature and its times become a platform of cultural projections, an 'affective system '. to use a concept of the French historian of melllalite, Lucien Lefevre. Physics, by contrast, presents timeless laws i n the context of a li near and irreversible and largely determin istic unfolding of the cosmos . Temporal Allegories However, temporal ity appears in yet another guise in the ' teleologies of hope and despair' . For example, the famous marine explorer and environ­ mental activist Jacques-Yves Cousteau explained his passionate engagement in the ideas of the United Nations Summit as follows : R i o has been al most like a dream for me. It was beyond m y greatest expectations to sec so much achieved so soon after the environmental conscience was born, when people all over the world began to real ise what was going on-that we were scuttling our ship. [ . . . ] At Rio I shared a platform with leaders of Indians and indigenous peoples; the people with the knowledge and traditions which teach them to safeguard their environments. I supported these people because I love them. But there is no hope for them. I have supported them because if you see a man dying by the side of the road you stop and help him. I have seen many t ribes o f I ndians disappear i n my l i fetime. I have seen one tribe where there was only one 82-year-old woman left. (cited i n The Ellropean, 8 1 [June 1 992], p. I 0)

In this statement we not only find the characteristics linkage between natural, cultural and individual processes but also an i nteresting focus on this linkage itself. The concern for the environment-Cousteau calls it the "environmental conscience"-is represented through the image of caring for a dying man. Thi s already sets up an existential framework for the whole picture. It becomes even bleaker in the face of the future perspective: "But there is no hope", drastical ly i l l ustrated by the case of the one i ndividual with whose death the tribe will wholly die out. In this picture, there is a striki ng temporal i rre­ versibi l i ty. In terms of l iterary theory, the depiction of the dying man by the side of the road is an allegory. An al legory is a presentation of ideas as a narrative.

Environmental Discourses

9

On the on e hand , as a narrative it tells an intell igible story. On this leve l , Cousteau 's picture draws on the connotations of the Christian tradition of the good Samaritan and of St. Martin. Thus we find oursel ves drawn into the sphere of a concrete moral d i lemma, a matter of consc ience . On the other hand , an allegory is a presentation of ideas that represents an abstract mean i ng, l i ke a doctrine or a thesis. The central rhetorical device of Cousteau 's al legory is the personification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, modes of l i fe and type s of character. Both concrete and abstract allegories prove to be all the more useful for environmental discourse. But there is yet another level of meaning in Cousteau 's allegory. The allegory involves a complex temporal transformation . It shifts from a journey as movement in time to the death of an individual , ending of time for h i m . This standstil l o f t i m e in t h e moment of the individual 's death marks the allegorical equivalent of Cousteaus's central point: "There is no hope." Cousteau's position of enlightened pessimism is by no means unique. Let us add one further example. A similarly drastic picture, even if presented more cautiously, is drawn by Dennis L. Meadows, who, like Cousteau, has been one of the leading scientific voices of environmental ism from its current begin­ nings: •

Life goes on. It will not, as mankind would i n the case of nuclear war, be annihilated in one fell swoop. The question merely is, how many people will live and how many will starve. The prognoses vary according to our choice of possible scenarios for the future. If these were reduced to only two, utopia or catastrophe, my guess i s that catastrophe will be the likely outcome. (cited i n Die Zeit. June 5, 1992, trans. from the Germ an )

It is worth mentioning that these views run strikingly counter to the original inherent function of hope for environmental activities that another famous campaigner and green pol i tician, Petra Kelly, claimed 1 0 years before in the early stages of the environmental movement i n Western Europe . In her book Fighting for Hope ( Kel ly, 1 984 ), published with a foreword by Nobel prizewinner Heinrich Boll , she confessed her hope for a better world to come her essential motive. Even more, maintaining hope seemed to her itself an important moral value, an essential word in the lexicon of environmental ism. We shall return to the topic of teleologies of hope and despair and the underlying matrix of time that they presuppose. The Closing of the Future In o rder to examine the teleological elements in the d iscourse of the e nvi ron mental ism we must understand i t as embedded in a multilayered

10

G R E E N SPE A K

cultural-historical fabric. Part o f this background i s a process o f erosion of the stable and rel iable time order of Western Civi lization. This is not a recent development, nor is it only a conceptual and inte llectual one. From a h istorical vantage poi nt, one certainly has to view this erosion as part of a broader cultural development that, in a sense, started with the Enlightenment itself. I n rejecting t h e c losed time of Medieval thought, the modern m i nd opened u p t h e possibi l i ty of a n uncertain a n d threatening future, whereas t h e 1 9th-cen­ tury belief in the human capacity for progress seemed to set aside the threat. ·we suggest that one ought not to isolate either the discovery of the 'ecological crisis' or the concomitant emergence of environmentalism from this fundamental cultural process. One consequence of th is development is a concept of h istorical process as noth i ng more than a great variety of cultural­ h istorical constructions. ' H istory ' is not itsel f a process. It is nothing other than an umbrella expression for a wide range of human approaches to the expression of mutability, change and succession . In 1 9th-century natural history, Darwin's Origin of Species played a crucial role in this shift in the Western understanding of time. However, natural history marks just one line in a broader cultural development, intertwined with many similar tendencies in other natural and social sciences, ph ilosophy, l iterature and the arts (Kern, 1 98 3 ; Nowotny, 1 994) . What has come t o a n end with this development is-among other things­ the conviction that the physical and cosmological idea of Newtonian absolute time is a universal ly appl icable parad igm for all forms of change and devel­ opment. The technological correlate of the model of absolute time is the frictionless mechanical clock and, more recently, electronic time-keeping devices (Aveni, 1 990; Young, 1 988). From everyday l i fe to poetry, a charac­ teristic selection of metaphors and other linguistic expressions capturi ng this model embraces the 'continuous and eternal" flux ' , the 'stream of the nows ' , 'the inevitability of change' and s o on. Without doubt, the erosion of the traditional concept of time has extended to both categories. From the point of view not only of the sciences but also of philosophy and of the arts, strong arguments have been brought forward against the Newtonian metaphysics of time, be it as the idea of a l i m i tless container, as the ever-flying arrow of time. Over the past 1 00 years we have witnessed the fal l i ng apart of all universal Weltanschauungen based on con­ cepts of time that are linear, continuous, homogeneous, progressive and teleological . Philosophically, this view found its most advanced and elabo­ rated form some decades before Darwin, in Hegel's developmental theory of Geist (Brockmeier, 1 992). Today, 'absolute spirit' and absolute container have dissolved in countless decentral ized fragments, and the arrow of time has been transformed into multidirectional movements and a nondeterm i n able multi­ plicity of temporal perspectives. This new view, widely established in social

Environmental Discourses

II

sciences, humanities and natural sciences, unveils a deeply heterochronous world. As a side effect, this also has opened up a new interest i n the huge cultural variety of different symbolic expressions of temporal ity. Revolutionizing our trad itional sense of history, these changes i n the perception and expression of time as change have necessi tated a continuous readjustment of our concepts-not to mention the individual time syntheses that one finds in autobiographies. Our c l aim is that this epochal process has ass umed once again a new qual i ty. H itherto, the traditional idea of time has been that there is, in one way or another, a limitless future in terms of the possibil ity of progress, a conviction that appeared to be securely guaranteed by the authority of science. Under the influence of the 'environmental cri sis', more and more scientists, however, have moved to the forefront of the environmental ists ' attack on the ' forces behind ' the phenomena. Like Cousteau and Meadows, many of them have used the public arena, as it was opened up not least by the Rio Summit, as a platform to demonstrate their conversions. As a consequence, skepticism about the authority of science has became a salient feature of Greenspeak, albeit a quite ambivalent one, to a discussion of which we shall return. Yet, as we shall see, the use of the tropes of scientific writing to enhance the authority of an environmentalist case is widespread . Examining the public image of the natural sciences and their social acceptance in North America and Western Europe since the 1 970s and 1 980s, we notice a change in the traditional optimistic and rationalistic self-conception. This change is not superficial . The more the 'ecological crisis' is conceived to be a threat to the very foundations of social and individual l i fe, the more it impinges on the moral status of the technological foundations of much of the everyday l i fe of those who dwell in the industrial West. Th is has spread to medicine, to agricul ture, to psychology and even to the conduct of commercial enterprises. For most philosophers of science, the defense of the priority of natural science as a model for the garnering of knowledge has become an exploration of modes of rational ity beyond the boundaries of the formal logic of tradition. With the 'environmental crisis ' and i ts far-reaching criticisms of current way s of life well-represented in current public discourse, the trad itional ideals of material progress and scientific knowledge have become deeply ambiva­ l ent-w i th all their emphatic connotations. Ironical ly, it is not the seeming irratio nalis ms of the postmodemist Zeitgeist but the scientific diagnoses, predic ting a seemingly unavoidable ecological catastrophe, that undermine, by means o f the authority of science, that very authority. The transformation of way s of l i fe by the appl ication of science and engineering has produced the very situat ion that requires science and engineering to identify and to repair. The 'ecological epoch ' , as sociologist Ulrich B eck ( 1 992; 1 994 ) remarked, is si m ulta neo usly scientific and also critical of scientific approaches. S uccesses

12

G REEN S PEA K

i n diagnosing and warning agai nst the destruction o f the environment drive, in turn, the d ismantl i ng of scienti fic standards of rational ity. This ambiva­ lence, we believe, is indeed highly characteristic of environmental discourse .

The Global View

'Whole Earth ' Perspectives Another new quality brought into being in the process of erosion of traditional concepts of history as development is the ·globalization ' of Green­ speak. The entire world wao; addressed by those who took part in Earth Summit 1 992. The ' l anguage of Rio' was, at least for a moment, a lingua franca. Globalization of d iscourse genres is one of the most stri king results of 20th-century technology. This has been particularly true of the forms of talk and writing with which the ' ecological crisis' has been portrayed . Twenty years earl ier, the fi rst UN conference had been cal led the Environmental Conference. Now it was the Earth Summit, and such was also the tenor of most declarations, speeches and reports. On a lexical level this became evident in numerous expressions l i ke 'global th inking ' , 'global perception ' , 'holistic approach ' , 'planetary timing ' , 'spaceship Earth ' , ' l i feboat Earth ' , and 'One World ' . Moreover, we must not underestimate the suggestive infl uence of iconic signals l i ke the ubiquitous pictures of Earth, the 'blue Planet', shot by satell ite cameras or from the space missions of the 1 970s and 1 980s. Al though the 'global ' message was presented and semiotical ly produced in an unequivocal way, one must understand it in a twofold sense. On the one hand, the various l i nguistic expressions and photographic, c inematic and graphic representations certainly reflect the fact that in public consciousness over the past two decades several local or regional environmental issues have been tran sformed i nto one great problem within which local problems are swal lowed up. Whereas earlier debates usually focused on single 'environ­ mental accidents ' (such as the pol l uted Rhine, the 'acid rain ' in the B l ack Forest or sea birds dying i n oil sl icks on the Danish shores) and on more or less local or regional industrial catastrophes (such as in B hopal , Harrisburgh and Chemobyl), they have now become a dense, all-encompassing d iscourse about one crisis of the global environment. In consequence, the term ' envi ­ ronment' itself has become subject t o the same elaboration being used t o refer to the whole biosphere and also to the strictly locali zed surround ings of one's own l i fe. Many authors have attempted to substitute for it terms l i ke 'global concerns' or un ity-centered metaphors l i ke 'Gaia' , 'planetary biotype' or 'global greenhouse ' .

Environmental Discours

es

13

Gl obal Discourse i n the Age o f Enlightenment Ne verth eless, as we shal l argue drawing upon another short excursus i nto al his tory, the global perspective on environmental matters is not at al l ltur cu new, nor is, of course, the problem itse l f-j ust th ink, for example, of the thousand-year-hi story of what has been called the 'ecological imperialism ' of Europe (Crosby, 1 986). In order properly to understand the new qual ity o f the present type of ecological globalization, one has to bear in mind its prehistory. In fact, the roots of Western conservation ism and environmental ism are at least 200 years old. Also, what could be called a global or holistic approach to enviro nm ental issues can be traced back more than 1 00 years. As R ichard H . Grove ( 1 992) outl ined, this approach developed out of European conserva­ tionist projects in the tropics that came into being as a kind of side effect of colo nialism. European-based environ mentalism first took shape in the mid- 1 8th cen­ tury, arising as a new expression of the old tradition of the search for utopia. In other words, the origins of environmental ism are also to be found in the Age of Enl ightenment. They are even prior to the l iterary construction of what Mary Louise Pratt ( 1 992) has called the 'planetary consciousness ' of colon i­ alism. Created by 1 9th-century European or North American travelers, this environmentalist l iterature emerged as an alternative variant of naturalistic Eurocentrism. Its l iterary forms were articulated in genres l i ke sentimental travel writing and narrative natural h istory. Articulating in many variations the idea of the romanticist's ' anti-conquest', it contributed to establishing a discursive space where Europeans could see themsel ves as "detached from unequal or exploitative pol itical-economic contexts," to borrow an expression from James Clifford ( 1 992). Of course, this d iscursive space also incl uded a view of unspoiled nature: the global landscape. Yet long before these visions of wild nature and peaceful 'anti-conquest' , which mingled with other romantic transformations of the Enl ightenment, were projected into the crude reality of the Western econom ic and cul tural c onquest of the Earth, colonial enterprise had began to clash with Romantic ide alism. This was documented with alarming scientific findings about envi­ ro nmental devastations in the new territories. Because many of these findings we re not disc overed by ' imperial eyes ' but from the naturali st's vantage point, th ey were impressi vely drastic . Their impact on the European debates was co nsidera ble , and the conflicts they aroused in the European public sphere �ere far-reaching, as many detai ls of Grove's (e.g., 1 992) cultural-historical Inq u irie s in this field prove . Among other things, we can learn from the d ocu me nts of these early environmental debates that the setting for them was th e "threatened ecology of tropical islands and lands, from the Cari bbean sea to Asi a." In London, Paris and other imperial capitals, these islands became

14

G RE EN SPEA K

"allegories for the world at large." They were referred to as models o f the dangers of civilization for nature in general : What yesterday was a tropic island could be a continent today and the whole world tomorrow ! The effect on the public of the alarming revelations about the colonial destruction of nature and the pressure of the simultaneously emerging community of profes­ sional natural scientists spurred European governments to consider first steps to protect the environment. Grove's research unveils an interesting interrelation between economy, phi losophy and an alternative discourse to the progressivist metaphors of the period. As growing international trade extended Europe's commercial reach, it also permitted exploitation of the new sites for more philosophical and natural istic needs. Soon, exotic lands were seen as symbols for ideal ized landscapes. As Edens, Arcadias or New Jerusalems they became ciphers of another world. In tum, the discovery of new territories was treated with more and more skepticism, as every new d iscovery necessari ly meant i ts colonial conquest and thus i ts destruction as place for alternative projections. A new kind of philosophical and natural istic angst arose: For as the l arge, uncharted terrains of India, Africa and America were explored, eventual ly all Edenic wildernesses would be dissolved . Already during the 1 7th century the ful l flowering of the ' Edenic island d iscourse ' led to the reali zation that European colonial rule could be environ­ mental ly destructive. Initiated by scientists, medical offices or custodians of the early colonial botanic gardens, a coherent awareness of the multilayered ecol ogical impact of capital ism and colonial ru le began to emerge . Drawings of Mauritius in 1 677, for i nstance, shocked many educated Europeans by confronting them with forceful depictions of the stark real ity of fel led ebony forests. Papers, reports, records and other documents of European academies and scientific soc ieties, which were established by the 1 9th century through­ out the new territories, demonstrate that, despite their orientation to the European centers of culture, these institutions made it easy for scientists to communicate and debate their observations of the change of nature in a worldwide context: Environmental theories and an ever growing flood of information about natural history and ethnology were diffused through meetings and publications. Thus, at the s ame time as it had promoted l arge-scale ecological change, the colonial enterprise had also created a coterie of men-and women-predisposed to rigorous analytic thinkin g about the processes of ecological change and the need for land control . (Grove, 1992, p. 23)

It is here that we encounter the very origin of environmental d iscourse. The first interlocutors of Greenspeak are men and women of the 1 9th century.

ses Environmental Discour

15

Alexander von Humboldt, the famous geographer and explorer, is only one of those outstanding scholars and Humanisten who reinforced the idea of 'global environmentalism ' . In his numerous and widespread writings he outlined a new philosophical and ecological conception of the relation between people and the natural world : the idea of a fundamental interrelation of humankind and other forces in the cosmos. The linguistic resources for these discussions were quickly created . For example, in the 1 860s the possibil ity of g lobal warming was passionately discussed by members of the Royal Geography Society in London . These debates give a good example how the discourse about climate change had become international in scope. Speakers referred to detailed research carried out on several continents that seemed to confirm that the very composition of the atmosphere might be changing. With those London debates, long-established anxieties about artificially induced climatic change, the loss of species and of unspoiled parts of nature had reached a first c l imax. One conclusion to be drawn from Grove's historical studies is that contem­ porary environmental discourse about the threat to the global ecosystem has to be seen in a long tradition. It seems to be a reassertion of ideas that had reached maturity over a century ago. As a consequence, we have to recognize that neither the idea of the environment as a global system nor knowledge about the planetary unit of the 'biotype Eart h ' is something new and specific to our 'ecological epoch ' . Yet i f it is really the case, as Grove assumes, that i t simply has taken s o l o n g for t h e warnings of early scientists t o b e taken seriously, we must shift the focus of our account. We must concentrate on the question of how it c ame about that an old issue has gained such an overwhelm­ ingly new interest. How do we account for this new quality i n the century-long discourse on global environmental matters'l Because the discourse genre was far from new, some other factor relevant to macrol inguistics must have been in play. Media Globalization Let us put the question again : As it is apparently not simply the global view of natu re that can claim to be new, what then is responsible for the new q ual ity in env iro nmental discourse, a quality that also has had a s trong impact on the ways of talking and writing in general ? We suggest that it is the crucial rol e of the new worldwide media systems that have emerged over the past decades, m ak ing pos sible the beginnings of an environmental l ingua franca: Green­ speak as a world language . Of course, there undoubtedly are new social and ecological developments th at, in sofar as they can find expression in the new lingua franca, make p oss ible a pol itical force for g lobal environmental strategies.

16

GREEN S PEA K

We suggest that the emotional and moral conception o f globali zation is, to a large extent, an effect of the particular way it is discursively presented and represented . In the past, the ' global view' had been one, more or less periph­ eral, aspect of a problem that perhaps existed for a few scientists who (despite their international reputation and appreciation) were all too often bel ittl ed both in the scientifi c community and in the public discourse as romantic naturalists. Now, these issues have themsel ves become a publ ic concern, a ' l i fe issue' not only for spec ialised botan ists and zoologists but for a world­ wide media audience. The cruc ial point, as it seems to us, is that none of the fol l owing is new, despite the lurid emphas i s that most media presentations of the discourse of Rio have put on it. Nei ther the global approach nor the scientific ' facts ' (which putatively 'on their own ' suggest a global perspective on environment) nor the highly dramatic discovery of new environmental depredations nor even much of the language in which the global approach is articulated is new. What is new is the global attention, perception and affirmation of the global approac h : i n other words, t h e globali zation of the discourse and thus of t h e 'ecological crisi s ' . How has this new picture emerged ? The deepen ing of the 'ecological crisis' itself, as well as of its cultural perception, has been accelerated by another simul taneous-though not iden­ tical-process: the enormous expansion of our communication systems that has engendered a vast i ncrease in worldwide i n formation on the env ironment. Many people with whom we have discussed these matters have expressed concern over what some cal led an 'overkil l ' of green data. Yet this has produced not simply more information but different information and divergent spati al and temporal schemes in which they are connected . The discovery that Earth is one biotype is also one (late) consequence of the discovery that Earth is a 'global village ' . Marshall McLuhan used his famous metaphor some 25 years ago to highlight the commun icative and sociostructural consequences that fol lowed from the electron ic revolution in global media systems-a cul tural revolution in the Western world which at that time was j ust in the offing. The Rio Summit wao; one of the first high points of this cul tural revolution in the 1 990s, in many respects comparable with the media presen­ tation of the Gulf war. Thus, it was the media presentation of the Rio Summit itse l f, the job for more than 7,000 journalists "to sel l a juicy Earth show," as one commentator put it, which consti tuted an impressive intertwining of these two cultural developments (see boxed text). It is worth dwel l i ng on some spatio-temporal aspects of the med i a produc­ tion and construction of environmental issues. For example, one of the cou ntless TV broadcasts at the time of the summit was a CNN G u lf-war-style report: simultaneous l ive connec tions with an antarctic research station, with details from a deforestation site in the Amazon rain forests and a poll ution

Envi ronm ental

Discou rses

17

"Dancing to Different Beats in Rio "

Last week nearly 30,000 people from over 1 70 countries touched down in this beautiful , twisted ribbon of a city, squeezed between a rocky mountain and the surf-bound sea. This week they will be joined by the 1 31 presidents and prime ministers-an unprecedented assemblage of power, far larger than expected only a few weeks ago-who are supposed to decide the Earth's future. All are being whisked into the city along a special ly-constructed £70 m i l lion new road , bui lt in places so c lose to houses that the unfortunate residents can reach out of their windows and touch it. Toxi c fumes form around a beach, overshadowed by the Sugar Loaf and the figure of Christ on Corcovado. Here i s the G lobal Forum, a cross between a global Liberal party conference and an ecolog i ca l world fair. Giant green and white p lasti c marquees resound to the earnest tones of the 365 public meetings being held over these two weeks, on subjects ranging from the International Industry Conference for Sustainable Development to Spiritual and Envi­ ronmental Purification for Physical Immortality i n the New Era. Maurice Strong, the relentlessly opti mistic secretary general of the conference, is everywhere, usually surrounded by television cameras, urging recalcitrant govern­ ments to 'rise above petty immediate concerns', posing with a football team from Nairobi and accepting a fleet of cars powered by non-polluting alcohol donated by Volkswagen.

[

.

.

.

1

Back on the golden beach , beneath helicopters buzzing the water skiers on the polluted bay, Roger Moore, resp lendent i n a l i lac tie, i s opening the Gl obal Forum . (The connection, he says, is that 1 5 years a g o , as James B o n d in Moonraker, he was on the Sugar Loaf, fighting, as now. agai nst 'the evi l men trying to destroy our civi l isation'.) The c limax, as dusk falls, is the launch of a 75-foot-high ba l l oon. powered i nevitably by hot air, which is to 'travel round the world for two years carrying many of the resol utions adopted in Rio'. The fi res flared, turning the translucent white balloon bright orange, s i lhouetted against a purple mountain as it rose . SOURCE: ·oanclng to DiHerent Beats In Rio." In The Obsemr, June 7, 1 992. p. 58. U s ed wtlh permission.

mo nitoring site in t h e c i t y center o f Los Angeles a t rush hour, w i t h a Green­ pe ace env iron ment monitori ng boat in the Mediterranean , a global weather satel l ite (via a NASA Earth station ), a d i scussion group of scientists at the Rio Su mmit itse l f, and, of course, with ourselves sitting in fro n t o f the TV with th e od d feelin g that this is all one event and we are part of it. All th ese places brought together simultaneously were places of d i fferent geo grap hical times. Furthermore, several streams o f i n formation represented

18

G R E E N S PEA K

"Woodstock Comes to the Amazon " LORETIA is Yugoslavian, and wears body paint and a leopard-s ki n toga. " I have no country any more. So I am here," she says. Then she heads off to take part in a tribal dance in front of TV cameras. Chundra Roy is more serious, a Japanese Bangladeshi based i n the Netherlands and representing the Unrepresented Peoples Organisation. The scene-in the grounds of a mental hospital on the outskirts of Rio-is a cross between Woodstock and the Amazon jungle with a Brazilian m i l itary guard . Kari-Oca vi l lage is where, courtesy of the Brazi lian government, Amazon Indians have built a traditional vil lage and p lay host to Austra l ian aborigines, Laplanders, North Ameri can Indians, peop le from Filipino and Thai h i l l tribes and a large number of Papuans. They held meetings on the rights of indi genous peoples i n the week before the Earth Summit, but were frequently outnumbered by journalists. The vi l lage was built over the past two months whi le the government brought i n solar-powered street l ights, water, public telephones a n d g uards. On a d a y off, the Indian construction team beat a team of British Rio residents 5-0 at soccer. last week, visitors drank beer, ate manioc from paper plates and took pictures. Part media circus, part serious politics, it had a lot i n common with the main Earth Summit about to begin a few m i les away. The most visible bare chest on view was that of Maurice Strong, secretary-general of the summit, who stripped off shirt and tie and donned an indi genous peoples' T -shirt for the B razilian TV cameras. Some indigenous peop l e stayed at the vi l lage , beneath huge, immaculately constructed grass-thatched roofs. Others, notably the Australians, stayed i n air-con-. ditioned hote ls beside Copacabana beach and arrived at Kari -Oca by coach each morning. There has been a split among the tribal groups. Some Brazi l ian Indians, fearful of what they see as government attempts to turn thei r conference vil lage i nto a tourist attraction, decamped before proceedings began and wi l l join environmentalists in the G l obal Forum event in downtown Rio. But for those who stayed, there was loretta's dance troupe and a constant round of interviews and photo opportunities. SOURCE: "Woodstock Comes to the Amazon,· In New Scienlisl, June 6. 1 992, p. 6. Used with permission.

in themselves comparative time data such as poll ution measurements today confronted with measurements (or assessments) 1 0, 1 00 or 1 0,000 years ago. They forecasted future developments, supported by i mpressive graphics and computer video simulations. Thus the production not only combi ned different geographical places representing di fferent stages of development agai nst the background of some ideal ized 'time' but also embedded these in historical processes and welded them into one ubiquitous 'real time' . Th is 'real time' was,

Discourses Environmental

19

oadcasting time, which then could be video-recorded and , f co urse, the br ted in other temporal settings, framed by further ' real times ' . inser , n nee ag ai i n such a scenario i s the discursive universalization wi tnessing are we Wh at electronic technologies) of a view offered by the by iated med se, ca (in th is of a global present: a global ized simultaneity that, as it point ge vanta ficti ve represent one global time budget of the spatial synthesis of to ds reten p were, rld. wo one into places

�

Space as a Di scursive Resource in Environmental Debates In a case study of the discursive creation of two antithetical constructions of space, Carbaugh ( 1 992 ; 1 996, chaps. 9- 1 0) analyzed how such symbolic codings of nature develop out of the mean ing context of the specific cultural field in which the discourse of 'nature · is embedded . He examined the rhetorical positions of different social groups in West Massachusetts, strug­ gling over several years for the future of the natural reservation Grey lock Glen, which was supposed to become an economic development project. As these groups' debates show, the area in question is mapped as a quite distinct natural object in rel ation to its cul tural positioning in the languages of different factions. Their talks about "the mountain" and "the land," on the one hand, and "the project" and "the property" on the other, include spatial locations within the frameworks of distinct moral spaces and, not least, distinct aesthetic worlds. Their drawing of a verbal mapping of cultural geography is integrated in two almost diverging systems of symbolic codings. Even the usage of certain indexical locators of the mountain in question (demonstratives like "a place up there" or "down below") marks, as it were, not only neutral references to an external physical place but aesthetic and moral attitudes and positions as well . I n the "up there" depiction, w e look at the mountain from a position firmly located in the town, whereas in the "at the foot" depiction or the "down there" depiction, we look at the town from the point of view of the territory and the threat. Each depiction of the piece of land over which the debate has raged is appropriated by the advocates of conflicting policies. For the utilitarians, the land "up there" is an extension of the town and its disposal should be considered with respect to utilitarian princ iples. For the people speaking from " up the re," the l and has i ntrinsic worth and should be treated as part of the accep ted reserve of the Grey lock mountain. Thus, every discourse represents a cul tural l anguage game on its own, realizing "symbolic moves in a cultural � y stem" of spati al references ; it depicts the land in precise and particular geosy mb olic ' systems of values and thus "locates interlocutors in a specific ph y si cal and cultural space from which to view it" (Carbaugh, 1 992, p. 366) . C arbaug h shows that the discourses are hopelessly at odds and that a resolu-

20

G REEN S PE A K

tion o f the debate was only possible b y the development within the facti ons of a common discourse detached from the "up there" and the "down there " depictions . Summary

Attention to the problems brought about by an unthinking exploitation of the resources of the world by human beings is not new. Its roots are at least two centuries old. What is new is the transformation of human consciousness on a large scale, brought about by the expansion and fusion of l ocal discourses into one media event. Greenspeak has become a worldwide cl uster of dialects. B ut, as yet, it is far from the expression of a unified voice. Although the emphasis on the 'global ization' of our view on environmental issues indicates a sal ient characteristic of contemporary Greenspeak, this globali zation has to be understood as an effect that is due to the global structure of the media through which this message is discursively presented. There is no meaning without a sign, but neither is there a sign that is once and forever given and not subject to negotiation and interpretation. In this sense, the cultural-historical change of the meaning of natural process and human history, which is so essential for environmental discourse, cannot be under­ stood detached from developments of their semiotic systems that are particular cultural systems themselves. They not only carry and present but also create these meanings, bringing new real ities into view. Yet the global ization of green consciousness rests in the end on a myriad of spatial demarcations that provide a geographical footing for what are essentially public debates. The geopolitics of 'developed ' versus 'developing' , or Third World, areas is global. However, patterns of this sort are readily discerned in local debates and issues.

Notes I. Concepts such as 'cultural linguistics' (Miihlhiiusler & Harre , 1 99 1 ) or 'cuhural pragmatics'

( Carbaugh, 1 994) express the same point of view.

2. This view, of course, h as been disputed, perhaps with good reason, by advocates of the Gaia hypothesis, who hold that the Earth-Sun system, as a whole, i s self-regulating . Even if

self-regulation is sti l l a pervasive feature of 'natural systems ' , new equilibria may not be in the

best i nterests of people.

3. This dominance i s reflected in available dictionaries of environmental terms, such as Allaby

( 1 988). There is an abundance of technical terminology. Thus, e cosph ere, ecosystem and ecorype are l isted but not ecopolitics, ecofraud and ecoshopping.

Linguistic Foundations

T

a l k i n g and w ri t i n g about e n v i ronmental matters i n v o l ves the usc o f l e x i c al , gram matical and prag m a t i c re sources as we l l as

of fragments o f partial l y determ i nate knowledge o f the material and social wor l d . Tal k i n g and wri t i n g about t al k i n g and writing about e nv i ro n m e n tal m atters-l i nguistics-req u i res the c o n s ideration o f the use o f these l i n g u i st i c resources a n d these frag ments of k n owledge i n debates and d i sc u s s i o n s . B ecause languages a n d l i n g u i s t i c pract ices arc themse l ves e c o l o g i c a l l y s e n ­ sitive phenomena, l i ng u i s t i c s m u s t b e or a t l e a s t i nc o rp orate a d i al e c t o f Gree nspeak .

In this chapter, w e concern ourse l ves o n l y w i t h some o f the m aj o r

l i nguistic top ics w i t h i n the framework establ i s hed i n C h apter I . T h e s t u d y o f l i nguistics a s i ts e l f a k i nd o f green d i scourse we take up i n C h apter 8 .

The discussion o f G reen speak, pred i c tably, has general l y cen tered o n

lexical issues, for the l e x i c o n i s c l oser t o t h e su rface o f l a n g u age u sers ' awareness

than any

other aspect of the c o m m u n i c a t i o n proce s s . It i s to t h i s

lexicon a n d some of i t s k e y words t h a t we t u r n our atte n t i o n fi r s t . From t h i s basis, w e broaden o u r d i sc u s s i o n t o i n c l ude t h e gen eral l i n g u i stic stance fro m wh ich the whole of our d i sc u s s i o n s of Gree n speak w i l l be m a n aged .

The Greenspeak Lexicon and Language Planning

!h e lex ico n of Greenspeak can be d i sc ussed from a nu mber of poi n ts o f v i ew, I nc l ud i ng the ade q uacy of the l e x i c a l resources for some d i scursive task and 21

G R E E N S P EA K

22

the role of the lexicon i n making avai lable and focusing attention o n otherw is e ' i nvisible ' aspects of material real ity. The former approach is associated wi th those who are in the business of language planning. Their primary questio n is this: Are the lexical resources of language X suited to the discussio n of phenomenon belonging to a domain Y? For instance, does English have sufficient lexical i tems to enable the discussion of such matters as metrication or the parts of the root system of plants or the shapes of leaves or c urrent varieties of genocide and so on? The criteria that language planners appeal to, in a rather coarse-grained fashion, include referential adeq uacy, systematic adequacy, social adequacy and environmental adequacy. What these terms mean is explained in the fol lowing definitions: •

•

•

•

Referential adequacy means "the capacity of the l anguage to meet the needs of its as an instrument of referential meaning" (Haugen, 1 966, p. 62).

users

Systematic adeqUilcy means "being structured so as to approach maxi mum rule economy and efficiency, and having 'a clear and uniform semantic structure with a terminology that is unambiguously translatable' " ( Dahlstedt, 1 979, p. 27).

Social adequacy means that language should be acceptable to a maximum number of speakers in the target community, promote social unity and i ntercommunication and cater to present as well as anticipated future social needs. Environmental adeqUilcy means that a language should enable its users to talk

about environmental matters in an informed manner and promote the well-being of its speakers and nonhuman nature.

Referential Adequacy A language is referentiall y adequate if it has the lexical resources to discuss a given topic i n sufficient detai l , ' sufficiency ' bei ng relative to the task i n hand. What seems a fairly straightforward problem (looking for lexical gaps) turns out to be a highly intricate one on closer inspection. It is clear from many indications we have that there is some sort of misfit between the contours of our language and the contours of our natural environment, despite 400 years of intensive scientific research i nto the latter and the consequential develop­ ment of rich resources in the former. Not only are our i ntuitions about the m ismatch sti l l to. be formu l ated clearly, but the misgivings that have been expressed about the consequences of it have remained fairly vague. Let us consider ways of speaking about the alleged ' greenhouse effec t ' , an issue that we shal l be deali ng with in several chapters and from several poi nts of view. Like most expressions introduced to refer to new areas of know led ge, the term 'greenhouse ' is a metaphor and open to numerous i nterpretati on s. What i s more, it refers to a putative scenario rather than an easily measurab le and con trollable reality. One might wish to argue that a term such as ' gre en-

undations !d!}guistic Fo

23

s an otherwise unnoticed aspect of material reali ty i nto h se effect ' bring tive role of d � lineating, albeit vaguely, the bounda­ construc the g vin f us. ser rather than bemg a new way to refer to something enon, enom ph e 'e s o f th al l along within the existing lexical identifiable dently pen de in at was 'j urassic' and 'greenhouse effect' do ke i l terms of duction intro The es. esou rc words l i ke 'sodium chloride ' . But the matter is more than job rent diffe and like all metaphors, its metaphor, a is ' effect greenhouse ' for ated, c omplic from material reali ty, not abstraction or of model a is elate corr ic guist no nl in of some of the key subtlety the of much has it way this In f. l itse lity th at rea create an image , a to them serves ke it i L sciences. , natural the in d use term s which of world it is at best an real the for mistaken easily world, tual vir policymakers-namely, for question crucial The abstraction. or ue alog an what is the degree of simi larity between this image of the world and the real world?-tends to be lost sight of as the metaphor comes to take on the trap pin gs of a direct description. As many have pointed out, when expressions like "Earth is a greenhouse" become well established in language both 'Earth ' and ' greenh ouse' have subtly changed their meanings. We choose here to recal l the debate about glaciation in the 1 970s and q uote a scientific assessment of this threat:

:: �� :

As far as climatic change and the threat of ice are concerned, there are three bodies of opinion: the pessimists say that cli matic doom is imminent, and if they are right then there is so little we can do that i t hardly seems worth trying. One might as well crawl i nto a cave and wait for the end. At the other extreme, there are still a few super-optimists, whose outlook is not unlike that of believers i n the Flat E arth Theory. They say that climate does not change very much i n the time-scale relevant to man and that there is nothing to worry about. The third group I would call optimists, and I number myself among them. Their view is that an ice age may be upon the world within a few hundred years, and that the immediate deterioration of the climate at the present time requires urgent attention from all responsible people. That may only seem optimistic in comparison with the pessimists ' view; but I feel genuinely optimistic that if we can get over the problems facing us in the next couple of decades, then within a hundred years or so we may well be in a position to adapt our global society to withstand even the rigours of a ful l ice age. (Gribbin, 1 976, p. 99)

Uneasine ss with the l i nguistic means available for the discussion of envi­ ro n mental matters can be traced back to the seminal writings of Rachel C arson. In her 1 962 book Silent Spring she attempts to raise her readers ' �:-v are ness by putting i nverted commas around terms such as 'pest' and I nsecti c ide ' , commenting on the l atter that what it refers to would m ore p�opriately be called a 'biocide ' . Appropriatel y in what sense? S i mply that t e I mag e of nature called up by 'insecticide' is of a landscape in which only

a:

24

G R E E N S PE A K

the six-legged pests are missing . It took Rachel Carson to convince us, with her evocative image of the 'si lent spring' , that much else besides w i l l disappear from the countryside. Here is one image set alongside another. Uneasiness with existing lexical resources is also found in David Rowan 's ( 1 992) brief newspaper article "Recycling Ecospeak ." Interestingly, he u ses, without further comment, the rather problematic term ' l andfi l l ' , a euphem is m for all sorts of dumps. H owever, his examples are so fe l i citous that we think the passage deserves to be quoted i n fu l l : "Recycling Ecospeak " Two years ago, busi nesses discovered they could susta i n their sales by recyc l i n g the language of t h e greens. Firms took to marketi ng ozone-friendly cars, CFC-free shampoos, and petrol which produced no p o l l ution of the environment-claims that were meaning less or false, but wh i c h the law did not prohibit. Now, h owever, the environmental movement has i dentified someth ing it calls a green/ash: an i ncreas ing awareness among consumers that many environment friendly claims are fu l l of hot C02. and a growi ng suspicion of firms deemed g u i lty of eco-fraud. Eco-fraud is a compan y ' s claim that by (for i nstance) avo i d i n g chlorine in its non-degradab l e nappies, it is b e i n g friendly to the environment: for the former does not n ecessari ly val i date the latter. After a l l , j ust because n u c l ear power g e neration is relative ly harmless to the ozone layer, the seepage of rad i oactive waste i nto Cumbria wou l d belie assertions that it is the environment friendly fue l . Such buzzwords are a lso repeated by those who should know better. Green Magazine te l l s you that its paper i s environment friendly, but fai l s to exp lain what this means. An obfuscation that- l i ke the p lasti c bags the Body Shop calls bio-destructible-e nv i ronmenta l ists are labe l l i ng ecohypocrisy. In New York, where this tren d is known as green-collar fraud, the state attorney is trying to ban the words biodegradable , degradable or photodegradable i n advertising for any p lastic produce, because p lastic does not decompose i n landfi l l s . But in Cali forn ia, green activism is so advanced that it has spawned a whole new language . Y o u a r e cal led a greenoid i f y o u a r e obsessed w i t h environmental i ssues, whi l e the more radical activi sts-known as ecodefenders or ecoraiders-practise monkey­ wrenching. A form of i ndustrial sabotage (and yes, called ecotage) . it targets organ­ isations with poor envi ronmental record s . Monkey-wrenchers sink metal spikes i nto trees to prevent them being fe l led, and even advertise for terminal ly-i l l volunteers to make kam i kaze bomb attacks on dams. Much of the new eco-speak i nvolves attach i ng the eco- prefix to old words. There are over 1 00 i n current use, from i nvestments adve rtised as eco-logical, to wholefood shops which provide an eco-menu. You may jump on the eco-band-wagon and go eco-shopping, work towards Ecotopia by movi ng into eco-alignment with your peers, or merely become an eco-freak or an eco-bore. Espe c i a l l y if you are a guppie: a yuppie who has turned green.

undations

Y!Jguistic Fo

25

You may have j ust come to grips with acid rain, but that term has been around though, some more recent coinages which may h e l p you since 1 872. Th ere are, greenoids. Edible land-scaping is the use of edible plants fellow with te unica comm en. k gard bac your In Speciesism is that gauche practice of considering certain species as inferior to hu man s. Last word to a Guardian letter writer, who offers new descri ptions of Britain's polluted landscape . What more apt terms than countrycide, seacide, and rivercide? soURCE: From "Recycling Ecospeak" by D. Rowan (pp. 1 7-18). Gul!dian Wee�. May 1 3, 1 992. Reprinted by permisSIOn.

Let us quote a few more examples of 'green awareness ' language . cul led fro m a variety of source s : •

"It is by no means easy to agree what constitutes pollution" ( B reach, 1 976. p. 8) and 'There are people who would not class an in-the-factory release of toxic substances as pollution" ( B reach, 1 976, p . 92 ).

•

"Man-made fibres: The term does not immediately remind us that we must wrest crude oil from the ground" ( B reach, 1 976, p. 56).

•

"We can justi fiably define modem fertilizers as potential contaminants" ( B reach, 1 976, p. 6 1 ). "A lot depends on how we define an agricultural pest" ( B reach, 1 976, p. 68). "Exposure to the poison, even at the supposed 'safety' level will cause nausea, skin and throat irritations" (Winter, 1 980. p. I 0).

•

"Waste steam from a power station" ( Holister & Porteus, 1 976, p. 78).

•

'The English word ' resources' is a very bad term for such materi als si nce the re­ gives the impression that they regenerate" (Gruhl, 1 978, p. 49).

•

"When speaking of 'economic growth' one evokes the impression, voluntarily or involuntarily, of a natural process" (Gruhl, 1 978, p. 1 88).

•

''To use poison to keep paths and playgrounds clean" (Der Stem, 1 980, p. 1 47).

•

Rigsby ( 1 98 1 ) notes that to use the term "wi lderness" in the context of the creation of a "Cape York Peninsula Wilderness" is "ethnocentric (culture-bound) and we are mistaken not to recognize that many Cape York Peninsular landscapes and plant and animal communities either have been or may well have been substantially modified by the work of Aboriginal people over perhaps 40,000 years of occupa­ tion" ( p . 3 ) . " ' D ispos able' nappies [diapers] are not really disposable at all . As wi th s o many of our modem conveniences, the hidden costs make them unaffordable for daily use. If the welfare of the child is our main concern, any potential risk to that wel fare is well worth avoiding. From this viewpoint, disposable nappies really do not make much sense" (news item in Greenpeace, Vol . 1 5 , No. l , p. 1 5) .

•

26

G R E E N S PE A K

•

•

•

•

'Acid rain' : More correctly this should be described as acid deposition, for it refers to the deposition of acidic materials in rain, as fog, and directly from the air onto foliage. The 'acids' come from combustion of fossi l fuels and are princ ipal ly sulphuric and nitric" (Southwood, 1 992, p. 26) and "In order to i mplemen t the Clean Air Acts ( 1 956, 1 968) power stations in the UK were fitted with tall chimneys on the 'dilute and disperse principle' ; measurements of pollutants were made at ground level in the vicinity of the stations and pollution was shown to have fal len" (Southwood, 1 992, p. 26). "

Lee ( 1 988) comments on two of the words used in describing the culling of newly born seals: "Seal pup" (the traditional Newfoundland designation) is a metaphor. It has sentimental associations for dog owners, but these do not apply to most Newfoundlanders, proudly unsentimental about wild animals and i nsistent on their traditional and "God-given right" to hunt seals. "Baby seal" is not at all the same metaphor as "seal pup" ( p. 23 ). The anti-seal-hunt campaign seized very early on the baby metaphor. Literature was illustrated with an appealing close-up of a large-eyed, cute and cuddly seal pup. World-famous actress Bri gi tte Bardot, now a well-known ani mal rights activist, was shown on television, cradling a seal pup in her arms. Conversely, defenders of the seal hunt such as Janice S. Henke, author of Seal Wars, have angrily rejected the use of "baby" and i ts human i mage for seals. She describes newborn seal pups on ice as "resembling a thick brood of maggots" and the seals as "dull-witted, rather stupid creatures." The term "baby seal" occurs nowhere in Defence of tile Fur Trade and lAunching the Offensive. On the contrary, the former decries the "insidious activities" of schoolteachers and television animators who "anthropomorphise animals" into "lovable" beings. This activity is said to sow "confusion in the minds" of the young "regarding human/ animal relationshi ps." The authors reject language that "speaks in terms of parent/child or other family relationships" when referring to animals.

"B iodegradability: The extent to which a substance can be decomposed-or rotted"-by bacteria and fungi . I mplies that residues from degradation are non­ toxic. One of the most misleading claims in business, because shoppers often assume a biodegradable product to be harmless. Some harmful compounds take much longer to degrade than others and the product can harm the environment while it is rotting. Biodegradation may also be incomplete, sometimes leaving residues in the environment which are more harmful than the original substance. Accumulation in the environment of nonbiodegradable (or poorly biodegradable) substances, such as some biocides, can cause serious problems" (Elkington & Knight, with Harles, 1 992, p. 232). 'Environmental friendliness' has become the new touchstone for the products of ' our consumer society, and political parties of all shades now claim to have a • green agenda. Sadly, such expressions of concern often reveal themselves to be ti ttle "

more than marketing hyperbole or expedient political posturing" (Dahl . 1 990.

p. xii).

tions [d!}guistic Founda •

27

The parti cular problem s of linguistic inadequacy and inappropriate communica­ tion practi ces are exempli fied with the concept of 'sustainabil ity ' . In a recent study 99 were asked what the term "sus­ by Hol singer ( 1 4 ), natural resource managers tai nable lan d use" meant to them. These managers had varied views on the term, in cl uding "pre serv ing resources," "ecologically sound land usc" and "econom­ i call y viable and minimum land degradation ." Conversely, in another exploratory study i nto consequences of employing sus tainable p ractices, farmers complained of the "high input tread-mill" associated with sus tain ability (Gray, 1 994). 1t seems that to farmers in that study, the more sustain able you are, the more outputs into the land are necessary. In a different study by Ison and Humphreys ( 1 993 ), producers were asked to define "sustainable land man agement." Again, the views were varied, and in this study, the authors found they had to remove the term sustainability from al l discussions with producers because it created too much confusion. An earlier study by Tisdall ( 1 990) points to one reason why there are problems with the term "sustainable": Although many peopl e favor "sustainability," they al l want to sustain something different (cited in Penman, 1 995, p. 2).

•

The following comments on a number of forest-related lexicons were made by Suzuki ( 1 993, pp. 1 48- 1 49): 'The forest industry is replete with words that indicate the values underlying its practices. Primary forests are described as 'decadent' or 'overmature ' , as if trees are wasted if they are not cut down. Logging is seen as a practice analogous to farming, from the 'harvesting' of 'crops' to the creation of 'plantations.' Foresters 'cull ' trees, remove ' pest' species, and refer to the use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers as 'silvicultural practice' . Old­ growth forests that haven't been logged are called 'wild ' , while the second growth after logging becomes a 'normal ' forest. Even the word management i mplies that we know what we are doing and can duplicate or even improve on nature."

•

Recently we have heard arguments by ani mal liberationists that the term "pet" should be replaced by the term "companion animal." There have been obj ections by a great number of environmental ists to the term "reduction," which they say misleadingly suggests that things are eliminated rather than converted from one state to another.

Lan guage Resources and Thought: Sapir-Whorf Revived Most of such criticism is concerned with vagueness, semantic underdiffer­ ent � ation and misleading encoding rather than with actual gaps in the area of lexical reference. Some of the implications, that cognition and perception are language driven, are generall y dependent on the well-known and much dis­ cussed Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, although it is seldom explicitly cited by language critics. It has, however, had a renaissance recently, thanks to the perceptive analysis of i ts various strands by Lakoff ( 1 987). The evidence suggests that it is at its least plausible with respect to the alleged influence of

G R E E N SPEA K

28

vocabulary and at i ts most convincing with respect to the influence of gram ­ matical forms on thought and action. However, the characteristics of l i nguis­ tical l y inadequate expressions mentioned above-vagueness, semantic under­ d i fferentiation and misleading encoding-are potential lexical faults independent of how far we adhere to the Sapir-Whorf thesis in general . We el aborate on them below. Philosophical criticism of language is, of course, not a recent phenomenon, and we woul d argue that certain aspects of the perceived mismatch between language and the environmental domai n are the result of a misguided view of language and its functions. Our stud ies of Greenspeak are animated by the Wittgenstein ian insight that languages arc neither fleshed-out formal calculi nor vocabul aries of terms given meaning by what they denote but, rather, lexical and grammatical tools employed for the tasks and projects of our everyday l ives. They are cultural instruments. Our remarks must not be interpreted as yet another criticism o f language, as if we would be better off were it displaced from human affairs by the intuitions of pure experience, nor are we intent on setting up a butterfly collection of data pertai ning to the theme of this book . Our analyses of language are part of an attempt to gai n understanding of how best to engage in environmental di scourse. 1 The project is to hone the instrument, not to abandon the struggle because of defective tools. Here are some examples of substitutions of words, chosen to shift our intuitions from one picture of forestry to another: Current Ll'xiccm

Proposed A ltemati1•es

to clear land

to remove native vegetation

clearing

na ti ve vegetation removal

a development degenerate tree eco l og i cal ly sustainable development greenhouse effect

a factory, houses. etc.

the harvest

wood products

ancient tree development aimed at sustainability human-induced climatic dislocation

to harvest forest

to cut down tree s

land reclamation overmature tree

wetland drai nage old tree

Proposals of this sort would be cases of 'l anguage planning' . Language Planning We begin this task by adopting the perspective of contemporary an d past language planners. The categories used in this branch of applied l i n guis tics

[d!!suistic Foundations

29

�

. Ju de th ose expressed in the terms vagueness, semantic underdifferentiation an encoding, expressi ons used frequently by language plan ners an misleading in a ' language audit ' . With regard to environmental di scourse, g agin h en en g mplified as follows: exe be can eir use

;

•

•

•

Seman tic vaguen ess. Terms criticized as semantically vague by various authors include pollution, progress, advance, primitive, safe, deterrent, pest, and many more. Semantic vagueness abounds in publ ications on both sides of the ongoing environmental debate. Thus we feel that lillie comfort can be derived from statements such as those of the Director of the B ritish Nuclear Forum that nuclear power is safe, affordable and necessary, as none of these terms have any clear referent in the contex t. Semantic underdifferentiation. This category of defective terms is closely related to vagueness, the main difference being that it refers to terms covering a number of qualitatively different phenomena rather than conti nua. An example (discussed by Gruhl, 1 978) is the notion of growing, which refers to natural growth, man­ made growth, arithmetical growth, exponential growth, dangerous (cancerous) growth and various other types of growth.

Misleading encodin g. Examples found include zero-growth (e.g., in 1 97 1 , 3,529,000 new cars were added to those already existing i n the German Federal Republic; cf. Gruhl, 1 978), labor-saving devices (where it is not stated whose labor is saved where and when), fertilizers (which can render soil infertile) and numerous others. In most instances, these are simply infelicities resulting from uncontrolled linguistic development, al though the latter two examples are more subtle. Both serve selectively to highlight only one facet of their place in a form of life.

The Case of the Term "Growth" We think it worthwhile to look in some detail at one example: the use of the word "growth." Problems with the notion of growth have been focused on by a wide spectrum of writers, from environmental ists discussing the l i mits of grow th to lin guists such as Hall iday ( 1 992). Let us briefly il l ustrate how from a very different perception similar conclusions are reached. Meadows, Meadows, and Randers ( 1 992) fel t compelled to add an appendi x on language to th eir book w here the word "growth" is given particular prominence: Following th e dictionary distinction . . . 1U GROW means to i ncrease i n size b y the �similation or accretion of materials. 1U DEVELOP means t o expand or reahze the potentialities of; to b rin g t o a ful ler, greater, or better state. When something grows it gets quantitatively bigger; when it develops it gets qualita­ . tively better, or at least different. Quantitative growth and qualitative i mprove­ ment fol low different laws. Our planet develops over time without growing. Our

30

G R E E N S PEA K economy, a subsystem of the fi nite and non - growing earth , must eventually adapt to a similar pattern of development. ( p. xix)

Hall id ay ( 1 992) offers a detailed critique of some of the uses of the word "growth ." Once again, the a nalys i s he offers is so nicely put that we quote it in ful l : I t does not take much work to show how our world view is constructed by expressions such as these. When we read "output fell sharply," it is obvious that all our negative loadings from childhood come into play: falling is painful, sharp things are dangerous, and both (especially together ! ) are to be avoided. On the other hand [the statement that] traffic is expected to grow calls up all the comfortable smiles of the admiring aunts who told us how we' ve grown, as well as the positive relation of growth to consumption-eat your meat and you ' ll grow i nto a big girl/boy. And we only have to mention a word like shrink to be aware of its pej orative connotations: shrunken bodies and heads, the one who shrinks heads (the psychiatri st}, and so on. Some people have tried to maintain the positive value of grow but reconstrue it in expressions like zero population growth and negative growth; but the zero and the negative sabotage the effort how can anything that is zero or negative be a desirable goal? (Others have tried to find negatively charged words for growth, like gigantism and elephantiasis; but these don ' t work either - the words themselves are too elephanti ne, and even if giants are baddies, the elephants are definitely goodies). It might be more effective to redefine growth as a failure to shrink. Since we are going to have to reduce the GTP (gross terrestrial product) should we not exploit the power of words by making shrink the positive term and labelling growth very simply as negative shrinkage? This is using the power of the grammar: in this case the device of reversing the marking. ( p. 8 3 )

Meanwhile, the debate about the relationship between degradation and growth continues unabated . An extract from a recent article by Kym Anderson in the June 1 5 , 1 994 issue of Australian serves as an i l lustration. How many different senses of the word "growth" can be spotted in th is passage? A small but vocal sub-group of environmentalists believes that trade liberalisa­ tion wil l harm the environment by increasing global incomes and causing international relocation of production and consumption. There is little cause for concern. Consider fi rst economic growth. Some believe an expansion of global pro­ duction, and hence consumption, is undesirable simply because they think it will add to the stresses on the natural envi ronment. But i ncome growth also tends to raise the demand for more stringent environmental policies. As well higher incomes in poorer countries lead eventually to low population growth rates and this reduces pressure on both rural and urban environments. And as the value of

undations [jnsuistic Fo

31

time in developing countries increases as trade liberalisation l i fts poor people 's an labo ur, the relative costs of using wood as a source of household the dem d for ecause of the time taken to collect it. o b als ri fuel ses of the ti mber harvester in developing countries is used as fifths fource Sin this alone could have a major beneficial impact in reducing fuel, ld eho us ho e levels. ( p. 43 ) defores tati on and carbon dioxid

This co mpl ex argu ment clearly identifies the shifts i n the many meanings o f the word growth . Lexical Poverty and Its Rem edy It is difficult to find good examples of nonexisting terms-unless one compares a language like English with another that is more developed or differentially developed in the area of resources for discussing environmental matters, a topic we shall elaborate on in a later chapter. For the time being, we will restrict our search to l isting a few examples of concepts for which there is no adequate lexical item in English: •

a word meaning " a not economi cally useful, unmarketable, ungardenable plant contributing to natural balance" (in other words, a positive weed)

•

a word meaning "not biodegradable"

•

a cover term for capital-i nvestment-type products that do not last longer than it

tak es t o pay them o ff

•

a term for someone w h o does n o t recycle their bottles, papers, and so forth.

•

a short word for "to separate garbage"

•

a special refuse container for recyclable goods, such as Grone Tonne in German

•

a word for the needless transhipping of commodities to places where they are freely available (English cheddar cheese to Australia and vice versa, milk in containers to dairy farm communities, etc.)-we suggest using the expression "to Newcastle."

System atic Adequacy Let us le ave the topic of the referential adequacy of language and turn to exami n e sy ste matic adequacy, a notion that is closely linked with ease of ec�� ng . Th i s ease is achieved in a number of ways. First, it is desirable to . _ Phrn1ze 1co mc encoding-for example, by observance of Zipf's law. Central concepts sh oul d be morphologically less complex than noncentral ones. The c n tral ity of a con cept is clearly culture dependent. A horse is for a steeple­ c e what a as r train is for a commuter. Second, it is noticeable that there are

:

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G R EEN S PEA K

32

very few short words in the environmental lexicon of English and that the shortening processes that have reduced 'sexual i ntercourse ' to ' sex ' or 'grand­ mother' to 'gran ' have not as yet taken place. It is interesting to contrast the terms for recent short human affl ictions with the much larger label s for adverse environmental conditions: Human

En vironmental

AIDS RSI

global wann i ng

slum

soil degradation

crib death

greenhouse effect

ozone depletion

Th ird, there is the generation of new lex ical material from existing morphemes and lexical rules. Although this yields a maximally learnable lexical inventory, it is often in confl ict w i th other factors, such as agreement with international term inology, as pointed out by Rosario ( 1 968). Fourth, there is the use of classifiers, assigning lexical items to a particular semantic field. Classifiers are particularly useful where speed in decoding is essential-for i nstance, classifying chemicals for use by the fire brigade. There is, of course, a very long traditi on of concern for systematic tables for natural classes, reflected , for instance, in the numerous artificial language projects ( ph i l osoph ical languages) that h ave been proposed from the 1 7th century onward. Wi lkins's ( 1 668) An Essay Towa rds a Real Character and a Philosophical Language assumes that "i f the Names of things could be so ordered , as to contain such a kind of affinity or opposition in their letters and sounds, as might be some way answerable to the nature of the things which they signified" (cited in Large, 1 985, pp . 34-35). Wi lkins attempted to achieve this by first setting up tables summari zing such natural classes as were known, to next atomi ze the meaning of the concepts in these tables, and to then assign a constant sound to each atom of meaning. Later designers of artificial languages have come up with many similar schemes. Although the numerous proposals for rigid classification systems were never put i nto practice among the users of vernacular European languages, they were fairly successfully ach ieved in the international chemical nomen­ clature, much of which has survived to the present day. However, co mparab le systems, possibly a result of del iberate naive language engi neeri ng are fo und in a number of ' exotic ' languages. A prime example i s A iwo, spoken on the Reef of Islands (southwestern Pacific). This l anguage has about 4 0 d i fferen t noun classes, comparable to gender. According to Wurm ( 1 9 8 1 ), one such c l ass, signaled by the prefix si-, is that of nouns denoting objects and item s that are despised, unclean, not valuable, dangerous or unpleasant, as i n :

tions linRuistic Foundn

33

Aiwn

sike sing sibe sikonya sikonya

Meaning smal l sore lie loin cloth

waste smoke rrom

a volcano

is interesting to imagine the effects i f such noun c lassifiers were obl igatory in English. Advertising would certainly be affected . Ad vertisers would find it much harder to foist undesirable products on an unsuspecting public, and si-garettes would not even need a government health warning. The principal effect of such a classifier would be to raise the awareness of average speakers to dangers they are normally unaware of. There is, however, the obvious danger of being misled by an inflexible system. Thus, i f it were established that moles were harmful animals, they would become known as si-mole and continue to be known by that name even in more enlightened times when their usefulness has been established and they are eventually reclassified as belong­ ing to the class of useful animals. It has been very d i ffi cult to dissolve the pejorative connotations of the word 'wol f ' , despite the widespread recogn i­ tion of the important and beneficial position these animals have i n the environment. Further, a number of other Aiwo nominal classifiers would also seem to promote awareness of environmental issues : It

nu signals nouns that are dependent on something else for their existence

/cQ signals entities that are, for most of the time, i nert but are liable to sudden dramatic

changes of behavior or appearance

nyo signals items moving or stretching away into the distance

Thus if ' du mps' , 'landfills ' , ' nuclear power station ' or the names of certai n

che mic als were obligatorily prefixed with ka-, language users' attitudes to­ ward such entities might well be different. Instead, the nouns of Standard Average European (SAE) languages belong to many morphological l y un­ m arked semantic and grammatical cryptoclasses, a fact that, on the one hand, e nabl es spe akers to discuss phenomena at a greater level of general ity and in val ue- free terms but, on the other hand, can lead to considerable imprecision mi sin terpretation . Thus, there i s nothing in 'disposal ' that indicates wh e ther one is deal ing with a temporary or a permanent solution, nor does the ' landfi l l ' suggest that this institution is liable to sudden dramatic nges. Th is ex ample is representative of a very large number of similar ones. E lan gu ages, i n contrast to many others (cf. Heine, 1 980), do not encode

and n un �;�

G R E E N S PE A K

34

aspect and time-related changes in any systematic way. Thus, for ex ampl e, Tok Pisin, whose grammar exh ibits many characteristics of Melanesian l an ­ guages, distinguishes between damage and irreparable damage.

bagarap damaged, ruined (not irreparably)

bagarap pinis ru i ned be yond repair

bus bush

bus pinis

taken over by bush, not amenable to human occupation or use

However, English expresses the associated concepts variably by means of cir­ cumlocution or lexicalization, thus clouding the permanently/non-permanently distinction . In practice, this results in numerous ambiguities, such as the fol lowing: •

disposal-This can be interpreted either as ''unsafe temporary getting rid of' or "final disposal of waste, usually through burning or burying" (Landy, 1 979, p. 357). Whereas Landy ( 1 979) lists an entry disposal by dilution ( p. 357), Breach ( 1 976, p. 86) insists that dilution is no answer to waste disposal. In actual fact, it is an answer to disposal in the first sense.

•

safety-The question is whether substances or installations are temporarily safe or safe pinis, safe in principle and perpetuity. Safety and safety levels are very much time-dependent phenomena.

•

pesticide, deterrent, disinfectant and similar terms-It should be noted that these expressions refer to temporary rather than permanent phenomena. In many cases. today 's deterrent i s tomorrow's museum piece and today's pesticide tomo rrow's staple food for pests.

In the examples j ust discussed , we can observe a tendency, a very strong one as anyone who peruses the various glossaries of environmental terminol­ ogy that have appeared (Hol ister & Porte us. 1 976; Landy, 1 979; Young, 1 993 ) can see, to prefer nominals to verbal expressions. Consider the fol lowing key words in Young ( 1 993): Data compression Dispersion in rivers and estuaries Dispersion in the environment Dispersion of toxic substances in freshwater systems Dissolved oxygen

ns fd!}guistic Foundatio

35

tem: identification of optical parameters Earth - atmosp here sys theory ance disturb cal Ecol ogi eling mod l gica Ecol o on Eco logical modeling: aggregati errors chical hierar ng, eli mod gical Ecolo

Ecological modeling: new perspectives Ecological modeling, stoch astic Ecosystem compartmental modeling Ecosyste m networks: measures of structures

Energy resources, renewable Energy systems in ecology En vironmental theory and analysis Environ mental modeling and the scientific method Environmental modeling, physically based Environmental modeling with advanced computers Eutrophication modeling in freshwater systems

Such nominals tend to be strongly biased in favor of an interpretation as permanent states. It would seem preferable to use verbs i n those cases where permanency is not implied .

Social Adequacy The parameter of social adequacy is best i l l ustrated with an actual example: the doma in of discourse about human (over)popu lation . Fear of population growth has been inflamed by extravagant language. Examples are the terms 'popul ation explosion' , ' people pol lution ' and ' popul ation bomb ' . These terms are not just catchwords of popu l ar wordsmiths, whose rhetoric one is acc usto med to discount. Rather, they have been coi ned and circu lated by d i s ting ui s h ed scientists. The term 'population control ' itse l f has been used for years to refer to measures ai med at reduci n g, for example, the rate at which th e world 's popul ation i ncreases, the actual number of people i n certain P� p� lati ons and con trol on a popul ation density. It is a quite vague term , but h t s ts not th e mai n perceived disadvantage . Nor has much been said against bei n � sy ste matic al ly inadequate . Population control belongs to the parat gm : b t rth con tro l , pest contro l , weed contro l , bug contro l . However, the proxi m ity of such terms already suggests some problems regard ing social ad� qu acy. One woul d not l i ke to see popul ation control in the same light as P otson ing pig eon s or oth er vermi n .

�

��

G R E E N S P EA K

36

There is another more recent argument about the soc ial adeq uacy of th is term, which emerged at the recent United Nati ons Con ference on En viro n­ mental and Developmental Preparatory Committee meeting in N ew York. Abzug ( 1 992) reports, Jessica M atthews charges ludicrously that women at the PrepCom scaled the fate of the population language, and she attributes this to i rrational antagonism to ' population contro l' . If she had been present, she would have teamed that ' population control' terminology is as outdated as the dinosaur and unacceptable to those who believe in democratic procedures. Women reject the concept of 'control ' of their bodies by governments and i nternational institutions, with its connotations of Chi na's forced one-baby-per­ family quota system, forced sterilization of women in Latin A merica and of Native A merican women in the United States, misuse of Third World women as uninformed subjects for experimental contraceptives, and the Bush adminis­ tration's relentless effort to deprive American women of free choice. Women believe that the ' moral ly correct' position is to defend women's health and reproductive rights and freedom to 'contro l' their own bodies. We seek government and economic policy changes to ensure that half the world's popu­ lation are assured of their basic rights to survival , to food, shelter, health care, information and full access to the whole range of family planning services they need to make informed decisions about family size. ( p. 5 )

What is argued is that t h e term 'population contro l ' takes away responsibility for their bodies from women, thereby dehumanizing and degrading them. Like many other human expressions involving the term 'control ' , there is a socially undesirable differential between control ler and controlled. New terms are needed in the perception of many women activists to promote a more equitable way of stabil izing the size of the human population.

Re ality Construction and "Deeper" G rammar

We indicated earlier that the lexicon can be approached either from the question of its adequacy or from that of its role in real i ty construction . Having given some examples of the former, let us now turn to reality construction or framing. One can conceive of two opposi ng v iews of the rel ationsh ip between l anguages and realities: a mapping or labeling view, under which the function of language is to label preexisting real ities; and a real ity construction view. under which signi ficant amounts of real ity are brought into being by l i nguisti c devices. A more sophisticated version of the latter argues that it is not so much

io b{!!suistic Foundat ns

37

real ity that arc . brought i n to bei n g or such but pe rspectives on . real 1· u·es as c to human bc mgs . made iabl are avaJ that ity eal r f c ts o view, e question of adequacy m u s t be seen h t then former the pts do a on e owing: l fol the things, other ong am of, in te rm s

as� • • •

Languages either having o r not having adequate tenns for entities of th e real world Languages having too delicate or too indelicate distinctions Languages using misleading tenns to describe reality

The exam ple of ' greenhouse effect' should have alerted u s to the second possib ility : that real ities are ' brought i nto being ' , that is, become avai lable for hu man atte ntion , and in some instances have their boundaries fi xed by lin gui stic practice s . Other examples are ozone holes, animal rights, eucalypt dieback , acid rain and others to be d iscussed later in this book. The poin t about these last two examples is not that, for example, eucalypt tree s only die because we h ave a word for it and that rai n only becomes acidi fied for the same reason but, rather, that the very c hoice of a new lexical item selectively frames, suppresses and highl ights perceptible aspects of phenomena. Moreover, once created as a noun, expressions such as 'dieback ' and 'acid rai n ' can become causal agen ts in an ill-understood and i l l -control­ led chain of putative events. A label such as ' acid rai n ' is not a description, an explanation or a cause, but a l i nguistic construct . It has led to attitudes and practices that may or may not lead to a better understanding of complex ecological processes. The creation of such terms is no guarantee that they w i l l d o actual work. S ometimes, a n e w language-driven perspective fai l s to reveal a new aspect of reality because there was no such aspect to be revealed . Yet the fact that a new expression has m ade a new aspect avai lable to h uman beings can never close off the possibil ity that there are many more that could become avai lable.

Family Resemblance, or Semantic Essences?

� n Greenspeak, as i n other c l usters of d i alects, we find particular words used In m an y contexts and i n seemingly incompatible ways. Wi ttgenste i n ( 1 95 3 ) �as warned against sl ipping into t h e fal l acy of "semantic essentialism," that 1 5 • � f thi n king that because the same word is used i n a variety of contexts and a d ivers ity of way s there must be a common ( and h idden) semantic essence or c om m on me aning that w i l l explain the use of the same word i n al l these con texts. t I mig ht even be assumed that we should l ook for a corresponding c1_om m on attribute that all the contexts of use have in common. B e l ieving i n In gu tstJ . . c es sen ces may send us off on a hopeless quest for the material

38

G REENS PEAK

essences that supposedl y correspond t o them. Instead , Wittgenste i n points ou t in many cases a field of use of a common expression is held tog ether networks of similarities and differences in use, such that some of th e uses of words that belong somewhere in the network have next to noth ing in common with others located el sewhere. In his well-known example of the use of the word "game" he l i sts all sorts of activities we actual ly call games, pointing to the complex patterns of similarity and difference we can discern in their uses w h i le noticing that there are uses that h ave scarcely any similarities one to another. We c an i l lustrate the point for Greenspeak with the word ' nature ' . H ere are some of the m an i fold uses of the expression . There are many context-; in which Greenspeakers make essential use of the words 'nature' and ' n atural ' . In trying to understand the variety of meanings carried by a certain expression , it is helpfu l to look for just what is it in any particular context that someone who uses these words is ru l i ng out. We can d i stinguish several senses of the words nature and natural by this technique, i n eac h of which there is an explicit or implicit contrast.

b;

The Natural and the Artificial In an important sense, what is natural is contrasted to the artificial or h uman l y constructed . But this distinction can take on d i fferent valuational l oadings in d i fferent contexts. ' Natural ' is to be preferred to ' artificial ' in cases in which the art i ficial is taken to be alien to or imposed upon what human beings do unreflectingly and perhaps "naturall y." There is a related sense of the word natural that expresses the idea of something being spontaneous and i n tuitive. Th is is superior to what is labored, contrived or formal . This is the way in which the words nature and natural were used in much romantic l i terature . However, the polar contrast between the natural and the artificial can be eval uated in the opposite manner. 'Nature ' and ' n atural ' c an h ave a negative connotation . Nature provides the raw material that has to be worked i nto shape by the efforts of civil ized people. The basic polari ty is not a d ichotomy. There are m any objects in our civili zation that are indeterminate, neither natural nor artificial. We have in m i nd such things as fanns and gardens. Whether we take a farm to be n atural or art i ficial depends on the use that is bei ng made of the idea of 'the farm' in the di scourse of the moment. This con trast at ti mes became i nstitu tionalized in the very architecture of garden s . The natural garden was a con tri ved simul acrum of ' the wild ' , whereas the formal garden expressed the con cept of nature tamed to the uses of humanity.

39

tuistic Foundations Un In organic The Organ ic an d the

A seco nd distin ction of importance i n which ' n ature ' and ' n atural ' are d w ith a nother ' opposi te ' shows up in the way that ' Nature ' is used con traSte org anic parts of the world. Again we can find a differen t . to refer to the " . to 1 s messy, su b�ect rel at1 ve va I ues. Th e natura I as orgamc of ons sum pti ele to and are clean pure, Crystals is ant. inorganic the and lly, sme � cay and be re fe rre d to ce ntipe des. B ut we can a! so fi nd t �t val uatiOn reversed . Nature p _ humane and seen m oppos1t1on to the dead stuff of the is warm . breath ing, inorg anic . A gain, th ere is an indeterminate class of objects-for example, mountains, cloud s, rivers, suns ets and so on , which are inorganic and can be approved as ad mirable or deni grated as bleak and soul less depending on the discursive ·

:

�

cont e xt. The

Rural and the Urban

A third contrast matches ' nature ' and 'natural ' to the rural, in contrast to all that is urban. In some of the documents we have been examining (e.g. , Earth Supplement, p. 34), we have an identification of what is natural with village life, contrasted with l i fe i n the c i ty, which is unnatural and therefore to be valued less (Herzlich, 1 973). Yet even in this case there are indeterminate o r ambiguous things. What are we to make of parks i n cities, or to use an image borrowed from George Orwell, the aspidistra in the parlor? We do value rus in urbes, the coun try i n the town. The Wilderness and the Peopled The fourth distinction comes from thinking of nature as the wi lderness, the world without pe ople. Here the contrast is with inhabited reg ions of any sort . In a w ay this contrast is a kind of amalgam of the three contrasts d i scussed �bove. The wildern ess i s not artificial, not created by human beings, i t is not Inorgan ic, and it is not urban . A variant on this contrast give us the conception of ' w ild life' , in contrast to domesticated plants and animals. Wildlife is se lf- sustai ni ng and so i n no need of human management. Plants and animals �e in the wild without the management of farmers and gardeners. In this l stm ct io n too , we can find contrasting patterns of val uation. This has come the fo re in a contro versy i n Delaware, with respect to preservation of the astern S ho re . It has been pointed out that the landscape that this group is I. ntent on pre serving is not a wilderness at all. It is the work of thousands of Years of transfor mation by the indigenous popul ations of that area. Even here

�

�

c:

and Strauss, Hass, and H arras ( 1 989).

2. Cf. Harris ( 1 990), Davis and Taylor ( 1 990) and Wolf and Love ( 1 993).

Rhetorical Uses of Science

A a

mong the most potent rhetorical resources of contemporary discourse arc the termi nology and even the results and theories of the n t ural sciences. Of course, there are many ways of looking on the usc

o f scienti fic terminology and theory other than its use as a persuasive rhetoric .

But, we believe, it i s a s much t o their role a s rhetorics that w e owe the use of fragments of the standard vocabu l aries and theories of science within Green­ speak docu ments and speeches as it is to their use in reporting matters of fact in professi onal journal s. We shal l refer to the use of a scienti fic vocabu lary ou tside its usual area of appl ication as ' scientism ' . The very word 'science ' i tse l f can be used scientistical ly as in ' l i brary science ' , 'Christian science' an d so on. ' As we p ointed out in Chapter I and wish to reiterate very strongly in this chap ter, the identification of the deployment of a fragment of a scienti fi c � h eory, of a measure of an atmospheric constituent, of the effects of certain tn dustri a l proc esses, as persuasive rhetoric does not imply that the science so d ep l oyed is false or suspect . There have been occasions when the anx iety to pro v e a point has overcome the natural caution of some group using the te ch niq ues of scien ce. But, by and large, the uses we wi l l d i scuss are bona fide s cien ce . There is one striking way in which rhetorical conclusions go �eyo nd sci entific premises, and that is in the expansion and compression of t e c a le s We shal l have much more to say about this temporal feature of J� s sc ie nce as Greenspeak in this and later chapters . � n an tiq uity, rhetoric was studied as part of the trai n i n g for legal and POh lJ. c al de b ate Teachers of rhetoric were well aware of certain techniques in .

.

51

52

G R E E N S PEA I(

the use of la � guage that would help to persuade an audience to fav or on e account or v1ew of some matter-say, the character of an accus ed-over another. We can understand i n what way a rhetorical device works o n l y if we look at it in light not only of the beliefs that have been successfu l l y prom oted but also those it has made unattractive ( B i l l ig, 1 9 87). The tradition al ho me of rhetoric is in the dialectic of debate in adversarial contexts. The u se of sci ence as a rhetorical device presupposes an implicit contrast with the irrati on al ity of other way s of looking at the world. There is a rhetoric of science as wel l as a rhetorical use of science by others. We shal l not be concerned with how scientists persuade each other of the belief-worth iness of their findings (La­ tour & Woolgar, 1 979). We can i llustrate the persuasive or rhetorical use of scientific terminology with a news item from the July I , 1 995 issue of the London Trmes. The head l ine says that the temperature at Wimbledon reached 1 1 0° F. The usual way of presenting air temperature in the United Kingdom, for example used invariably in the London Trmes, is in degrees Celsius, not Fahren heit-in this ca'ie, 38° Celsius. B oth ' 1 1 0° F' and ' 3 8 ° C' refer to the same degree of agitation among the Wimbledon molecules. Why report the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit in a headl ine? It seems to us that the larger numerical expressions of the same physical property, ' heat ' , is a good deal more dramatic. Th i s suggestion is supported by the fact that when reporting very cold weather the Celsius scale is always used , havi ng the rhetorical advantage. One never fi nds 1 6° F used i nstead of - I 0° C! Here we are confronted directly with the dual i ty of accreditation as was discussed in Chapter 2 . Both tempera­ ture read ings arc accredited as science, but they di ffer in their powers of ex pression of subjective experience.

Science in Greenspeak

We shal l use excerpts from a number of documents to demonstrate th e way in which the voice of science is empl oyed as the voice of authority in Green ­ speak. We shall show how the use of certain rhetorical characteristic s of scientific discourse in general reappear as fami l iar devices for can vass ing rhetorical support in environmentalist claims and debates . Of course, we do not wish to deny the importance of environmental science i n diag nosin g problems and suggesting solutions. It is by just such research that it was fo un d that algae develop more rapidly in iron-rich water and so fix mo re c arb on dioxide. Perhaps i ncreasing the iron content of the earth 's water wou ld balan ce some of the emissions of 'greenhouse gases ' . In their campai gn ag ai nst the a oceanic disposal of the Brent Spar platform, Greenpeace clai med to scientific case for their campaign against the dumping of the ri g. Th iS case

�ave

Rhetorical Uses o[ -

Science

53

be flawed . The viabil ity of the scienti fic case for and l ater sh own to program is less important, we believe, than the rhetori­ ical act pr me a g ID st so shaped by the d i scursive conventions of the natural ourse disc a of ca ower erned not with the scientific question of whether Green­ conc arc We sc i· ces. their factual c l aim but, rather, with the ir usc of in wrong or ht rig peace were . ns m presentmg J t . conventiO ve urs1 disc ci en ti fic source of knowledge and a resource in t h e shaping of th a is bo ce' 5 ' Sc ien to its use i n the latter task that our anal ysis i s directed . is n. It nio opi ub lic papers publ ished in mainstream scientific that mind in bear also ust ne m nce their authors not only wish to report si duality, this display also journ als secure the belief of their readers in those findings. We to but gs ndin fi th eir of concepts, theories and measures usc the ng i display in that rate reite m ust by conservatives or reform­ whether Greenspeak, in sciences ral natu e th m fro ers, as persuasive, we do not mean that Greenspeakers who, for example, recal i brate temporal parameters arc guilty of fraud or dishonesty. Language is a kit of tools used for purposes . We can only assess the use o f any tool by examin ing its relation to the task which it is used to perform . When scienti sts are reporting how they bel ieve the world is, we understand their use of the dialects of science in one way ; when they or someone else i s using the language of science in support for a program of pol itical action, we must understand thei r use of those di scursive devices i n other terms-n amel y, as to how far they have the power to persuade. In this study, our question is: Why does science have this power? was.

� !

.

.

. .

b

Scientific Rhetoric and Political Work We be gin our analysis with an example of Greens peak in which the rhetorical

use of 'scien ce' is quite plain to see, si nce in some respects it has lost i ts moo rin gs in s cience proper. From the writings of Teddy Goldsmith ( 1 992) we sh all demons trate the way i n which the voice of scientific authority is em­ ployed to clo se the gap between the scientific evidence that is drawn on by the autho r and the political response he wishes to encourage in his readers. We sh al l c on trast the political judgments he expresses-that the commitme nt so me govern ment to sound environmental polic ies is ' superficial and half , carted ' -with the 'six scienti fi c poi nts' presented by this author as, so to say, wam ping' the way in which the pol iticians express themselves. From the ay 30. 1 99 2 issue of the London Ttmes we take an example of d i saster rhe tor ic in the fol l ow ing quo tation:

�f �

�

Gl o al wa rmi ng, ozo ne depletion, desertification, large scale p o l l u tion and speci es loss we re all threatening to combine with runaway poverty and hu n ge r

54

G R E E N S PEA K i n the Thi rd World in one crisis which could destroy ' the security, well-being and very survival of the planet ' . It was the most frightening analysis possible was not dismissed as exaggeration. (Goldsmith, 1 992, p. 1 7 )

yet it

Why did it have this privileged status? Wel l , because Goldsmith, auth or of the article we have quoted, claims a unanim i ty and seniority for the authorities he cites, as speaking with the voice of science . This unanimity and seniority w as of course a spin-off from the presentation of the report in a scie ntific mode. I n this paragraph, a conditional conc lusion is offered on the b asis of w h at amounts to a uti l i tarian argument. I f the practices of the indus trial nations continue unabated, there is going to be a massive crisis in which the Third World will be impoverished and the planet w i l l be destroyed. S trong words indeed . Interestingly, the argument is set out in terms of the situation for human beings, rough l y in terms of what would be conducive to the greatest good of the greatest number of people. There is a more general utilitarian argument associated with the ' deep ecology ' movement ( Devall & Sessions, 1 987): The moral ly privileged position of human beings, assumed i n much Greenspeak l iterature, is brought into question . This is a point to which we shal l return from time to time: the unargued assumption that the health of Earth in some sense is to be identified with the continual presence on it of human beings and the quality of l i fe defined exclusively in terms of human well-being. In d i scussing the science- influenced rhetoric of Greenspeak, we must bear in mind that it conti nual ly i nteracts with contestable assumptions about the moral place and role of human beings in the biosphere. The Structure of Scientific Discourse To fully understand the force of science as rhetoric, we must look closely at the origi nati ng context, the discourse of ordinary science. We shal l firs t look at the way in which the content of a scientific discourse is organized. General l y speaking, we have the fol l owing structure: To make an i nves tigation pos sib le at all, there must be an abstraction or ideal ization of the phenom ena of interest . This procedure is control l ed by our adherence to a general assum ption abo ut or the ki nds of things, substances and processes that there are in the wo rld . F Iy � le � example, 1 7th-century physic ists, such as Robert Boyle, as a way of mg nk describing the behavior of gases class i fi ed them as ' e l astic stuffs ' . Th1 u dy of gases as elastic stuffs suggests a way of studyi ng their properties . We st test t � ere e l astic i ty of springs by comparing their deformations unde r diff weights . B oyle decided to fol low up this idea by constructi ng and ing w ith a gas ' spri ng' . Th is was the famous Boyle apparatus , w ith wh 1 c

expe n�en t­ h he

of Science Rhetorical Uses

55

t Hook a:d voh isluasmesistan of an enclosed sample of a gas-in this case, air-was inversely t : the pressure exerted on it. By experi menting i n many other ways pr portion to

discovered the first general law of gas behavior: that

' th di fferent versions of this gas spring, physicists were able to arrive en tually at the most comprehensive of all gas laws :

::

PV = RT,

where p is the pres sure exerted on the gas, V is the volume occupied, T is the gas tem perature and R is a constant. But why is it that a confi ned sample of gas behaves as if it were a gas spring? Why are gases best thought of for scientific purposes as elastic stuffs? To build an explanation, a later generation of scientists tried to imagine what the real nature of gases might be . They proposed a mechanism that would simulate the experimentally discovered behavior of gas spri ngs. We can call such an imagined mechanism an explanatory model . An explanatory model is not a free invention. It is constructed by reference to some general assumption about the natural kinds that make up the world, even those aspects of it that we are unable directly to observe. In the case of gas theory, the favored natural kind was 'material particle in motion ' . So a gas was imagined to be a swarm of Newtonian particles, moving about in a confined space, colliding with one another and with the wall s of the confining vessel . These imagi ned particles were called 'molecules ' . A mathematical study of the way these imaginary particles should behave yielded the formula

We notice that the two formulae we have derived, the one from the use of an ex plan atory model and the one from experiments with an apparatus that represents a 'stripped down ' version of the world, are formal l y similar to one another. Th e law of the behavior of gas springs is PV = RT. The law of the beh avior of an enclosed swarm of gas molecules is pv = l /3nmc 2 • It is relatively easy to establish rules for interpreting the relevance of each in terms of the o ther. P ( pressure) is p (momentum change as particles bounce off the wal ls of the vessel ), V and v are both expressions for volume, and T (tempera­ u re) is inte rpreted as energy (a function of nmc 2 ). It is the similarity of the aws th at all owed Clausius, Maxwell and Boltzmann to offer the behavior of mo lecu les as a tentative explanation of the behavior of gases. L 1 ookin g at any discourse that proclaims itsel f to be scientific, we must be ert to ide ntify the natural kinds that are controlling the construction or

�

a

56

G R E E N S PE A K

conception of t h e models invol ved in the experimental and the oret ic al re search program s . Only when we have identi fied these correctly do we have a cl ear understanding of the content of the di scourse and its standing as scie nce. Part of the persuasive power of science comes from the pla usi b i l i ty of the assu mp­ tions that lie behind seem ingly objective descriptions a n d explanatio ns of the phenomena of interest. The Imperial ism of Natural Kinds In every scientific discourse, assumptions of natural kinds as the sou rces of explanatory model s and controlling the ideali zation of phenom ena that make experi ments possi ble are the ultimate sources of intelligib ility and o f the meanings and structural characteristics of the discourse itself. But it should be poi nted out that sources compete for hegemony in any particular branch of science. For example the concept of 'elastic stuffs ' . which plays such an important role i n the science of gases , has two possible com pe ting forms. In the way Stephen Hales used this model it was sufficient simply to identify e l astici ty as the key property of gases, whereas in the hands of Lavoisier it was the molecular features that were salient. Compare the way these two great scientists explai ned the famous bel l j ar experiment. In this experiment, a burning candle fl oating on a cork is enclosed in a bell j ar with a finite amou nt of air. The candle eventual l y goes out after the volume of air in the bell jar has decreased by one ti fth . Accord i ng to Hales, the bel l j ar ex periment shows that combustion causes air to lose a proportion of its el as ti city According to Lavoisier, combustion removes some of the molecules, indeed one fifth o f them , from the mix ture of active and passive components in the a i r It removes what we would now call the oxygen molecules from the original nitrogen/oxy­ gen mi xture. I f the molecular account wins out his toric al ly over the general­ ized e l asticity account, we are strongly inclined to treat the phenomena that we used the concept elasticity to explain as actually molecular phenom ena. This is a point of the very greatest importance as we shal l see when we com e to analyze Greenspeak discourses from the po i n t of view of the explan ato ry models they invoke . Some explanatory models, how eve r, are simpl y aids to thoug h t and are not taken seriously as depictions of a reality independ en t of of h uman beings. Deciding between a real ist and a heuristic inter preta ti on e explanatory model s is neither easy nor secure. However, if a mod el is to serv as the basis of a program of action it is obviously of great im portance to k now ate whether it is being used as an aid to thought or whether it is an ad equ representation of how the world real ly is. . · on tY H owever, our beliefs about the nature of the world general ly g 1 ve pn ery to som e basic natural k i nd on the basis of which the classi ficati on of ev .

.

·

s of !!f!_etorical Use

Science

51

So in biology we have ' molecules '- 'cel ls'- ' organs ' ­ el se is set up. 'biosphere ' . Each natural science has i ts 'ontolog i­ gies'olo ec ' s'g ni sm Such hierarchies explain the choice of explanatory inds ' . k of y rch iera Harre & Way, 1 993 ) . Changes i � sue hier(Aronson, in� ipl disc ch ea odel s in : hnked to changes m expl an atory models. H tstoncally, are ably vit ne h ies i ai n , it should be obvious th at prac­ either direction . Ag go in may ence in flu . on the back of assumptiOns about the nature of the world. de s ri am t 'cal progr We will ill ustr ate the application of this way of analyzing the content of examination of the way in which Darwi n sci en ti fic d iscou rses by a brief analysis o f the natural origins o f the famous s i h in dels mo cted trU cons an imals we know today and that is revealed i n the fossil ts and plan of ersity div up, step by step, of a pattern of building the as this see could We cord. re in terloc king anal ogies under a basic choice of type on which al l his pictures of evo lution were to be dev ised. Here we have an example of ' metaphors doing a persuasive job ' , an idea we develop in more detail in Chapter 5 . First o f all is the abstraction o r ideal ization of nature i n which Darwin pays great attention to genealogies o r lines of descent, the ' bloodstock ' conception with which all the farmers and horse breeders of his time were imbued . This device leads to an analytical model, 'nature as l i ke a great farm ' . The very same generic type of phenomenon also can be thought of as the contro l l i ng source of Darwin's explanatory model , the idea o f natural selecti on. On the farm , stock breeders make a systematic selection of breeding animals. Trans­ ferred to nature as the source of an explanatory model this forms the basis of Darwin's theory of the origin of species by natural selection. Darwin's presentation o f his theory can be summarized in accordance with the model structure we have just out l ined . The source of h i s controlling model is the be havior of farmers, pigeon fanciers and other stock breeders and the way in whic h varieties arc developed in domestic ity. There is domestic vari ation, gen eration by generation, of animals and plants in farm and garden. Then there is do mestic selection of breeding stock. Darwin points out that this proces s yiel ds a vast variety of novel forms of pl ants and animals, breeds as dome stic vari eties. Th is entire structure is then transferred to the natural world , to the wild, to nature as self-originating and sel f-managing. Accord ing to Don Schon ' s ( 1 980) treatment of scientific metaphors, the ex pl anatory po wer of a science grows when concepts arc displaced from one c � te xt to a noth er. They take some of their original meanings with them, but 1 et r me ani ng s are modified and transformed in the course of insertion i n to h. e new co nte xt. Darwi n describes n atural variation in the w i l d , such as the 1 e rs ity of the forms of the beaks of the fi nches of the various Galapagos 1 5 an ds . H is pro blem is to account for natural novelty. If the fi nches had a c o rn rn o n an ce stor, 1 what process n e w shapes of their beak? H i s produces the e x p an a tory met h od i s the same a s that u � ed in the domestic context: Namely,

�htn. g

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·

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58

G R E E N S P EA K

h e employs t h e concept o f selection o f a breeding stock. In transferri n g th' u . concept from the domesttc context to the context of nature, of the wi ld th e concept is subtly trans formed . The term 'selection ' in the phrase 'natural selection' is to be u n ders tood i n a somewhat d i fferent way from the same word ao; it is used in the do mestic context. Farmers and plant breeders are overtly active of sele ction . There i s no intentional breed ing in nature. ' Selection of a breeding stock' then doe s not describe a process common to farm and forest but serves to bridge the gap between intentional and nonintentional processes of selection by pointing to a fu nctional s i m i l arity. For the rest of the book, Darwin deve l op s and differ­ entiates the concept of natural selection from that of domestic by the deletion of various unwelcome features that are part of the concept of s e l ec ti on as it is used in its original domestic context. He needed to find a pattern o f nonagentive , nonteleological, nonhuman causal ity that would perform a simi­ l ar selective function as that performed by the human agent as sel ec ti ve breeder. In this way we can understand how the content of the theory of natural selection is c reated and through the use of the ' breeding' model is attractively and persuasive l y ' packaged ' . '

'

'

Some Scientific Models in Environmentalist Debates

Thermodynamic Models 1: Cycles and Balances We turn now to an analysis of the models that appear in the first chapter o f a well -known collection of environmental ist essays (Southwood, 1 992). In this chapter we are presented with a general analysis of environmental issues w i thin the framework of a conventional scienti fi c discourse. To understan d the force of what is being advocated, we must extract the models being deployed and try to identify their sources. Analysis reveals two striking d iscursive devices. There are thermodynamic models galore, and these are i nterwoven with subtle recalibrations of time. Together they lock into p l ac e powerful system of metaphors with apocalyptic implications. What is the generic source of models of basic ecobi oph y sic al proce s.se s that is at work in Southwood 's chapter? Wel l , patently it is t hermod y nam i c s I t is used for analyzing, idealizing and extracting conceptually m anage b l e t. patterns from what we know of human life and its impact on the e nv i ro n e 1 The leit-motif of many of the models found in Southwood ( 1 99 2, P · 6) 5 . transformation of ti mescales through the shrinking and expandin g of f 0 the thermodynamics of a generalized biology are recruited to the r he o rt c an d Greenspeak. The basic thermodynamic mode l that serves to sim pli fy d sc hematize the relations between people and their enviro nment, su btl e

a

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W�IC

an

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59

ence torical Uses of Sci

they are, appears in the guise of an ideal ized and abstracting comp lex as formul a : I = (P x E)

+

(P x E x N ) ,

an i mpact on the environment, P is the number of people, where 1 is the hum per capita, �nd N represents the nonrenewable energy E is the en erg y used a l aw of nature, say, e Th is looks for all the world hke

us .

PV = RT.

Where does the abstract formula of the thermodynamic model fit onto the world as we know it? Darw i n ' s abstract model of natural selection appears concretely in the patterns of d istri bution of the beaks of finches. The law of molecules is matched to the law of gas springs by various identity rel ations. In Green speak, the identity is forged between an aspect of the thermodynam i c model an d something apparently nonthermodynamic, namely food, that comes to the fore as the argument develops (Southwood, 1 992, p. 1 2). It is in that mo­ ment that the model and i ts subject are tied together. We are invited to consider the impact of human life on the environment in general thermodynamic terms, but terms that have been temporally adj usted and rendered human. South wood begins his account with a striking model of the early state of affairs on planet Earth . This model takes the form of an imag i ned scenario of the early history of the planet. The central concept of the model world that Southwood describes is the photobiont, the first "photosy nthesising m icrobes that produced oxygen" ( p . 6). Of course, this is a construction, an i nven tion, a pic ture of the way in which the origins of the organ ic world as we know it mi ght be understood . But from the point of view of rhetoric, i t is also a picture of the way an organism can transform the entire global atmosphere. In teres tingly, the way i n which Southwood employs his model involves the deleti on of features of the biology of those photobionts we can study in contemporary enviro nments and the substitution of other features that fit h i s m odel organi sms for their role in his virtual model Earth. The Southwood m odel works in the followin way g : I n due co u rse these chan ges [to the environment] were to drive the anaerobic organ i s m s that origin ally populated the earth to take refuge i n unusual environ­ men ts su ch as su lphur streams or the guts of other animals . ( p. 6)

��

e even ts occu � rred over eons of time by our standards. Our knowledge of e • ol ogy of phot o bionts is drawn from the observed behavior o f such 0 rgani s ms In su 1 p h ur strea ms and other unusual environments over ti mespans ·

60

G R E E N S P E A I(

of at most a week or two. In the essay we are analyzi ng, the b i o l ogi c al phenomena of the model world is based on the anaerobic biol ogy of th e sulphur streams proj ected over eons of time. I n the model, the c onc ept of photobiont and its e ffect on its environment have been subtly tran sfo rmed . temporal characteristics have been adj usted to fi t its role in the virtu al worl d of the imagined Earth history. But the an alogy up � n which the usc of photobiont biology in contemporary Greenspeak .IS set up m another way : between the effect o f the activities of ' homo sapiens' on the global environment and that of prim i t i v e ' photo b i on ts ' . This requires a second recalibration of the temporal concepts of photobiology. In the model world there is imagined to be a very slow rate of change, compared with the l ater h istory of bio-evolution. The human time scale is ultrashort compared with that of the photobiontic model . Homo sapiens threatens to transform the atmosphere in decades in a way comparable to the e ffect of photobionts in eons. Th is suggestion depends on a rhetorical use of a double temporal recal ibrat ion of processes descri bed in the terms of the natural sciences. In highl ighting the rhetorical force of the compression and decompression of ti mescales we must emphasize once again that we are n o t impugning the scientific val idity of i nductive reasoning from l i m i ted domains of evidence. S i m ilar recal ibrations can be seen in discussions of population grow t h in relation to the ex haustion or ovcrcxploitation of resources. Again, our focus on the rhetorical force of such recal ibrations should not be interpreted as if it were an attack on demography. In many instances, the arg u m ent or analysis di splays the human population growing exponential ly by d ec ades , with cor­ respond ing atmospheric changes mapped onto a similar time s c al e, u t by i n ferences from data from the ice ages that cycled over hundreds of thousands of years . By inserting human activi ties into the ' eval uation ' we have explicit recalibration of the temporal parameters of atmospheric change. In effect we end up with a discourse i n which tens of years of human h istory and tens of th ousands of years of geological history are subtly mapped on to a com mon cali bration. There is a perfectly respectable pattern of inductive inferences l y i ng behind the apocalyptic conclusion of such reasoning. The point, we must reiterate, is not to impugn the scientific a distingui shed scientist's analyses but to highl ight their role in a disc o �rs e presented as a contribution to environmental ism. As such, it does not JU.s t n report but must aim to persuade. I t may wel l be that hu ma n bein gs can do I th decades what photob ionts achieved in eons. The persuasi ve power � f rhetorical parallel, we argue , comes in l arge p art from the time. South wood does not take the time to explain the parall el. I ndeed , WI never states it explici tly. The recal ibration of time, as a rh etori c al tro pe. l op . e v play an increasing role in our analysis as our studies of Green speak d e

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Uses of Science Rheton·c,nl ..

61

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Thenn

od yn amic M odels II : The Gree nhouse S tory

m The m o st i po rtant thermodyn am i c mod e l , from the point o f view o f the tion of env i ronmental ism as science, is based on the analogy of b l ic percep enh ouse. Th i s i m age fu nctions as an abstract and idea l i z i n g gre a to h many environmental d i scourses . T h e rhetorical use o f t h e reat g a in model to everyone who reads a daily paper or l i stens to the rad i o l i ar m i fa is del mo gauge t h e rhetorical role of t h i s model w i t h i t s apocalyptic To TV. es tch or wa warm i n g ' we shall anal yze a measured presentation o f the global ' of t2 ep nc co re by M ason ( 1 992, p . 87). atmosphe the of s sic y ph

��

The openi ng paragraphs of that paper are couched i n the fam i l iar m i x of s c ien ce and prophecy. Thus we have the claim that "the concentration [ o f C02] is now 27% h i gher than that which prevailed during the ind ustrial revol u ­

t i o n . . . . " coupled t o t h e apocal y ptic prophecy that "hi gher temperatures w i l l b e accompani ed by . . . a r i s e in s e a leve l " ( p .

60). M ason 's m o d e l of Eart h ' s

physical situation shows t h e q uan t i ty o f i ncoming rad iation balanced exactly

by the quantity of outgo i n g rad i ati o n . The question for the atmospheric

physicist i s how

exactly

this balance w i l l be perturbed by the effect of

'greenhouse gases' i n the atmosphere.

The pivotal point at wh ich prophecy and scie nce meet occurs in the

fol low ing passage :

It is virtually certain that the troposphere is warming very slowly in response to the continually increasing concentrations of C02 and the other 'greenhouse' gases but the signal i s yet too smal l to detect above the large natural c l i mate variations, partly because i t is being delayed by the thermal inertia of the oceans. ( �ason, 1 992, p. 90) How can a signal that is ' too small to detec t ' estab l i s h that somet h i n g i s ' v irtu ally certai n ' ? The confidence i n t h e c l a i m m u s t derive not from obser­ vatio ns but from the model w i t h i n which the d i scourse is framed . In the co nte xt cre ated by the mode l , this spec u l ation i s endowed w i th the authority of its discu rsive environmen t . Th i s is not to deny, of course, that i t m i g h t turn o u t to be supp orted by fi ner-grained measurements . I n terestingly, a new

general hyp othe s i s to explai n g lobal warm i ng has recently been proposed . It t u s on the effec t of bursts o f cosmic rays from d i stant novas on the solar � � I n d. To carry publ ic conviction, this thes i s wou ld need to fi n d a model as user frie ndly ' as the humb gree le nhouse. We sh ould rem i n d ourselves that rhetorical devices play two d i fferen t Pers uasive r oles i n l ay a n d scientific d i scourse. In some cases, t h e rhetoric pe�s u ades one of a conclusion for which, in a more generous expos i t i o n , a . ratt o nal argu m e n t could be prov 1ded . In other cases, and M ason ' s ( 1 992)

62

G R E E N S P E A I{

presentation seemed to be one of them, model- based rhetoric is us ed to cl ose a gap i n the d i scourse, for which at the time no bridge could be es tab l is hed Em bedded in a di scursive environment that is m arked by all the devi ces of th presentation of scienti fic reports, the distinction is eas i l y overlo oked , perh a p even by the authors of environmental position papers that draw h eav i l y on th e results of scientific work.

: ·

Our comparison between the opening and c l o s i n g paragraph s

of Mason 's

argument shows j u s t how the figures, graphs and equations in which the argument is presen ted conceal a somewhat specu l ative d i scussion . But what

is in s t i l l a rather i n adeq uate working model of the Earth 's atm os phe re is a

powerful i m age, potent as a rhetorical dev ice. Agai n we must e mp h as i ze th at the technique of closing gaps in thi s way is not pec u l iar to Greenspeak. It can be found in the most h ard -core physics and chemi stry.

However, it is i mportan t to notice that these are i n tended as real ist rather

than mere l y heuristic mode l s ; that is, what they picture are systems

and

processes that could exist. They are virtual worlds, one or more of which might

closed car on a m etaphor of the greenhouse and its use as an explanatory mode l . What we l ac k, as lay folk, is an adequate basis of compari son between that car and Earth , a comparison which wou l d be medi ated by such pic tures as that conj u red up by t h e use of these models . The ' green house ' metaphor makes the picture i n t e ll i g i b le, but does the picture make the state of Earth i nte l l igible? We s hal l have to wait on resemble our real world in re l evant respects q u ite closely. A

hot day w i l l te l l one a l l one n eeds to know to

appreciate

the

atmospheric science to tel l us. To add a touch of irony to the greenhouse story, there is a newly m arketed gadget that uses solar e nergy to

cool

the i n teriors

A third virtual world offered as a scien tific model of Earth i s

prese n ted i n

of the very same cars that sunl ight has warmed up.

Gaia: The Organ ismic Model of the Earth and Its Cosmic Environment

Lovelock's famous ' Gaia' concept (Love l ock,

1 987). Love l ock offers the ?.ai a

polar opp ost uon are c oupled but of the l oose l y, the sort of v i rtual world we have come across i n di scus sion s c role greenhouse story. The other model presents a virtual world in wh ich th. xtste t o f l i fe processes i n regu lati n g the state of the p l anet is minim al or n one and \ e Accord i n g to L ovelock, neither alternative is adeq u ate. The ph ysic al ure , biological systems are one system. The pl anet Earth , its phy si cal s � ct s ts yste b i osphere and i ndeed the S u n as wel l constitute a whole sy ste m . Th h ypothesis in contrast to two other model worl ds that stand in to one another. In one, l i fe and the physical environm ent

�

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es of Science Rheton·col Us

63

-

l ati ng in such a way that the conditions for l i fe are maintained at se If- regu "b "l "b . . us diffe ren t equ 1 1 1 rra. varro · g firom t h e pomt o f v1ew o f t h .IS stu d y ·IS not to attempt The i mport ant th m twee n these mod e l s as science but to look at them in their dj udi cate be t use i n argument. The con trast between the Gaia model i their ole, r or cal as persuasive i m ages does not l i e i n a catalogue of model se hou een the gr � i ncrease i n the proportions of C02, methane possible a as such es, sc overi at i o n to processes i n the biosphere. I t i s i n rel n i atmosphere the n i on d so . IS

·

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which the Gaia model i s based , the idea that the whole system th e root idea o n A l l sel f-reg ulating systems h ave boundary conditions that, ting. egula -r is self rce the system to maintain a new eq u i l i bri u m , and fi n al ly, will fo ded, ee if exc to ' crash ' . If we are l i v i ng in someth i n g l i ke th is enough, far ced displa if

virtual world, we are very far from an environmental crash that wou l d elim inate hum an l i fe altogether from the p l a n e t . B u t we m a y be i n the v i ci n i ty of a shift to a new eq u i l ibri u m .

The sign i ficance of choice of m o d e l i s underl i ned by the alternat i ve ro le of the B razil ian rai n forest in the Gaia model from i ts role i n the ' s tandard ' pictu re. In the Gaia model , the d i scovery that there is no net production o f oxygen in equatorial forests i s irrelevant to its plausi b i l i ty. B u t there i s a very

definite answer to the question o f why we should preserve them rather than

replacing them with soy or somet h i n g else of immed i ate ut i l i ty. I n the Gaia model, the forests do p l ay a fu ndamental role to be understood by refere nce

to the generic th ermod y n am i c model that l i es beh ind all three alternative

pictures. The forests are i m portant for the ir cool i n g e ffect. They are an

e normous air conditioner, which red uces the tendency of the tem perature of the bio sphere to i ncrease cumulative l y. Th e relation between the v i rtual world presented in the Gaia model and the mo ral duty of human be i ngs i s quite other than that portrayed i n the apoca­ ly ptic visions of the near future conj u red up in the simple therm od y n am i ca l l y

i nsp ired v i rtual worlds. Short- term human i n terven tions ar e cal led for i f the real world i s best modeled by the ' greenhouse ' picture. B u t accord i n g to the Gaia pict ure, the efforts of human be ings are puny. We must w i thdraw from

t he hubristic post of stewards of Eart h ' s estate to the more modest pos i t i o n of � ere planetary doctors, and ' b arefoot' at that, hel p i n g the patient's own I m m u ne s ystem to resist i n fecti on. A l l three thermody n ami c models are used to su pport conclusions as to w h at h u an bei ngs m ough t to do. The reason i n g we have been fol l owi n g exemp l i fies exact ly th e pat tern o f factual premise to eval uative conc l u s i o n medi ated by m e pho r and m odel that we identifi ed i n the d i scussion o f s u rrogati onal i s m and ln te grat io nal ism i n l i nguistics at the end of Ch apter 2. Insofar as both the u se of m etap hor s and of models i nvolve the d i s p l acement of concepts from one cont e xt to another , the i r rhetorical ro le is very much a l i ke .

�

64

G R EE N S PEA k

The Scientistic Use of a Scientific Vocabulary The d i scourses of science are not only a source for the analytical and expl ana­

tory models used by Gree nspeakers but also offer spec i a l i zed vocabul aries and other forms of symbo l i c presentation such as graphs and d i ag rams. In

this

ch apter, we shal l look o n l y at the use of terms for n u merical measures that carry rhe tori cal force. We have al ready in troduced the d isti nction between scientific and scientistic d i scourse. In the former, the termi n o l ogy of,

say,

thermody namics has a proper p l ace, and its use for pers u as i ve purposes is based on wel l -grounded scientific re searc h . In the l atter, the prestige of the

term inology is u sed without such groun d i n g . We h ave already encountered a

rhetorical use of recal i brations of temporal parameters in our exploration of

thermody namic mode l s . Recall the simple case o f temperature reealibration with which the London

1imes journal ist brought home

to readers j ust how hot

it h ad been at Wimbledon . Numbers attached to measures are the bearers o f the rhetorical force . Th i s feature o f t h e u s e o f s c i e n t i fi c terminology i n

reaching doomsday concl usions is evident i n t h e e x a m p l e we h ave taken from the article by Goldsmith ( 1 992) from which we have already quoted. I t

is

richly adorned with the c h aracteristic rhetorical devices o f scientistic dis­

course, that is, termi nology not we ll grounded i n re spectabl e researc h .

There are s o m e chemical formulae i n Goldsmith 's text, b u t above al l there

are statements of measures, some expressed in percentages and others in

degrees :

Even if emissions stop today, ozone Joss would be of the order of 20-30% by the year 2000 . A I % loss is estimated to increase ultraviolet radi ation by 2% and the incidence of skin cancer by 5 % . ( p. 1 7) As l ay readers we are unable to i n terpret this prediction since we are not told how many Americans h ave devel oped skin cancer over the past two decades .

At the heart of the argument is a statistical inference from unknown an d

perhaps unknowable prem ises presented in formal n umerical terms. Temporal recal i bration appears i n the fo l l owi n g :

Undoubtedly t h e most serious environmental problem is global warming. There has al ready been an 0.5 to 0.7°) C. increase in global mean temperatures since the start of the industrial age, approximately 1 750, and it i s predicted by different i nternational and national agencies that emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to a 1 .5 to 4° increase over the coming decades. ( p. 1 7) e We see here a chaacterist ic example of s h i fting time bases. It o cc urs in th j u x tapo s i tion of an 0.5 ° di fference in 200 years to a 1 .5° differen ce i n 1 0 years.

o( Science Rhelorical Uses

65

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one n u log ical re l �tion fro Now he re is the l i ty o f th s order tempora ith w t y sh ort wa

� ber to the ot� er prese nte d . The IS

_ contmued m the rest of the

p aragrap h :

The last I ce Age was triggered by a mere I 0 drop in temperature . . . . Tens, if not hundred s of mill ions of refugees from the areas that arc no longer habitable will s warm into those that sti ll are. (p. 1 7) We are bei n g asked to extrapo l ate now on an even grander scale but i n the

opposite direction . The temperature i ncrease relative to Ice Ages h as to be understood on a timescale o f tens of thousand s of years. The temperature

0.2 °, the 1 .5 ° . w h i c h

increase that has, with a charitable read i n g , actually been detec ted is

predicted temperature with the collap s i n g of time into a decade i s

is o f course greater than t h a t needed to trigger an I c e A ge . But a decade i s n o t

20.000 years.

It is obviou s w h e n one l ook s c l osely a t thi s p aragraph j u s t how

the shifting from one time base to another fu nctions rhetorically when the

flaggi ng of the shift i s omi tted . Once again we e ncou nter the rec al i bration of

time measures that we noticed i n the prev ious s ection. To deman d that

we d o

someth ing m akes sense o n l y i n a time s p a n measured i n decade s . It took Nature tens of thousands o f year s to bri ng about the Ice Ages. Econ omic

conditions and pol itical possibi l i ties constrai n any practical program to a fairly short-term i mplementation . In add i tion to this i s the ' c u l tural attention

span ' problem. There i s a s trong ' fashion ' element i n attention to green i ssues

that should be a matter for a soc i ological study of green movements at

different historical moments .

We must emphas i ze that the use of scienfic term i nology in this article i s rhe toric al . I t i s n o t w e l l grounded i n t h e rational foundations of t h e tempora l ity

of geo logy and c l i matology. A scientistic descri pti o n , that i s , a descri ption drawing on a scientific vocabul ary but not well grounded tec h n i cal l y, is

o ffere d as part of the rhetorical package . The mo s t s tri k i n g way i n w h i c h Golds m i th ' s article display s i t s rhetorical character i s s h own by the fac t that

wh en the scientific evidence, such as i t i , does not fit the rhetorical needs of s h is article , he attack s scien : ce

It is argu ed i n particular b y G eorge Bush and the o i l industry that there is no sci entific evid ence that global warming i s occurring, but the concept of s cient i fi c _ ev ide nce w h en applied to complex biological , social or ecological issues i s largely mea ning less. ( p . 1 7) Th s quo tati on fol l ows d i rectly after the paragraph in w h i c h the scientistic th at a 0. 2° i ncrease i n mean temperature o f Earth s i n ce the advent o f 1 e I n d us tri al a g e can be e xtrapolated to a 1 .5 °-4° i ncrease over a d ecade o r

�

C�aJ�

G R E E N S PEA K

66

two against the backdrop of the 20,000 or 30,000 years required for th e com ing and g o i n g of an i ce age . There is a startl i n g j u x tapos i tion i n the same paragraph of the two main attitudes to science one fi nds in the spec tru m o f speakers of d iverse dialects of Greenspeak : deference and rej ecti on.

The way i n which the t i m e d i mensions of processes are adj usted for rhetorical purposes in some i nstances of Greens peak rem i nds on e ve ry much of a s i m i l ar rhetorical device employed in A I DS rhetoric . There h ave bee n many di fferent pred ictions of the rate at which the ' unstoppabl e spre ad ' of the lethal virus i n to the heterosexual popu l ation w i l l occur. We have h ad p red ic­

tions that range from a re l atively m i l d epidemic to the claims of chat show

hosts and hostesses that the dead in the United S tates alone would number

some 20 m i l l ion by the year 2000 . Of course, not one of these predictions has

come true. The heterosexual epidem ic, pred icted for the West, h as simply not

even tuated, and yet the rhetoric o f u nstoppable, incurable v iruses h as persisted in the apocalyptic presentation of the l i ke l i h ood of the spread of the disease.

Even the reports of AIDS in A frica are contentious. Our point is not about epidem iol ogy but about the recali bration of time for rhetorical effect. I f Goldsm ith ' s article had been presen ted

a'>

a scientific paper, of course it

could not have been taken serious ly. However, we must remember, and this

example i l l us trates the poi n t with great clarity, that the use of a scientific vocabul ary as a scientistic rhetori c , the n u mbers, the degrees Celsius, the

percentages, the chemical formu l ae and so o n , do not necessari l y indicate that the wri t i n g is a part of a scient i fi c d i scourse . We should also add that

persuasive rhetoric tends to draw from a l ocal l y prestigious source, and

Greenspeak is no except i o n . Thi s is how persuas ion is done. Grammatical Style i n ' Science' Wri ting

The myth o f 'object i v i ty ' i s i m manent even i n the preferred gr ammar with w h ich scientists and those who imitate them write up their rese arch es . The act i ve and personal engagem ent of the researcher is wri tten out of the story

by the convention that the pass i ve voice should be preferred : "1\v o d ro ps of ne sal ine solution were added . . . . " is preferred to "I added two drops of sal i d te na i m ta uncon truth the forth brings f Hersel Nature if as is It " . . . . sol ution by the person of the scientist:

For i n the passive construction the actor ha� disappeared-the doer has discon ­ nected-repl aced by the deed i tself, sterile and i solated, and apparently accom­ plished wi thout human input. (Kahn, 1 992, p. 1 52)

che�i:

W h i l e t h e i norganic molecules of t h e v i rtual w o r l d conceived by stand in no moral rel ations to their manipulators . the s ame is n ot trU e

0

e

o( Science Rhetorical Uses -

67

ea1 world of biol ogy. Of the l i v i n g real i ty of the creatures with which

al we need no v i rtual s i m ulation . They are there for al l to see. �iolog istsqde uo te K ah n ( 1 992 ),

A g ain to

sive, soulless [sic] voice which science presents in i t s literature 11 is indeed a pas h , perfectly reflective of a mode of thinking that proceeds from ea r c res mal ani on of active responsibility. ( p. 1 53 ) outs i de the moral realm One o f the reasons w h y the natural sc iences serve as a powerfu l source o f rhetorical devices i s that they i ncorporate with i n the i r rhetorics the i d e a of impersonal authority. I n the d ialects o f G reenspeak h i gh l ighted i n this sec t i o n ,

Greenspeak itse l f appears as a dialect o f t h e language of Natural S c i e n c e . Th i s appearance i s rarely deceptive. Noth i n g i n o u r anal y s i s entails that Green­

speakers qua scientists never or only rare l y prod uce or faithfu l l y report genuine scientific fi ndings, some sou n d , some not so sound, j u s t l i ke al l other

scientists . Sometimes, their zeal for their cause overwhel m s their d i screti o n .

The scienti fic c l a i m s of Greenpeace concern ing t h e environmental conse­ quences of dumping the B rent Spar ri g i n the Atlantic seem to h ave bee n

unsound . The vice of excessive zeal is not u n ique to Greenspeakers . The claims for 'cold fusion ' , made in all s inceri ty, have turned out to be i l l - founded

and the claimants to have been carried away by an understandable enthusiasm .

The point of recru iting the l anguage, structure and grammatical sty l e of scientific writing i n many of the dialects of Greenspeak i s that not o n l y is it

one amongst contemporary d iscourses that tend to persuade, which i s the

focus of th is d iscussion, but that much publ ic pol icy turns on choice amongst

competi ng models of the biosphere. I s i t Gaia or is it a gree nhouse? I s i t a greenhouse or a m i te bobbing on the cosm i c w i nd ? Which of these pictures

one chooses to live by may make a huge d i fference to w h at one even tual ly d ies by !

Summary At a first reading i t would seem that Green speak is a scientific d iscourse en owed w ith the authority of the voice of the natural sciences. Natural � sc • e nce is a rich reservoi r o f term i n ology and mode l s . I n making use of P h_y sic al science models, Greenspeak is not only a ben e fi c i ary of a borrowed sc • e n t is tic rhe toric but is also a d ialect of n atural science. Environmental st ud ie s are an important branch of b iology in relation to geophys i c s . We can s e rh et ori cal uses o f a borrowed term i n ology in the Aristote l i an tradition of r etoric co nce ived as general ' art of persuas i on ' . B ut throughout there i s an ot he r use that coinc ides w i th t h e commonsense mean i ng o f ' rhetorical '

�

68

G R E E N S PEA K

which i s juxtaposed to 'substantive' or 'rational ' . The rhetorical use of nat ural science and the use of the devices of science for persuasive pu rposes are not always driving in the same direction . If one were incli ned to offer environ­ mental ists advice it would be to be very careful indeed in drawi ng on natural science, whether for its bona fide results or for its prestigious discursive sty l e. The natural sciences have derived their authority from the rigor with w hich hypotheses and models are tested experi mental ly. The upshot of this has bee n the al most continuous revision of what is accepted as wel l - establis hed fact and plausible theory. I t does not do the cause o f environ mental reform much good to be caught out in exaggerated claims and apocalyptic scen arios th at do not eventuate.

Notes I. In the 1 7t h century. the lang uage of Euclidean geometry became the popular rhetoric for the

physical sciences. Gilbert's De Magnete of 1 600 uses no Eucl idean tenninology, whereas

N ewton 's Optics of 1 726 is set out in terms of theorems. corollaries. axioms and so on. 2. The widespread coupling of ' global warming' and ' rise of the sea leve l ' in disaster stories, such a.� the scenarios in which densely populated low-lying

areas are flooded. j ustifies, we think.

describing the discourse that makes use of these e x p re ssions as 'apocalytic ' .

Environmental Narratives

I

t is now widely agreed among ph i l osophers and soc i o l og i s ts o f science that scient i fi c wri t i n g derives i ts power to convince at

least as much from its narrat ive structures as from its logical organ i zation . At

fi rst glance , many writings about env iro n mental matters seem to belong among the genres o f sc i e n t i fic d i scours e . To the e x tent that they do, the n ar­ rative conven tions that endow s c i e n t i fi c wri t i n gs with their be l i e f-worth i n ess app ear to be shared by G reenspeak authors .

There is a point of pri n c i p l e to be d i sc ussed before we e n ter into the meat of this chapter. Greenspeak has many d i al ects and uses, one group o f w h i c h is po liti cal . There ar e green panics and green themes i n t h e p l at forms of most po l i tic al groupi ngs. There are i n stitutions that, i n a po l i t ical sense, stand over

ag ains t the policies and programs o f green po l i t ical al l i ances. Yet they too p rod uce wri tings in which environmental issues are the cen tral top i c of co n ce rn . In our view, for the purposes of the study o f the l ang uage of e nvi ron me ntal i st d i scourse, the scope o f Green speak must be e n l arged from

the d i alects of the overtly

' gree n · to i n c l ude the d i scourses of those who seem to be in opp os i t i o n . For that reason we h ave i n c l uded not only an anal y s i s of the B nt1 sh Green Pany M an i festo of 1 990 but also an i mportan t docu ment Produced by B ri ti s h Nuclear Fue l s . I n short, there can be con servati ve, rad ical l i beral e nvir or onmental d i scourses i n which such matters as g l obal warmin g ·

·

69

G R E E N S PEA

70

K

are addressed and certain narrative forms are employed . A l th ou gh m an

�

n arrati ves seem at first sight to be monologues, cl oser stud y shows h t ' voice' . They are as

e x p l icitly or i m p l i c i t l y they often i nvolve more than one

much d i alogical as monological . For example, as Tay lor ( 1 99 1 ) argu es Greenspeak, even in i ts 'radical ' stance, i nvo l ves a dialog ue b etw ee n th ' Expansionist World View ' , the story l i n e of which is 'Wise man age ment ' and the ' Ecological World View ' , the story l i ne of which is C on se rvati on ' '

�

'

The very same text may be a d i alogue of these two voices . N

;

arr

ati ve rn a transcend the n arrow constrai nts of formal logic, according to which con tra­ d i ction is the most heinou s of al l s i n s . What Is 'Narrative ' ? Narratives, w h i c h appear i n a var i ety o f form s, constitute a l i nguistic, psycho­ l ogical , social and ph i l osophical framework for our attempts

to come to terms

w i th the nature and conditions of our existence . It is the inti mate merging of

a l l four frameworks which serves to create the mean i ngs we fi n d in our o f l i fe . Yet, j ust as i n the case of the term ' d i scourse ' , the use

of

forms

the term

' narrative ' , although it has appeared in this context o n l y recently, has become

rather i n flationary. There fore , we shal l ex plain it a bit more precisely to make

c l ear its role in our inquiry. The study of narrative as a way of i nvestigating cognit ive structures in use is not new (sec, e . g . , Greimas,

1 987; Labov, 1 972).

The l i nguistic organ i zation of d i fferent kinds of d i scourse has

been subject

to man y forms of i nvestigati o n , ranging from those that focus on phonol ogical aspects to those that analyze the sy ntactic, semantic, pragmatic, logical and

have been considered : The mean ings of words, expressions, sentences, speech acts, te xts and conversational forms of discourse h ave all been anal y zed , and the log ic aesthetic aspects of discourse . Many d i stinct u n its of

language

networks has been investigated. of these analyses serves to defi ne a level of

of names, propos i tions, metaphors and lexical

None of the u n i ts i m p l i c i t in any

structure at which the persuasive powers of discourse can be seen to be of grounded in a who l l y satisfactory manner. We th i n k that the explan atio n of s ect asp cal these powers must also make reference to the narrato logi of res ctu stru ve persuasive d i scourses. It is by the l i nguistic and cogn iti and ted tia ren diffe n arrative d i scourse that we m ake sense of the w ider, more ( 1 992 ) t h us more complex texts and contexts of our experienc e . C ron a n ' s eve nts d i stinction between 'chronicles' and 'narrative ' , between ' fl at ' l i sts of po i nt for and hi storical d i scourses real i z i n g story l i nes, can serve as a start in g our d i scuss i o n .

we order our experience and try to m ake sense

of

it.

�

thai throu gh nan:at J V ar so For ex ampl e, m

A s far as h uman affairs are concerned , i t is above all

.

as

.....ntal £nviTO"""' .

--

•

Narratives

71

ve the fabric o f temporal experience as created and expressed we e on ce i . . . ng h l i ui sti c p racti ces, t h e connecti. on between t h ese two pomts b ecomes ug o r h t . . ze our expenence . an d our memory o f h uman h appemngs We org am . e va"de nt . . B ut t h 1" s notton . h as b een genere form o f n arrati ves an d stones. mai n ly in th 986, 1 990). 1 ner, ru B ( dened roa b d r1 ze d an enera l i zed sense, n arrative is the name for an ensemble of a In i ts curre nt, g s tructures, transmitted cultu ral - h i storically, con­ chological psy nd a li n gu is tic ividual 's l evel of mastery and by h i s or her ' m i xture' of ind ch y ea b d strai ne ative techniques and l i nguistic s k i l l s and, not least, b y such i c un mm co socialas c uriosity and passion. I n tel l i n g (others or our­ cteristics chara al person event' -an i ntention, a dream or a state of sel ves) so meth i n g about a ' l i fe takes the form of n arrative ; that i s , it is presented as a story l y usual it gstan tol d accord i ng to certai n convention s . Hence, there are strong arguments for unde rstanding our repertoire of narrat ive forms as fu ndamental ' frames of m i nd ' , to use Howard Gardner's ( 1 983 ) expression . There i s , h owever, an important qual i fi cation of this argument which we must not fai l to notice. To

present someth ing as a n arrative (that i s , for example, to te l l a story or a fragme nt of one) does not mean to 'external i ze ' some kind of ' i n tern al ' real i ty

and to give a l inguistic shape to i t . Both Wittgen ste i n and V y gotsky have

warned agai nst the view that l ang uage could be understood as a k i n d of

transformation, or even a tran s l ation, of pre l i nguistic mean i ngs i n to words and sentences, the surrogational approac h we critici zed i n C hapter

2. Fo l low i n g

this line o f argument, n arratives should n o t b e conceived a s presen ting a n

'external ' version of some particular mental enti ties float i n g i n a k i n d o f

presemiotic state . Rather, they are forms inherent i n o u r gett i n g knowledge

and that structure experience about the world and ourse l ve s . N arrative i s one amo ng many ways of fi n d i n g mean i n g i n an overwhe l m i n g l y crowded and distorted chronological real ity (Cronon, 1 992). But i t seems to be a p articu­

larly potent one. In effect, the discursive order i n which we weave together the world of our � x perie nces eme rges only as the modus operandi o f the narrative process ll� elf. Th at is to say we are deal i n g not o n l y with a mode of represe n t i n g but

w uh a mode of constructi n g and constituting rea l i ty, as B runer ( 1 99 1 ) poi n ted o u t. Som etim es, the n arrator i s j ust one person, dominating the aud ience. B u t so m et im es, t h e tale i s created cooperatively, as Middleton a n d Edwards h ave de m ons trated in th e study of collective rememberi n g ( M idd l eton & Edward s ,

�990).

So i t i s quite surpri s i n g that i t w a s o n l y i n the

1 980s that psychologi sts

ec am e alive to this form of ' world-making ' . Yet, nei ther can the n arrative

r a ity b arded as an e ntire l y personal i nvention, as the subjectivist would ��at�m , nore regdoes i t simply represent the obj ective description of the ' things as

h appen ed ' , as the positivist wants us to think. Mode l i ng their ' ow n ' I S i on s of re ality, n arratives apply highly conventional l i nguistic forms (as,

v·e�

72

G R E E N S PEA K

for examp le, structures of plot or rhetorical tropes) that l i n k the story, its i n terloc utors and the si tuation in which it is told i n a more or less subtle w ay (mostly escap i n g attention) to an u nderl y i n g c u l tural - h i storic al w eb . Th

:

n arrative structure of stories is rare l y given expl i c i t attenti on even b y th o s

wh ose professional i n terest i t is in te l l ing of them .

The most general category of l i n guistic prod uctions is ' d iscourse ' . In this

c h apter we treat ' narrat ive ' , the writing and te l l i ng o f stories, as a type of

d i scourse . Other types of environmental d i scourse i n c l ude conversation and

other forms of symbo l i c i n teraction and communication, such as issuing

orders or i n struction s ; cogn i tive ac tivities, such as argumentation and per­ suad i n g ; expressive activ ities, such as s i n g i n g and pray i n g ; and so on. The

category of n arrative i n c l udes myth, fo l k tale, fai ry story, and the l i terary genre of the nove l . There are vari ous k i nd s of novel-for example, romance,

detective story, trave l saga or the

Bildungsroma11. We shall

be finding the last

c ategory o f talc exe m p l ified in many Green speak contexts.

Despite this see m i n g l y neat scheme, there are three reasons why it is not

so

easy to draw a prec ise bou ndary around the mean i n g of ' narrative ' . First,

the forms and styles o f n arrative are very v ari ous and many-col ored. Second,

we also find elements or structures o f narrative i n most other d i scourse types,

such as j u s t i fications o f act i o n , advert i sements, excuses, scientific or legal

texts and decl arations o f l ove and of war. And third , as we have grown into

the repertoi re of n arrative uses of language si nce early c h il d hood, and use

them in the same fam i l iar and spontaneous way as l anguage in general , the

n arrative aspec t is usual l y taken for gran ted . L i ke a l l kinds of ordinary

d i scourse i t i s u n iversal l y present i n everything we say and do, i ncluding the

experience of time. There fore, the ' taken - for-granted ' existence of narrative can eas i l y be seen as a ' natural ' existence. As a con sequence, it has attracted l i ttle cri tical attention u n t i l recentl y-apart from, of course, special ized stud­ ies of l i terary theory, mythol ogy and n arratol ogy.

Ye t there arc some features that near l y all narratives have in common an d wh ich j u s t i fy the use of t h i s term for analytical purposes. Draw in g u pon

) l i terary, l i nguistic, anthropol ogical and psychological research , B runer ( 1 9 9 1 y onl here tion men d i sti ngui shes l O characteri stics of n arratives. We s h al l ves some of them which are i m portant for our problem. To beg i n wi th , n arrat i e os lo e th is, at th , ' i n c l ude what B runer cal l s an ' i nten t i onal s tate entai l m ent le sib l i n k between the i n tentional states expressed by people an d th e ir pos an of ry sto or t coun ac subsequent actions. This is one reason why a narrative ry does event is rare l y a causal expl anation of it . The ' n o w ' and ' then ' of a sto not always refer to a causal sequence of cause and conseq uen ce . There i s also t h e w a y i n which narratives are presented , by that we mea

has

that the content of the n arrative is rel ated in various way s to the s trU ctu re

the work itse l f as a written or spoken text. For i nstance, as Fowl er

( 1 97 0)

�

0

arrarive.r Environmental N

73

-

the mid dle l i ne o f M i l to n ' s poem Lycidias mentions the h i ghest h own , i n . Th e org an i zation o f this particular narrat ive i n the second half i s a m 5 ou n ta of i ts organization in the fi rst. I n various other ways that poem irror i mage s o f the same period d i splay symmetrical patterns around about work r d othe ( Fowler, 1 970). The repetition o f pattern i n vari ous ways is nts poi he ir mid Green speak n arrative s . For example, i n one of the narratives of ture als o a fea i s repeatedly tested through the repet i t i o n of the same hero the ze we an aly -struggles-success ' . I n contemporary n arratives, formal and ' trials of pattern have l argel y g i ven p l ace to the more trad i t i o n al pattern structures cal m m etri sy

� �

of 'th e story ' , the structures of which we shal l use various tec h n i q ues to disp lay. Fin al ly, we must take account of the authorship of narrat ives. S tories d o

not j ust happen ; they are t o l d . They arc t o l d from ' positions ' , stand i n g s i n local moral orders . They must b e heard as the n arratives of ' voices ' , i f their signifi cance i s to be fu l l y appreci ated . B u t the very authority w i t h w h i c h

narrative presents i ts vision o f reality i s ac h ieved b y obscuring l arge parts o f that real ity, for example b y 'suppres s i n g ' or ignoring d i ssident voices (Cronon, 1 992). The extent to which i mportant pu b l i c documents can ignore

alternative voices through the ad option of a s i n g l e story l i ne h as been brought

out by Hughes ( 1 995 ), i n a study o f the s tory l i nes adopted by school and

un iversity texts for 'World H i story ' . These texts exc l u s i vely adopt a 'deve l ­

opment' and ' triumphal asce n t ' narrati ve format to the exclusion of other narrative forms . A well known alternative form c an be found i n the story l i nes

o f Navajo ' myths of ori gi n ' , which are based on themes o f 'ecological proce s s '

in which t h e human/an i mal boundary i s transcende d . A n imals a n d humans form a single coherent s oc i al and moral order in these stories.

Story Lines Proppian Plots The idea of the orderly and conventional plot or story l i n e is one of the main working concep ts of narratol ogy. We shal l begin with a general descri pti on of

one fam ous anal y tical scheme for iden t i fy i n g the e l ements of a story, that p roposed by V lad i mi r Propp ( 1 925/ 1 968) _ 1 Accord i n g to Propp, fai ry tales, we be l i eve, a great many other n arratives o f vari o u s genre s are based on , or pe rhaps we shou ld say rea l i ze , a common framework . Propp identified 3 1

and,

co nse cu tive

steps or features o f fairy stories and fo l k tales . He cal led them ' fu cti o ns ' . F uncti ons can be acts, episodes or the en trances of people of � v an ou s sorts. For example, we could set up a simple Proppi an structure as sh o w n i n T able 4. 1 .

74

G R E E N S PEA k

TABLE 4.1 Common Story Pattern

Story 1 Story 2

Any Villain

Any Confinement

Any Possessor

Any Valuable

King Bad Fairy

imprisons puts to sleep

Queen's King's

lover daughter

It's easy to see that we could construct a very l arge n u m ber of headed the c o l u m n s . The fu l l Proppian function l i s t is

narratives,

w h i ch we have more c om p l e x The 3 1

eac h of which exempl i fi e s the four consecutive fu nctions w i th

.

' fu nction s ' o f Propp 's ori ginal scheme are set out i n Table 4 .2.

TABLE 4.2 The Proppian Functions I II IU IV v VI

VII

vm IX X XI XD xm

XIV XV

XVI XVD XVDI XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII

XXIV

XXV XXVI XXVII XXVDI XXIX XXX XXXI

Absentation [Family member absents oneself.) Interdiction [An interdiction is made to the hero. ) Violation [Hero violates interdiction. Villain appears.) Reconnaissance [Villain or hero attempts reconnaissance.) Delivery [Information about victim is delivered to villain.) Trickery [Villain attempts deception of victim.) Complicity [Victim submits to deception.] Villainy [Villain causes harm to family member.] Mediation [Misfortune or lack is made known. ) Counteraction begins [Hero agrees to/decides on counteraction.] Departure [ Hero leaves home.] Donor 's first function [Hero is tested.] Hero's reaction [to donor) Provisional receipt of magic agent Guidance [Spatial transfer of hero is made to vicinity of object of search.) Struggle [ Hero and villain are in direct combat.) Branding [Hero is marked.] Victory [Villain is defeated. ) Liquidation [Initial misfortune/ lack i s made good.] Return [Hero returns.) Pursuit [Hero is pursued. ] Rescue [Hero i s rescued from pursuit.) Unrecognized a rrival of hero [at home/another place) Unfounded claim by false hero [Hero is at home. ] Difficult task [proposed by false hero] Solution [Task is achieved.) Recognition [Hero is recognized, often by brand. ) Exposure [False hero is exposed.) Transfiguration [ Hero is given new appearance or possessions.) Punishment [Villain is punished.] Wedding [Hero marries/ascends throne/ is rewarded.)

function s . H owever, whatever selection any

�

realize every one of the 3 0 story take s from th e fu l l set

I n Proppian analysis, not every story will

Narrati Env_ironmen tol

ves

75

ar in the order i n which they are laid out in this schem e . ct ion s wil l appe s e t expresses t h e temporal order i n w h i c h a narra tive can tion nc fu e total that the Proppian analysis c aptures someth i n g very b ieve bel . We to ld the k i nds of narratives which people of our general cul ture about tal en m f n da tory. fac tis fi nd sa f

,;;:' :

in their sequenti al order i t i s easy to see I f we c on sult Propp 's 3 1 functions thought of as a seq uence o f social ac ts. For example, i n be can y th at the t o a fam i l y member. In Function XVI , harm causes n i a l l i v the Vffi ion Fu nct and so on . We call these ' soci al combat, direct a in n i o j n ai l l i v the and o the her characters are rel ated to one another in terms of their role i n the cause ' be acts the s tory and their status i n the virtual world t h e story i nvites us t o imagine: fam ily mem ber, hero, v i l l ai n , and so on.

It is also clear from even a c ursory exam i n ation that aspects of Proppian acts can be j uxtaposed as opposi tes . For example, there are several oppos i n g ch aracters o r roles-for i n stance, good/bad , man/woman , hero/v i l l ai n , a n d s o

o n . In

Cinderella,

the Fairy Godmother i s j u xtaposed to t h e U g l y S i sters . Then

there are oppos i n g d i rections-for ex amp le, departure/return , confine­ ment/rel ease, and so on. I n Sleeping Beauty, the thorny thicket is breached b y

the Prince w h o releases t h e Pri ncess from h e r thraldom . Then there are

opposing appearances , such as masquerade/real i ty. In

Beauty and the Beast,

the tension i n the story ari ses throu gh the real ization that the Beast is perhaps

not so beastly after al l , but only at the very last stage in the story does the

masquerade end when the B east is tran sformed i n to the Pri nce.

Bildungsroman The term is drawn from l i terary theory, i n particular, from the theory o f the

n ovel. It incorporates three root ideas , analogous to the German concept of Bildung: ' formation ' , 'education ' and 'creati on ' . The subject of a Bildungs­

roman i s the development of the protagonist's mind and character in the pass age from childhood to maturity. The hero suffers varied experiences, someti mes delusory. Through trial s and tribulations (often inc l ud i ng a spiri­ tu al crisis ), he or she reaches maturity and recogn i t i on of a true identity. Often,

yo� th is the m ost i mportant peri od for this development. As Moretti ( 1 987) po mted out , ' the youth ' i s t h e true hero of the Bildungsroman. It is a stri k i n g allegory for the human condition, which i s fu l l o f e nergy, dreams, projects and grand ide als. The entire n arrative scheme embraces the l i fe-hi storical d ev el op me

nt from innocence to d i s i l l usionment. The fas c i n ation of th i s n arrative model of development, as M . M . B akh t i n sh ow ed i n his analysis of Goethe's novels, lies i n i ts power to merge tn d t v t du al , cultural and h i storical processes into one story. We shall discuss

� � 9��)

76

G R E E N S PEA k

the threefold scheme-n atura l , cul tural and indiv idual-in o u r

anal ysis of the that th i particular fusion, which takes p l ace in the story of the Bildungsroman , seern to be one of the reasons why it is such an importan t n arrative devi ce i n gree n storyte l l ing. Refe rr i n g to his own earl ier work, Love l oc k ( 1 987), the o rigi n a­ tor of the Gaia hypothes i s , prov ides as c lear an example of the Bildung sroman

e nv i ronmental scenarios of time. Here we want o n l y to u nderl i n e

:

as we could ask for:

The human propensity to interfere was the plot of a doom scenario in my first Gaia book. The central character was an earnest, well-mean i ng agricultural biologist, Dr lntensli Eeger. He succeeded, where all other hazards had failed, in eliminating all l i fe by his meddling. He developed, using gene tic engineering , combined nitrogen-phosphorus fix ing microorganism. It was intended to im­ prove the yield of rice grown in the humid tropics so that the hunger of the Third World woul d at l ast be overcome. Unfortunately, his organism found a free-living unicellular alga much more to its liking than the rice plants. So su cces sfu l was this combi nation that it conquered the world. I t was a pyrrhic victory, because the bicultural world of the alga-bacteri al combination could not, on its own, maintain planetary homeostasis. ( p. 1 39) However the

Bildungsroman

ron mentalist wri tings.

is not the only story l i ne

exemplified

in

envi­

Elsbree 's Five Narra tive Forms The analytical scheme for story l i nes proposed by Elsbree

( 1 982) uses five there are five main narrative forms: j ourney i n g , end uring sufferi ng, engaging i n a contest, pursu­ ing and consummat i n g and establishing a home. Finer-grai n classifications would y ield vers ions of the main categories. We shall fi n d that b o th upbeat and downbeat vers ions of t h i s essential l y romantic v i s io n of the human 2 race/nature story are to be found throughout Greenspeak literature. broad categories of plot. Accord i n g to his c l as s i fication ,

Some Applications of the Proppian Scheme Within the Bildungsroman The S tory of Human Evolution We take this example

from

an article by L an dau

categorie s appro x i mati ng the Proppi an

( 1 984). 3

functions to display

�s

L an dau u� the s i e n JC

c u

77

!J!lXirrmm�n tal Narra tives

e evo l u tion of humankind as a Bildungsroman. Accord i n g to ·cou nt o f th "begins with the hero lead i n g a relatively safe and u n trou­ story e th dau, al ly i n the trees . . . . He i s somehow d i fferent . . . [and] usu ce, ten bl ed ex is in s ."4 orig e mbl hu · from are with nu rsery n arrati ve s , we would expect this start i n g we as i ar l Fami

�:O ·

·

k now w e l l from t h e nu merous rags- to-ri ches stories o f w h i c h poi nt, one w e archety pe : an s i Cinderella

The hero is event ually expelled or dislodged from his home. [His descent from the trees) . . . can be linked to either a change of environment or a change in the hero . . . [and) is often depicted as the beginning of a journey or an adventure. ( p. 264) The hero escapes from h i s former exi stence, and he moves i n to a n ew real m .

I n th is new real m, a s i n s o many fol k tales and trad i tional n arratives, he is

subjected to a series of tests. These te sts bring out h i s special q u a l i ties-that is, his evolutionary potenti al-which o f co urse brings about h i s transforma­

tion. Landau points out "that this trans format ion depends on a beneficent

power or donor" (p. 26 4 ) . The hero, humankind, suffers from a deficiency, h i s physical weakness. B u t

the hero acquires from t h e donor the u s e of a magical agent, perhaps a cloak, or a sword, or a ring. Similarly, i n human evolution the transformation of the hero . . . depends on special gi fts provided by his intelligence, tools (Osborn), reason ( Keith) a moral sense ( Darwin). ( p. 264) The gift allows him to triumph over adversity. However, as Landau

( 1 984)

po ints out, the hero is tempted t o u s e his g i ft wi thout proper con strai nt, a n d he succ umbs to ' pride or hubri s ' a n d is threatened w i t h destruction. Dar w i n

( 1 87 1 )

said ,

M an may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exenions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of having thus risen instead of having been aboriginally placed there may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the future. ( p. 707 )

H?we ve r H u x ley 's conclusion is an extension of t h e narrative more i n keep i n g

w uh the tradi tion of t h e c l assical fairy tale o r heroic story. Accord i n g t o Hu x ley ( 1 88 9), 1 kn ow no study which is so utterly saddeni ng as that of the evolution of hu manity, man

emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is

a

brute

78

G R EE N S PEA K

only more i ntel ligent than the other brutes, blind to creative impulses which often as not lead h im to destruction, a victim of endless illusion which makes his mental existence a terror and a burden and fi l l s his physical l i fe with barren toi l and battle. ( p. 256)

The hero has been caught up in the i ll-managed use of the gift the good fai ry Evolution has provided him with . In Propp 's Functions XXI-XXVI we find the hero subjected to a second rou nd of tests and difficul ties over which, after many tribulations, he finally triumphs and achieves the heroic status in which the story seems destined to culminate. If Landau is right, the story of evolution and its double cycle of trials and tribulations is ordered as much by the conventions of narratology as it i s by the empirical material on which the sc ientific story of human evolution is based . The narrative conventions and the paleoanthropological record lock together into a mutually supporting story. It is extremely easy to fit the tale as thus told i nto a Greenspeaker's discourse. Of course, it is exactly the missing intellectual capacities relative to the other primates that human beings possess that make them vulnerable to the excesses of environmental destruction that the rise of science, the ultimate gift which comes from intel l i gence, has made possible. In many Greenspeak narra tives, as we shall demonstrate, the second round of trials and tribulations is told according to the pattern of the first round, namely the appearance of a mysterious donor and the presentation to humankind of yet another gift, th e wisdom that is enshrined in the environmental ist movement.

The Environmental Education Story As an example of narrative analysis, structured as i n the secon d phase of the Proppian fol k-tale format, we shall take an article by S . Boyden ( 1 99 1 ) from the Australian Na t ional University Rep orter. Its ostensib le topic is new university courses that are intended to "save humanity and the planet." The article can be read as social history, as critical sociology, and no doubt in other ways as well . Like any text it is capable of many different read ing s. We sh �ll pay attention only to its qualities and structure as a story. Seen from th at p0 1 � t iS of view it takes the now familiar form of a Bildungs roman. To m ake th at reading more convincing, we shall identify the 'characters ' or ' vo ices' th le . appear in the article, read as a narrative, treating them someth i ng l i ke peop �r) , There is the Human Race, Gaia (the Planet Earth as Lovelock p res ent s h ry fru Industry (something of a v i l l ai n ) and Education, which plays th e ro le of godmother.

a Environmenta l Na"

tives

79

On ce ag ain, as in the Landau narrative, the story opens with a happy ween the Human Race and Gaia. The Human Race and the equ il ibri um bet in ecological balance. They have been living together con­ are arth Pl anet E very long time, tens of thousands of generations, says B oyden , a for ten tedly were hunter-gatherers. Their main culture-related im­ humans ich wh durin g s were probably those resulting from the deliberate use of ystem ecos p act on fire. The e ffect of this, he implies, was not very great. Then Industry, the villain, makes his appearance. His advent is described in the following way : "Th e Industrial Revolution . . . heralds another new phase in the ecology of the h uman species characterised by a massive i ntensification of the interplay be tween culture and nature" ( p . 4 ). Tempted by Industry the Human Race embarks on a way of l i fe that has widespread destructive consequences: "A single animal species is causing progressive ecological disturbance at the level of the planet as a whole" ( p. 4 ). There is an increase i n population beyond supportable limits. There is release of damaging gases. The Human Race indulges in all sorts of bad behavior, which in the third scene leads to a serious quarrel with Gaia. The use of psychological metaphors, like 'tolerate ' , highl ights the story line we are bringing out in our narratological reading: It is now well appreciated that the biosphere, as a system capable of supporting humankind, will not tolerate indefinitely the present patterns of resource and energy use and waste production by the human population. ( p. 4)

In true Propp ian fashion, B oyden ( 1 99 1 ) identi fies something that the hero lacks: "There is a grievous deficiency in our contemporary culture . . . . It is the lack of an understanding . . . of the sensitivities and interdependencies of liv ing systems" (p. 4 ) . The Human Race lacks this knowledge, and its igno­ rance makes it extremely difficult to bring about a reconciliation with Gaia. The Human Race is not really a bad character. It has been led i nto a l i fe of rec kless squ andering and profligacy in the use of resources by the temptations that Indu stry has put in its way. However, help is at hand. There is a donor, helper or fairy godmother in the person of Education . According to B oyden, "it is time to take deliberate steps to overcome this shortcoming i n our ed ucatio nal and researc h programme " ( p. 4 ). It is ce nainly true that it is more difficult to present a good rigorous . In tegrated course than a good specialist course, so accepting the gift is not so easy. However, although the task of rescuing the H uman Race is hard, Ed �c ati on can give i t true knowledge because she herself has a helper, the U n avers iti es. In the fi nal act of the story B oyden tells us that "our u niversities h ave a key role to play in the promotion of this understanding and should as

80

G R EE N S PEA K

a matter of urgency give serious consideration to the ways and me an s o f meeting this responsibil ity" ( p . 4). Why is it worth toying with a narratological analysis, imposing what m ig ht seem an artificial framework on a plain piece of ' scienti fi c ' repo rt ing ? We advocate t his kind of reading partly because it enables us to better understand the way in which the argument is laid out. It seems just plain common sense to suppose that conviction i s more l i kely to be achieved by a story that fulfills some of the requirements of the classical tale than a mere catalogue of problems and their putative sol utions. This type of analysis shows the Jinks lhat tie the discourse i nto an orderly and sequential whole, the mapping of the multidimensional real ity of organic existence on to the single story line of the typical Bildungsroman. Fol k and fairy tales and their descendent, the Bildungsroman, present a generally optimistic story l i ne . The hero usual ly triumphs over evil or, if not, returns home sadder but wiser. Lennox Honeychurch has pointed out to us that a tragic genre is also widespread in Greenspeak documents. Species have become extinct, and the stories of their destruction conform to a bleaker narrative convention. The tragic story l i ne, for example as it appears narra tives concern ing the blue whale, is not on ly bleak but i nvolves another l i terary dev ice, anthropomorphism. Green cartoons depict whales with human faces. In w ritings about dolphins, we note the use of expressions l ike 'mother and baby ' rather than 'cow and calf' . In some texts, 'seal pup' gives way to ' baby seal ' . Framed in the dimensions of a humanoid narration, the destruc­ tion of the blue whale is not j ust a d isaster but takes on the color of a tragedy.

in

An Application of the Proppian Scheme Within an Elsbrce Narrative To ill ustrate how Proppi an functions can be combined with Elsbree 's

( 1 982) story l i nes as a complex analytical tool, we shall analyze the Brit ish Green Party 's manifesto prepared for the 1 992 general electio n. Our firs t

analysis draws on the familiar talc of Frankenstein and his misadventures , t� e story of his m i splaced scientific researches and the monster he c reated . Th iS is a quest story in both an abstract and a concrete sense. It is the pursui t an d d consum mation of a great project which turns out not to be as the h ero plann e rm fo e it. It is also the pursuit of the material man i festation of that proje ct in th . sh al ) · 1 n th "IS ana1 ys1· s, we of the monster mto the frozen wastes of the Arct1c. e st o try to bring out the 1 1 Propp functions that are identifiab le i n th e man if gy lo ho rp mo in the order that Propp sets them out in h i s general account of the of fol k tales. ,

ratives Environmenta l Nar

81

-

The story, so to say, begins before the opening scenes of the mani festo. eryth ing that is said in this document is the abi l i ty of scientists A ssu med in ev create and deve lop processes that in profoundly fundamental s to eer n nd en gi way of l i fe. The assumption behind the document is that our ffect ay s a enstein that tries to create a new life form, a scientific l i fe Frank a is sc ience being that has been created , which was at first innocent has now the ut form . b nster. mo a o int tu rned The man ifesto begins with a section in which the main subheading is "The Power to Des troy." Th is power is identified with the development of science and en gin eering, which created the "present power producing systems" ( § I ) . Once benig n assistants to l i fe, they have turned into something that is destroy­ ing the plan et "by overheating the planet: . . . by increased acidi fica­ tion : . . . by increased radioactivity : . . . [and] by many other forms of pol lu­ tion and environme ntal degradation" ( § I ) . Like Frankenstein's ' unnatural creation ' the monster created by 'sc ience ' c ontinues to develop more threatening q ualities-nuclear energy and so on. The only way to save oursel ves, according to the brochure read as a story is to destroy the monster. A different kind of world is to be created. There is to be a green energy program , a benign entity, in sharp contrast to that which was first created by the appl ication of science and technol ogy to human l i fe . Although our ' Frankenstein and h i s monster' story i s schematic, the analysis, coarse-grained though it is, brings out a familiar story l i ne. However, this manifesto can be analyzed in a much sharper and closer manner by the use of the Proppian functions. Part of the man i festo labeled "The Real Issues" can be l ooked at from a Proppian point of view as exe mpli fy ing four of those functions. In the fi rst section, we fi nd Propp Fu nctio n II: The Hero violates an interdiction si nce he uses his scienti fic res ou rces in an unthinking and destructive way by creating ecological ly obn oxious power-producing systems. He does this in complicity with a confederate who is shortly to be unmasked as the vil lain. He turns to destruc­ tion, and in the first section we are presented with the story of his misdeeds :

:

Human health is equal ly threatened, . . . the economic costs are becoming intol­ erab le, . . . the social costs are equal ly unacceptable, . . . [and] the political price can no longe r be paid. (§ 1 .2)

I n al l o f this the power-produ cing systems harm the Hero 's fam ily. ·

In the second section , we fi nd Propp Function IX in wh ich the villain is u n m as ked. It is Old Con sensus:

�

Des p te t heir diffe rences none of the traditional parties is prepared to recognise th at nc h co untrie s such as Britain are going to have to cut their energy coat to a mu ch s malle r and diffe rent cloth . ( § 2 . 0 )

82

G R E E N S PEA K

Old Consensus consists of the Labour Party, the Conservatives, a nd th e Liber al Democrats, of which "neither the Labour Party nor the Liberal De mocrat s have the imagination to envisage a society radically different fro m tod ay 's" ( § 2 ) . When they have taken an interest in alternative energy propos als it has been in those that most c losel y resemble large-scale systems. W ith the vill ai n unmasked it becomes even more evident that the Hero, the Human Race, is in desperate need of help. In Section 3 of the man i festo we find Propp Function XII : A rescuer appears, the donor of a magic gift. The newcomer is the Green Party. "The ambition of the Green Party is to change the institutional framework and to open the door to energy systems that are i n harmony with both people's needs and . . . the wel l-being of the planet" ( §3 ) . The gift is ecological sensibility. However, it will cost money. So, in accord with the Proppian progress, the Hero is to be tested . It is evident, and the Green Party emphasizes this fact, that a great many painful changes are going to have to be made in the way we l i ve . In Propp Function XIII we find out that the Hero, particularly as exemplified by the people of B ritain, is very much inclined to ignore or reject the offer of the gift. B ut in Propp Function XV we have an offer by the Green Party to instruct or guide the Hero and to be at his side i n the struggle against Old Consensus, the vil lain, and his henchman, the Labour Party. Finally we come to Propp Function XXXIII, in which the v i llai n is defeated . We see by examples that green energy policies work. Of course, the Green Party 's manifesto, l i ke any document whether written in Greenspcak or a dialect of some other persuasive genre, can be read in many other ways. For example, we could pay attention to the rhetorical device s by which the authors of the manifesto attempt to secure conviction in their audiences and their readers. The main device, the use of 'scien tific' and 'economic' estimates and statistics that bolster the green argument, is one we looked at closely in Chapter 3 . For the purposes of this chapter however, we are interested onl y in displaying one of the possible story lines to be fou nd i mmanent in the discourse taken as narrative. It is unsurprising to us that there are plenty of examples of envi ron me� tal s d i scou rse in which the structures of contemporary environmentalist narratl v� 10 d isplay forms and plots that have survived through dozens of gen erati o_n � ng the form of fairy tales and other l iterary genres. They have an abl d� s. le attraction for their readers who are, after all, cast as the heros of th ese sto � . onau B ut stories are told by peopl e embedded m systems o f s h 1" ftmg soc1 a1 rel everal ships and with multiple layers of social meanings. In any actu al tell in g, � g e ak plots may be running at once. To investigate this aspect of Gree nspe m . must turn to positioning theory. . 1 On ce again we must remind our readers that our mterest .I S no t t n d tnm enta fi 1 green p olicies are sound or unsound, right or wrong, bene c1a or e ·

·

.

w . w hether .

a"atives ironmental N Env. -

83

�

od of the p l an � t, but how they e presented as such . To reveal some fo r the go . asive tec hmq ues o f a genre 1 s not to dent grate what we are to be rsu o f the pe

pers uaded of.

Posi tion and Narrative to S tory Lines Speec h Acts and Their Relation

A recent in novation i n soc i o l i n gu i stics h as been the i n trod uction of the idea

and of a 'speaking position ' . A ' position ' i s defi ned as a set of rights, d u ties g a n i occupy person a that statements of nd i k the to respect with ns atio oblig therefore s i ' to tion i Pos relative ' make. properly or legitimately can po sition t he anal ysis of some piece of discourse in term s of the speech acts, soc i a l l y mea ning ful acts, accomplished j o i n t l y by speakers a n d hearers i n w h a t they

say and ho w what they say i s responded to (Harre & van Langcnhove, 1 99 1 ) . For exam ple, someone who occupies a position i n which they h ave a rec­

ognized obl igation and a corresponding right to j udge someone's work wi l l be heard t o be prais i ng it when they utter the sentence

"I

thi n k that work i s

v ery good ." Someone else, d i fferently positi oned i n t h e relevant soc ial order, could speak the same words and be heard as bei n g mere l y pol i te or even

sycophantic. Of course , a speech act becomes fu l l y determ i n ate only as and

w h en it is taken up as such by other mem bers of the conversati o n . It fo llows

that positions are defi ned relation al l y w i th respect to other mem bers of the local group, s ince rights, obl igations and duties arc themse l ves concepts that

can be understood only in terms of shifti n g pattern s of re l ations between the

people in some c ircu m scribed soc ial group. A third e l ement that completes the position ing ' triad ' i s the n arrative or story l i ne that can be fou n d in the speakings of th e various part ic ipants in the conversation by those who are

en gag ed i n it or w ho analyze conversations from the p o i n t o f v i ew of those e ngaged . More th an one such story l i n e may be bearab le i n the same form of words spo ken by the same people o n the same occas i o n . How the conversati o n wi l l be interpreted as a narrative depends on t h e positions that people arc taken to o cc upy and th e speech acts they are jointly heard as prod u c i n g . For e xamp le, w e might hear a conversation as the rea l i zation o f a heroic narrative 1. f we see the spe ech acts o f one o f the speakers a s defiant responses t o the thre ate ni ngs of another positioning onese l f as the dom i n an t character and the o t her as the subo rd i n ate . The c onc ept of ' voice w i l l also prove usefu l . The voice we are heari n g i n ' c ertai n sp eec h actio n i s an i mportant assumption of o u r i nterpretive proce­ , d ure s Th e vo 1ce o f a speaker may not be defi ned by the overt personhood o r so c·. a i l po sition of the apparent speaker or wri ter. One may be speakin g w i th

a

•

·

84

the ' voice' of another or using some collective ' voice ' . Bet wee n the noti o of ' position ' and ' voice ' we have the wherew ithal to provid e an analy s is some i ll uminating refinements of the essentially one-dimensio nal Proppi an _ analys1s. When we consider an utterance as a speech act, it must he taken as the j oi nt product of speaker's intention and hearer's uptake. The social force of the utterances that make up conversation is evident in words su ch as 'com plai nt' , ' greeting ' , 'answer' , ' i nvitation ' , 'threat ' and so on. Every speec h act is not only the individual performance of a social action but the joint creation of a social act. We must emphasize that the role of the in te rl o c u t or or hearer is quite crucial in making what someone said determi nate as a speech ac t . Furthermore, an utterance is determinate as a speech act only if we assume the speaker has a certain position vis-a-vis the hearer. For example, "I' l l help you up" could be an offer of help. But it could be an act of commiseration, condescension and so on. Imagine the various things that we might hear as the meaning of the utterance "You can see that the party has your welfare at heart, can ' t you'!" M uch depends on the relative pos it ion s of speaker and hearer and the context in which the utterance occurs. It is also evident that the story li ne readable in a text is sensitive to the imputed or claimed positions of the participants, be they people or voices. Since we can take positions, be positioned and so on, the re is always the possibility that positions can be challenged . A challenge can be accomplished by deny ing someone's right to issue a certain kind of s tateme n t . For example, we may declare that someone is not, as their discursive style implies, author­ ized to speak with the authori ty of science. This way of challenging a position was a common moti f of environmental discourse between representatives of the Western nations and those of the Third World . In these challenges, the overt social act in what is said is denied (a warn ing of the ecological dam age of unbridled industrial ization is reinterpreted as a deception to mai ntai n power), and the narrative l i ne is thereby transformed, say from stewardship to nco-imperialism. Vario us al ternative concepts have been proposed for capturing the id ea th at we have used the notion of 'position ' to express. For example, Goffm an ( 1 9 8 1 , p. 1 28) talks about having a footing in the conversation , or more g e n e ral ly a footing in an interactive episode, and of course that means havi ng a righ t to take part, to intervene, to say things, to be li stened to when those thin gs are said, and so on.

:�

Position and Rhetoric

In Chap ter 3 we discussed some of the rhetorical devices used by Gree ns pe ak ­ . sty l e ers . Prom inent among them was the use of a vocabulary and pres entatio n

arra tives §!!Yironmental N

85

al scie nces. Our point was not to deny the relevance of scientific 0 f th e natur shaping of environmental policy but to look at 'scientism ' in ese arch to the � persuasi ve aspect as rhetorical . How do choice of rhetorical style and act m . G reenspea k?. • · ng mter • • J ts di sc ursi ve pos1 t10m of speaking in the scientific voice? Positioned as al force soci the is Wh at are prefaced with an implicit "trust me." Trust is clai ms e's on tist, a sc ien say, but we are strongly scientists what ke i l not may We lity. eliabi r to elated matters in their domai n of write or speak they when them ve ie bel to nc lin ed be scientistic, but using not may or may language fic scienti use To e. rtis of expe person with a certain trustworthy and reliable a as oneself ion sit po it is to . of fact ters mat on auth ority Sc ientifi c discourse and environmental discourse using the vocabu lary and rhetorical techniq ues of the presentation of scienti fic matters are related through the positioning that the one induces on the other. Grecnspeakers wish to position themsel ves as scientists and hence obtain the characterological stand ing and moral force of bona fide members of that c luster of professions. The stron g relation between rhetoric and narrative has been pointed out by others, for example B runner and Oeschlaeger ( 1 994 ) . All this, we recollect from Chapter 3, must be considered in l ight of the fact that some Greenspeak­ ing is indeed well-authenticated science.

�

Examples of Analysis Using the Concepts of Narrative and Position

Disc ourses with the environ ment and ki ndred matters as topics are not con­ fined to the writings and speeches of 'environmentalists ' , such as the members of Gree npeace and the S ierra Club. 'Greenspeak ' as a l i nguistic genre must in clude the dialects of both radicals and conservatives. We turn now to the detailed analy sis of a Greenspeak text in the conservative interest. We shal l be u sin g both positioning and narrative structure t o reveal some o f the sources of its persu asive powe r. A

' Con serva tive' Text: B ritish Nuclear Fuels Brochure The docu ment we shall analyze is a publication by B ritish Nuclear Fuels

(B �) titled Nuclear Energy, and subtitled Don 't Be Left in the Da rk. It is not

wnuc n by those we would immediately identify as Grecnspeakers, but it is neverth el ess an important document in our arch ive of environmental dis­ course. The overall structure of the pamphlet is organized around a certain Pat tern of p ositioning. The voice or position from which BNF speaks i s always presented anti phonally to another contrasting voice and position. We shall repre sent thes e as +P and -P for simple reading. The positive position, +P, is

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occupied by the voice of B NF. The disreputable, morally ambi gu ou s and sel f-deceiving position , -P, is occupied by the voice of Env iron men tali s m whose programs and plans wou ld be disastrous. The E-voice appears in th i s' quotation fol l owed immediately by a commentary in the B-voi ce: [E] renewable forms of energy too have an i mponant contribution to make; [B ] however it is likely they will only meet a smal l proponion of energy needs, and considerable research and development work still needs to be carried out to determine their reliability and economic and environmental suitability.

The E-voice is positioned as unreliable, as overoptimistic and without the right to make declarations with the authority of science. The utterances of that voice should not be taken seriously. The second, or B -voice, is positioned as follows: "The Nuclear Power Industry on the other hand has over thirty years experi­ ence of electricity production and in Europe more than thirty percent of elec tricity is provided by nuclear power." As such, the B -voice is occupying a position in which it has a unassailable right to make prophecies and to be trusted. Thus, in the opening sections of the publ ication we fi nd the defining of positions and the assignment of voices. One has the right to comment on the dangers and the future of nuclear power; the other does not. As we look more closely at the text we can begin to draw out features of pronominal use that are strongly i ndicative of speaking positions. For in­ stance, we have the fol lowing: "Fossil fuels will not last forever and it is vital that we do not waste them" ; "Oil should be conserved for our transport needs"; etc, etc. Here the 'we' is inclusive: <speaker, + hearer>. In another section of the text however, we find ' we ' used rather differently. The heading of a large-scale flowchart describing the procedures for recovery of n uclear fuel is "How We Operate." The ' we' here is BNF, and we should understand that pronoun as <speaker, -hearer>. Throughout the document ' w e' is used so that the reader is doubly positioned as one of the public and, by the multivoiced use of ' we' , invited to see the world as one of the BNF people. There is a fasc inating rhetorical device employed in thi s text : n amel y, t� e positioning of machines, processors and equipment. We have an ex ample 10 a photographic montage in which a uranium centrifuge is presented ne x t t� a simple domestic spin-dryer. We notice that the i ncredibly h i gh- tech mach ane is depicted i n a common context and so as, by implicatio n, belon gin g �o �e same type as the good domestic clothes dryer. This is a famili ar devic e 10 commercial advertising brochures, in which family cars are presented nex t a castle, a certai n brand of cigarettes in the landscape of the Wild We st , an Oxford colleges display their ' B rideshead ' profi le to the came ra.

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Narratives £mlirontnen tal

87

The use of imagery to reverse the subsumption of the domestic and der o ne type also appears in this brochure . There are examples of tee h ni cal un . ht c all a contrast context. A c 1 ean, pretty young woman IS shown ig m w h at on e a ' nice ' nuclear pellet, small and tidy. On e aring ru bb er gloves and holding is a di rty old coalman weari ng photograph contrasted the in and, h e other coal sack. The caption "One old dirty a humping and gloves ther lea clu msy roughly equivalent to 1 .25 tonnes of coal" refers to the ellet is p l AGR fue rhetoric i s in persuasive the course of but involved, tances subs of q uanti ties s. th e pi cture Positioned together, BNF are people l ike us, the sensitive, sensible people, and we are people l ike them, the well-informed and scienti fically l iterate peop le. The story line is too simple to need Propp 's functions to unravel . It is the Fairy Godmother and the Ugly Sisters a l l over agai n .

;

A

'Radical ' Text: Elsworth 's A cid Rain

For our second example of positioning and narrative we shal l use Steve Elsworth's ( 1 984) Acid Rain. Looked at from the point of view of positioning, we find three voices, that of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB ), that of the Environmental ists and that of Steve, the common man with uncommon powers of reason . The positioning that we are suggesting domi­ nates the narra tive structure of the work appears explicitly only i n the fi n al paragraphs of the chapter on which we are focusing, through the use of the expression 'victim' . Previously, the dominant voice of the text is that of the imparti al scientist (Elsworth , 1 9 84, p . 79) . The position of the voice of the CEG B in the argument can be determined by whether or not it fee ls itself to be affected by air pollution. If it is a victim of acid destruction it w i l l want to do some thing to reduce industrial emissions of sulphur and nitrogen oxides. If it is not a victi m i t will want a preferably lengthy program of research into ac idi fic ation before committing itse l f to action. Here we h ave two positions. e disc ourses of those occupying these an tithetical positions will be d i fferent 1 0 vari ous ways, in particular heard as expressing di fferent speech acts. Alt hou gh for those positioned as victims the request for lengthy program s of researc h by th ose posi tioned as victimizers w i l l be read as prevarication , those posi ti oned as v ictim izers w i l l read the complaints of the victims or those �osi tioned as victims as at best winging and at worst some kind of prevarica­ ti o n. The effect of thi s positioni n g , which is covert or implicit for most of the chapte r, is to give every statement made by or on behal f o f the voice o f the CEG B a doubl e i llocutionary force. As uttered by voice 1 in position I the

!h

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illocutionary force is expressed in the phrase "You can take it from me th t . . . " The same voice from position 2 is now being heard as the vo ice procrastinator, a liar and a dissembler; that is, the il locution ary force of th a e statement is something l i ke this: "I admit i t 's wrong but I ' l l fix it l ater · Characteristically, there are two story lines that can be h eard in th� ��ry same sentences uttered by the voice of the CEGB : one as it i s interpreted fro m the position of victimizer, the other as it is interpreted fro m the pos iti on of victi m . We can see very clearly in these cases how the i l l oc u ti on ary force of the utterances is determined by the position from which they are thou ght to come. However, the author, Steve, has already positioned himself as a th ird voice-that is, the voice of the people, the voice o f reason-and so h e legitimates his positioning as that by means of which he presents the two versions of the voice of the CEG B , first in one position and then in another. So his interpretations or glosses on the utterances of the CEGB voice depend on his sel f-positioning. Why should we accept his pos i t io n in g ? For withou t the acceptance of that. his criticism of the scientific s t atus of voice 1 in position I falls down. I t is very important to emphasize this feature of t he use of the voice of science or the criticism of it in Grccnspeaking. The conclusion we wish to draw from the analysis of Elsworth's chapter is that the issue between Elsworth as the third voice, the voice of reao;on, and the CEGB seen in one posi tion or another is not really a matter for scientific research at all. This is not a discussion of the scientific merits of a c ase. Th at job could only be undertaken by two voices, both positioned within the framework of the scientific communi ty, each prefi x ing their remarks with the i nvisible trus t me" and each having faith in the trustworthiness of the other. Fo r the Elsworth 's gloss on the CEGB 's speech actions, what we are observ ing is a matter of positioning. That is, the CEGB's position o f itse l f in position 1 as speaking with the voice of science is being challenged by Elsworth from position 3. He repositions the CEGB in position 2, namel y the posit ion of procrastinator not of scientist. From then on the force of what the spokesper­ sons of the CEGB say is not that of someone speaking with the voice of scie nce but rather the typical di shonest utterances of the procrastinator, the l i ar or th e prevaricator. Elsworth 's text is not as it appears at first sight, a text in environmental science. It is a much more interesting document. It is l i ke the Briti sh N uclear Fuels brochure, which is not a scientific docume nt eithe r. In these tw o documents we see quite overtly by the time we come to the end the �he� om� ­ non of posi tion ing: Interestingly in the El s w ort h text the p osi u on m g . vis-a-vis the voice of reason , and very much the same can be said of the vo a e of B NF in its account of the reasonableness and good sense o f tho se 0 generate electricity by the usc of nuclear power.

0/ ..

"

w

�1 5

es

!J!!Xironmental Na rrativ

89

summary

1be n arrati ve s tructure of a passage of Greenspeak can be very complicated. On a bas ic n arra tive plan that compl ies with Propp's functions there are to other narrative conventions. To im bric ated layers of structure conforming of science is not just to adopt a certai n vocabulary and voice the with speak to structure one's story within a Proppian framework, or one so ut al b ric rh eto traditional narrative form , such as the heroic q uest. Yet some lizes rea wh ich elaborations must be taken note of, as the positioning of the ural struct further various voices that can be ' heard ' in the narrative shifts and changes with its development. The social force of the utterances of the various authors of documents and parties to disputes depends very much on how their 'voices' are positioned in the moral order or orders taken for granted i n the material we have looked at.

Notes I. There has bee n much development and fi ne-tuning of Propp's ideas since they were first proposed, for example by Bat ( 1 985), Greimas ( 1 987) and Toolan ( 1 988). Such amendments would need to be taken into account when more fi ne - grained analyses than those we attempt here are made. For our purposes, largely illustrative, the original 3 1 Propp functions will do very well. 2. The topic of narrative has been very popular. We are wel l aware that there are several other analytical schemes of merit, for example t ha t of Labov ( 1 972). For the purposes of illustrating the narrative aspects of Grcenspeak, we make usc only of those of Propp and Elsbee . 3. We note that Landau ( 1 984) follows the once common convention in use among paleontologists of failing to refer explicitly to the female half of the human race ! 4. We use traditional expressions for llomo sapie11s in this section. The species name in English is 'Man'. Readers are reminded that the grammatical gender of species terms in English is masculine. The species term comprehends members of both biological sexes.

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disease, nuclear power and genetic engineering, among others-are tal ke d about from the three macropcrspcctives of science, econom ics and moral ity. The conclusions arrived at in this chapter are l i kely to hav e more general appl icabi l ity than to environ mental issues alone. Al though these issues are not new to our generation, they exhibit the massive d iscrepancy between what we know and what we need to know that has always been a feature of philosophical reflection on the human condition. The "one universal truth about al l cognition : the abi l i ty to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge i n man 's environment" ( B runer, 1 979, p. 65 ) . The h istory of thought discloses a succession of new heuristic metaphors in every attempt to push back the horizons of knowledge. Environmentalist discourse is no exception. This process has been subject to two conn icting interpretations: (a) that metaphor is a convenient interim research tool that, ski l l fu l l y employed, will reveal objective reality and (b) that al l of our worlds are constructed by our linguistic and social practices, or more modestly, that all our perceptions are thus con structed. B oth positions call for an exam ination of the role of metaphor, a less ambitious task than tack l i ng the question of the general nature of human cognition . We begin with a brief survey of some recent writings on metaphor and environment. Central to our argument in th is chapter is the thesis that the boundary between the l i teral and the metaphorical uses of language is group and culture spec i fi c (Muhlhliusler, 1 985). Under this view, the notion of l i teral meaning loses its status as a direct representation of universal truth to become, instead, the agreed mean ings a cul ture regards as unproblematical at a given point in time and indeed in a given communicative exchange. Note that, accord ing to this v iew, the boundary between what is l i teral ly true and what is not can differ greatly from time to time and from cul ture to culture. The term 'languag e fam i l y ' in l inguistics or 'plant community ' in biology started off as metaph ors but have come to be accepted as literal concepts picking out real , natural kin ds by many practitioners of these disciplines. That humans and apes are 'relat ed ' is taken for uncontroversial knowledge b y some scientists but reje cted by sizeable sections of Western societies. That humans and pigs are closel y related , or that humans are pigs in disguise and vice versa, is reg arded as a fact by some communities in the M iddle Sepik of Papua New Guinea. where � in our society to call a person a pig is seen as a pejorativ e metaph or. I� IS n important to emphasize that we arc concerned not with the scient i fic ques� J � iC of whether Darwinians or creationists are correct but with the l ing Uist question of the metaphors by which such views are presen ted. atte r Term s such as 'community ' , ' family' or any linguistic sign for th at m ac ­ ar have trad i tionally been treated as capable of definitive sem an tic ch to r:" u terization, that is, characterization as decontextual i zed units. Let us ret s g em b sentences such as "Human bei ngs and apes are related " and " Hum an

'[!!! Power of Metaphor

93

" As we poi nted out in Chapter 2, the interpretation of such a e n ot ape s. trU depen ds on their accreditation . U ttered by a scientist they are tions c ns when used as a remark about someone who has a crav ing for from i ffere nt rejection of scienti fic biology by a Jehovah 's Witness or i n a a i n or b an anas amoral ity. In other words, whether or not such statements ut human abo p oem metaphorical depends on contextual factors. When there is l or litera ar appe the accreditation of a statement (for example, between two about ict nfl no co conviction), it is taken to be a literal description . Where same the of tists scien arises ( for example, between a fundamentalist Christian and an ict confl such evolution ary biologist), the statement is taken metaphorically. Speaki ng about environmental issues can i nvolve scienti fi c , economic and moral concepts borne by the characteristic vocabul aries of each domain of d i scourse. The tensions between these di scourses and the conflictin g views of those who engage, for instance, in a moral debate about the environment thus are a rich source of metaphor. The integration, as we put it earl ier in this vol ume, between the 'as if' and the ' as is' can take a number of forms and can do a number of different jobs.

� �

Metaphors for Nature and the Envi ronment

Thinking, speaking and writing about environmental matters employ, as do other genres of cognition, a huge range of metaphors. We cons ider in what follows some of the more widely used 'displacements of concepts' . M i l l s ( 1 982) identified three core metaphors of nature that Western societies have lived by for the past I , 000 years and that have defi ned distinct stages i n the development of Western thought since the M iddle Ages : •

In lhe Middle Ages, nature was seen as a book wri tten by God.

•

In the Renaissance, nature was seen as a reflection of the human body : Microcosm corresponds to macrocosm .

•

From lhe Enlightenment onward, t h e world is seen as a machine: first as a clock, then as a kind of steam engine and more recently as a computer.

Alth oug h e arlier metaphors h ave coexisted with each newly dominant one for cac pe riod, particularly among non ! iterate people, the principal metaphor by � • ch the major i ty of educated people lived were the ones j ust l i sted . Not only d Jd th ey guide people 's everyday behavior, but they were systematized and fo rm alized as theories and guiding principles for deal ing with nature . Ce ntral to the book-of- nature metaphor is the assumption of its divine � uthor. Nature, like the B ible, had been given to humankind as a means of Ins tru cti o n . The prin cipal task for humans was to discover the signification of

"':

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every single sign i n this book, not to rewrite it or improve on it. Cen tral als is the idea that the B ible and the book of nature were written for hu man ki n d Just as the B ible offered spiritual salvation, nature offered remedies for th e body, a theme profusely illustrated by writers such as Thomas ( 1 98 3). The idea of an intimate relationshi p between the human b ody an d the external world in the shape of animism or sympathy is encountered wid ely i n prescientifi c thought-for example, in the mystical geomancy of St. Hilde­ gard of B i ngen. I ts systematization was an achievement of Renaissance science. It prov ided a coherent framework for the study of phenomena such as the aging of Earth (the transformation of the once smooth surface into the wri nkled face of older Earth). The semi nal principal implied, among other things, that minerals, l i ke plants, origi nated from seeds and eventually ripened into gold. The microcosm/macrocosm rel ationship explained the i mportance given to the discovery of Earth's circulatory system, its ' veins ' , which ex­ plained why there were so many spri ngs high up in the mountains, volcanic activity and other previously puzzl ing phenomena. In contrast with the metaphors of the previous age, which encouraged passive understanding, the nature-as-body metaphor engendered aux iliary metaphors for healing, improvement and control. As Mills ( 1 982) put it, "To know the world people have only to know themselves, and to change it, change themselves" ( p. 245 ). Perhaps the most i mportant difference between the machine metaphor and those it displaced is that where both the divine book and the human body were givens, whose essential nature could not be altered, machines can be invented, refi ned and manipulated in order to transcend existing l i mitations. Nature is the raw material that can be changed into what the human mind wants it to become. Of the many impl ications of the machine metaphor, we can only single out a few. Machines are made of parts , an observation that encourages the atomi za­ tion, "the thinking nature to bits," as some contemporary environmental criticism cal ls it, of complex machines into their components. Mach ines are created. Although th is insight apparently reinforces the view of an almi ghty creator, it can also lead to a v iew that has become increasingly do minant: Go d as a ' retired engi neer' , with human beings taking over and playi ng the divi ne role . Most important, the metaphor suggests the legitimacy, ind eed de sirabi l­ ity, of control ling nature and consequently is hospitable to the con cep� �f progress . Progress is manifested i n the emergence of i ncre asin gly soph l � ll­ ne cated machines ( mechan ical c lock, steam power, internal com bu sti on en g � e and computer), eac h of which in turn has led to the redefiniti on of the machm metaphor. ated The very concept of ' nature ' itself can be looked on and criti cal ly eval u ak . spe as a metaphor. A l though the term is pervasive i n most dialec ts of Green

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J1¥ Power o(Metaphor

95

ot on ly does it have very different mean ings in the di scourses in which it is of its complex h istorical ori gins, it also remains vague ccred ited as a result discourse. That virtually all existing metaphors of nature vidual indi y with in an omings is argued by Meisner ( 1 995 ) who advocates the need shortc vere h ave se that should be "provocatively powerful and cognitively hors metap for n ew must evoke positive feel i ngs about nature and suggest a they al ; practic t l eads to humil ity, respect and non-exploitative ways of living" tha tion con cep 1 6). 5, p. 1 99 er, isn ( Me

:

Some Metaphors From Economics Mills's ( 1 982) analysis is concerned mainly with the scientific discourse and, in particular, approaches to geography and geology and has l ittle to say about economic metaphors, which, though partially deri ved from the other three core metaphors, have become increasingly sel f-contained , as i l lustrated by Worster ( 1 985). The idea that nature produces for human consumers has shifted from its agricultural roots (nature as a larder) to resourcist and managerial perceptions. Agai n, such a shift is typically interpreted as a refinement of progress, and ecological management has been hai led as a solution to the problems created by the unmanaged growth of science. This notion of progress is currently under attack in environmental dis­ course. It is argued that perceived progress is merely a reflection of the successive adoption of ultimately arbitrary metaphorical interpretations of the world, not the replacement of inferior tools of inquiry by superior ones. Equally important , there is a growing awareness of the limitation to what humans can know about nature. As one can only control what one knows, there are principled limits to contro l . This has two consequences. On the one hand , it is essent ial to understand the l i mitations of the prevai ling scientific meta­ phors for gaining knowledge ; on the other hand, it is desirable to minimize the damage that can be caused by living by a single metaphor and to pool the in sights fro m as m any alternative metaphorical proposals as possible. Thus it is this last postmodern insight that explains the recent replacement of a framew ork based on a single metaphor by a proliferation of competing metaphori cal systems, the search for insights into the metaphors of ' primitive ' or pre tech nol ogical societies and the search for explanations for what has caused our current environmental crisis in past metaphors . This ins ight must be developed with great care. It is easy to slip into the as sumptio n that there is no real scientific progress, only the replacement by one pop ular picture or story line by another, between which no rational choice can � made. B ut metaphors, story lines and so on are not neutral when cons tdered in relation to the tasks that they facilitate. For the task of under-

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standing the causal structure o f nature, the machine metaphor is b e tter th a n ei ther the microcosm/macrocosm picture and the tropes of the book of nature . But for the task of creating a world worth living in, other metaphors th an th e machine and its current derivatives may prove more val uable. Th ere is no good ground for those extravagant developments in postmodernism p h i losophy th at have surfaced as an attack on science as the domi nant way of k nowi ng ( Rorty, 1 989). We must always ask the question "The dominan t mode of kn ow i ng what?" If the answer to that question is "the best place to site a vi neyard," chemical soil analysis and attention to geology and lie of the land is th e be st way to proceed . If the answer is "the best way to bring up chil dren," develop­ mental psychology may have less value than the fol k wisdom of the ancie nts. Criticisms of Some Entrenched Metaphors Our survey thus far has drawn attention to attempts by environm ental scientists, philosophers of language and the l i ke to understand the metaphori­ cal roots of certain scholarly practices. Such writings are complemented by a body of other work criticizing the dominant Western metaphors . A recent summary of such critical literature is given by Meisner ( 1 995). Like other environmental ists, Mei sner is particularly scathing about the mechanistic and cybernetic metaphors with their visions of repairing the ecosystem, biocom­ puters and Spacecraft Earth. Similar criticism is directed at economic meta­ phors of the environment and attempts to redefine environmental problems as an exercise of weighing fi nancial costs against benefits for human consumers. Meisner, li ke many other critics, is dismissive of the anthropocentric character of Western metaphors. He is pessimistic about attempts to change the current state of the environment by promoting more benevolent anthropocentri c metaphors (in particular, the redefi nition of nature as a woman) as, in his view, they perpetuate the nature-humanity dualism. To overcome this dual is m, it is fel t necessary to search for metaphors that promote a holistic visio n, m eta­ phors that emphasize the place of human beings as part of nature . In th ese critical writings we can see the importance of judging metaphors in rel ati on to the tasks that fac ilitate or obstruct. The pri ncipal obstac le blocking attempts to establish a more h olistic d iscourse is the prevalence of a small number of l argely uncon sci ous meta­ , phors that most speakers of Western languages live by (Lako ff & Joh ns on r, o 1 979). Particularly important in this connection is the reification metaph fo r which turns temporally bounded processes into timeless abstract obj ect sm­ sy instance, ' speaking ' and ' writing' i nto ' l anguage' , ' l iving togeth er' i nt o ' e biosis' , the metabolic process involving the breakdown of food an d rel eas � f red J n energy into 'digestion ' , and so on. Two rei fications frequen tly enco unte

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are the terms problem and solution. B y virtue of being nouns Green speak ing existence of entities that can be changed , fi xed or removed . the st gge th ey su blem fi x i ng, troubleshooting, problems that can be drowned, pro get we Thus , get a gri p on, an s on. Sol utions arc similar:ly seen as can one s probl em _ anent obJects, as m the motorcar t_ s the solut t on to our i-perm quas static, transport prob lems, or, as it was once hailed, the solution to horse manure poll uti on in city streets ." A more realistic view would be to consider that ' the prob lem ' is much more l i ke a verb that can be predicated of objects, a verb (Zeitwort) that means ' to be problematical ' . for which the ugly neologism ' to prob lematize ' might be a suitable synony m . Moles are not intrinsical l y a prob lem any more than are baldness or hunger. Moles can be problematical for a short pe riod of time i n a certain area (say, a gol f course) and hunger can be pro blem atical if it is involuntary suffering for a long period of time by a group of people, unless they are ascetics such as the Desert Fathers. That something is problematic thus turns out to be in many instances highly transient. This is even more true of 'solutions ' . O n e of the many subsidiary 1 laws derivable from Murphy 's Law is "today ' s solutions are tomorrow 's problems." Replacing horses with motorcars in big cities has turned out to be a rather costly and largely transitory solution to the problem of unpleasant was te products. DDT, once hailed as ' the solution ' to ' i nsect problems ' , had slipped not many years after its invention into the problem category i tself. The construction of motorways, the green revol ution, the bu ilding of nuclear power stations, using introduced spec ies to control pests, such as the cane toad in Queensland, the giving of development aid to poorly managed Th ird World regimes, and many more former solutions are similar candidates for a new problem category. The green revolution, the application of Western science and technology to traditional agriculture, was hai led as a solution to the problem of persistent food shortages in developing countries (a metaphor itse l O . It was said to be the 'biggest gun ' i n the worldwide war on hunger. Its critics have pointed out that the victory has been a very temporary one and that rel iance on monocul­ ture and ferti l izers has a high cost and is not sustai nabl e . The metaphors appl ied to the green revolution have shifted (see Wh arton, 1 989) from ' c or­ nuc opia ' to 'Pan dora's box ' . Paddock ( 1 970) presents an argument that, in a si m ilar form, has since been appl ied to green busi ness, green tourism and gree n cons umerism :

� ?.

Th e revolut ion i s green only because i t i s being viewed through green-coloured gl asses. (Reme mber the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz? It could be seen only when you put on a pair of green glasses.) Take off the glasses, and the revolution proves to be an illusion-but devastating i n the damage it can do to mankind's tardy efforts to limit the world's horrendous population growth. For opti mism

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about man's abi lity to feed himself as today 's rate of population growth continues is precisely what we do not need and cannot afford in the race with the population bomb. ( p. 897)

Here we have the fasci nating phenomenon of one metaph o r, ' the green revol ution,' in conflict with another, ' the population bomb' . How the argument will turn out must depend in large part on the balance between the power of the metaphors at work here. We i l lustrate our point with a further instance of metaphorical reification: the notion of noise easement. An easement is a well-defined right of way over private land (e. g . , for the council to have access to a 'water supply pipe ' ) . The concept was extended metaphorically to the flight path of airplanes o ver private property i n the United States and elsewhere. B ut, as B axter ( 1 974) has pointed out, extending the notion of easement in this way does not provide a sensible solution : On the basis of this descri ption, the system may not sound dramatically different from the system of noise easements that we have today. But there are two important differences. Under our present law in most parts of the country, the airport is not required to obtai n a noise easement unless airplanes physically pass directly over the parcel of property involved. Under this absurd rule, which is a tec hnical hangover from ancient concepts of trespass, adj acent properties each affected in precisely the same way by exposure to noise are treated very differently. The one that happens to be directly under the flight path is compensated because a noise easement must be obtained; the adjoining parcel not under the flight path receives no compensation at all. That rule should be eliminated. But a second major defect in our present system of noise easements is that the easement is perpetual . Once an casement has been acquired, the airline industry is entitled to go on making the same amount of noise forever without making any further payments. This makes a certain amount of sense, because the airline is required to pay, in the very first easement proceeding, the entire amount by which the value of the noise-exposed ownership interest has been depressed by noise exposure. The great di fficulty caused by this feature of the system is that once the aviation industry has acquired a pattern of easements, no cost attaches to mak ing noise in the future . ( pp. 55-56)

the

In this passage, we see the metaphor as a displaced concept, clash ing wi � h framework in which it has come to be embedded, in rel ation to a parttc ular task: namely, that of ameliorating the noise of aircraft. The very term ' environment' is a metaphor, particularly reveal ed i n t tendency that goes with its use in expressions like ' the env i ron me n separate human beings from nonhuman n ature. The poin t has been by several writers , whose views are summ arized by Rowe ( 1 9 89 ).

th�e t debate The meta'

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by routinely, and without anyone having to account for them , phors we live d critically, particularly when it comes to the relationship tudie be s eed to ngs and the 'built environment ' . Not only is this last phrase bei an u m h et ween it tends to suggest-falsely-that only i n cities is the or, but taph me itsel f a ult of the work of people. There are hardl y any areas of res the l ive pl ace we display the results of tens of thousands of years of not do that face ur Earth 's s . use and tion upa h um an occ

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Heuristic Metaphors Metaphors and the Genesis of Knowledge That metaph ors are one of the most powerful tools in the generati on of new knowledge has been known for centuries. Th is general insight and i ts appli­ cabi lity to environment al matters has been com mented on, for i nstance, by Hardin ( 1 974) : Susanne Langer has shown that i t i s probably i mpossible t o approach an unsolved problem save through the door of metaphor. Later, attempting to meet the demands of rigor, we may achieve some success in cleansing theory of metaphor, though our success is limited if we arc unable to avoid using common language, which is shot through and through with fossil metaphors. ( I count no less than five in the preceding two sentences). Since metaphorical thinking is i nescapable it is pointless merely to weep about our human limitations We must learn to live with them, to understand them, and to control them. 'All of us,' said George El iot in Middlemarch, ' get our thoughts entangled i n metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.' To avoid unconscious suicide we are well advised to pit one metaphor against another. From the interplay of competitive metaphors, thoroughly developed, we may come closer to metaphor- free solutions to our problems. No generation has viewed the problem of the survival of the human species as serio usly as we have. Inevitably, we have entered this world of concern through the door of metaphor. { p. 56 1 )

Ex amp les of He uristic Metaphors H ow the lexic on of English can be used to enter the world of environmental m atters w ill now be discussed in more detai l . We can i l l ustrate th is with an x am ple . There is a certai n amount of agreement on the mean ing of the terms . sp�ce s h 1p' and 'carpet' . B y predicating ei ther of these two terms of the e nv tro nme nt, as in "the environment is a spaceship" or "the enviro nment is a c arpe t," one has created a mental device for exploring aspects of something un k now n-in this case, the environment.

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G R E E N S PEA K

Let us first highlight the Spaceship Earth metaphor, first posi ted in Bo ul d­ as follows:

i n g s ( 1 966) writings and interpreted by Hardin ( 1 97 4 ) '

It is time, he says, that we replace the wasteful 'cowboy economy' of the past with the frugal 'spaceship economy ' required for continued survival in the limited world we now see ours to be. The metaphor is notably usefu l in justifying pollution control measures. ( p. 56 1 )

That there may also be a downside to this variant of the machine metaphor has been pointed out by a number of writers : Unfortunately. the image of a spaceship is also used to promote measures that are suicidal . One of these is a generous immigration policy, which is only a particular instance of a class of policies that are in error because they lead to the tragedy of the commons . These suicidal policies are attractive because they mesh with what we unthinkingly take to be the ideas of 'the best people' . What is mi ssing in the ideal istic view is an insi stence that rights and responsibilities must go together. The ' generous ' atti tude of all too many people results in asserting inal ienable rights while ignoring or denying matching responsibilities. For the metaphor of a spaceship to be correct the aggregate of people on board would have to be under unitary sovereign control. A true ship always has a captain. It is conceivable that a ship could be run by a committee. But it could not possibly survive if its course were determined by bickering tribes that claimed rights without responsibi lities. What about Spaceship Earth? I t certainly has no captain, and no executive committee. The United Nations is a toothless tiger, because the signatories of its charter wanted it that way. The spaceship metaphor is used only to justify spaceshi p demands on common resources without acknowledging correspond­ ing spaceship responsibilities. ( H ardin, 1 974, p. 56 1 )

We note that such mechanistic metaphors are widely employed i n the current debate about the optimum size of Austral ia's population and in the policies to be adopted toward asyl um seekers in Western Europe. Even though we postpone judgment on the rel ative merits of these two opposed interpretations, we use them to point out an import ant as pect of metaphor. As a tool for explaining the unknown, the metap hor su ffers fro m limitations, particularly its property of selectivity : highlighti ng som e aspe cts of the world and excluding others. These limitations are compou nded when it. metaphor is mistaken for an icon of reali ty rather than a tool fo r ex plo ri ng el y ur p no are There Its virtues, of course , should not be underestimated. objective discovery procedures for anythin g. We are not equ ipped w ith �he n or gift of im maculate perception . What we perceive is in part detennin ed by p wn no conceptual preparation and expectations. Those who look for the un k

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fi nd i t . B ecause o f this pervasive feature of perception and the wi ll som etim es of perception, metaphors are thus highly usefu l de­ ticipation an al th eoretic ess of helping people make sense of new states of affairs. busin the vices in against self-deception i n the short run, but without guarantee no is The re our possibi lities of perception and cognition there is no enlarge to ors metaph in the long run . knowledge our of gement enlar e th f hope o force of several metaphors is particularly valuable in trying the ing bin Com of biodiversity has been sense aking M concepts. complex and erst to und in terms of metaphors such as "green glue" (Ehren­ discussion its by helped "rivets or passengers of an aeroplane" and "insurance policy" 86), feld , 1 9 (Digard, 1 993). The heuristic power of metaphor is brought home by the fact that it is now possible to conduct empirical tests of these metaphors with the help of the study of miniature biosystems, in the "ecotron" project at Imperial College's biological studies center at Si l l wood Park (Cherfas, 1 994 ). The Commonplace as a Metaphor for the Sophisticated We can illustrate the productive use of the most commonplace domestic objects as metaphors with the analysis of a metaphor deliberately created for this chapter: "The environment is a carpet." Carpets have a number of properties that it would seem profitable to apply to the environment via the disp lacement of concepts from one semantic field to another that the metaphor opens up. There are, for instance, the fol lowing: •

Both carpets and environments can b e a complex mixture of natural and arti ficial fibers.

•

E xpensive carpets and crucial environments do best when not subjected to too much human interference.

•

Carpets and environments are used. They are trodden on, made dirty, and they need occasional cleaning.

•

Carpets and environments are finite in area and life span.

•

Both carpets and environments have patterns and structures.

•

For both carpets and environments, only the surface i s visible.

•

It takes more time to make a carpet and an environment than to ruin either.

•

Different types of carpet are suited to different environments.

C arpet is a term related to a number of other terms that could be used as subsidiary metaphors (e.g., the verb weave, the notion of tapestry of life, and 50 � n ). So me of these have indeed been successfully employed in discussing env iro nmental matters. Consider, for instance, the notion "tapestry of l i fe" in the fol low ing quo tation :

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Like a child tugging threads from some enormous piece of tapestry, we c on tinue to tear at the web of l i fe with little if any knowledge of the possi ble im pac t Perhaps those who dug l imestone out of caves near Kuala Lumpur and recl aim ed land from swamps up to 40 km. away realized that they were de stroyi ng th e roosting sites and feeding grounds of a bat, Eoynycteri s spelaea . But t here was one thing they did not know: this single bat species is responsible for pollinating one of Southeast Asia's most highly prized fruit crops, derived from th e durian tree. The annual duri an crop, worth some $ 1 20 million, i s now at risk. (Myers 1 985, p. 1 5 5 ) ,

It highlights the complex interdependency of the various threads that make up a tapestry and in doing so draws attention to s i m i l ar interdependencies in nature . The metaphor powerfully alerts the reader to the possibility that l ocal tinkeri ng can h ave consequences of a very d i fferent order of m agnitude. Another metaphor from the c arpet family is the environment as a doormat, a worthless object, used to c lean one's shoes, to be trampled upon. This metaphor can be used negatively, as i n "the environment is not a doormat," i l l ustrating the more general poi nt that the identi fication of dissimilarities and boundaries can be equal l y productive as a heuristic process as the identifica­ tion of similarities-for example, "surgeons should not be butchers " and "human be ings are not machines." Another metaphor drawn from the everyday objects of the household is that of certain parts of the environment being a 'sink ' . There is now wide­ spread skepticism over the dispersal of pollutants in water or air as a sol u­ tion-for instance the idea that the ocean can absorb a l imitless quantity of effluent-and scientists are looking for innovative ways of d isposing of noxious substances. In this searc h , they are inspired by the metaphor of a ' s i n k ' -a place where one can 'safely' d i spose of harm ful substances: For i nstance, forests or swamps can be made to serve as sinks for a ran g e of pol l utants. To what extent the model of the soil and rocks as a sink for carbon monoxide and oxygen appl ies to the absorption of man-made substances remai n s to be seen. Th i s discussion of the metaphors 'carpet' , ' sink' , and so forth shows how the use of metaphor can h i gh light interesting aspects of the environment, more complex than the usual household item. Put differently, a new metaphor affords a new frame or perspective but not the whole solution.

The Management of Metaphor

tel y Our analyses suggest that there are several ways i n which a predo m i na ad es l i nguistic study of the d i scourse of environmentalism, in many of its sh

r e The Power o(M tapho

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and divisions, can help bring c l arity and depth to m atters of fundamental human importance. We think that there are at least four major ways in which hor can serve as a val uable resource : the st ud y of metap •

•

To make an i nventory of metaphors that have helped or hindered progress i n discussing environm ental matters To devise new metaphors to create additional perspectives, along the slightly playful lines of our 'carpet' metaphor

•

To determine which metaphors have been regarded by their users as heuristic tools of exploration or ways of describing icons of reality

•

To make a careful assessment of the principled limitations of metaphor in various contexts-for instance, to discern the role of metaphor based on the use of the notion of anthropocentrism, of the concept of deep time, of the notion of expo­ nential growth, of the concept of feedback relationships, of development changes, and so on. We are inclined to believe that the current unclarity on these matters does not make any of them, as yet, a reliable basis for a metaphorical extension.

Let us begin by enlarging our col lection of environ mental metaphors. Metaphors for Our Natural Environment We can recognize several different polarities that give rise to d i fferent metaphors.

Open Versus Closed Systems This distinction is extremely important. One could argue that the greatest conceptual c hange i n human views of environmental matters came abou t with the transition from Earth as a practical ly i nexhaustible resource to a concep­ tion of its strict fi nitude. Consider H ard i n 's ( 1 974) commentary : Man for too long has considered himself apart from nature rather than a part of n ature. Nature is governed by one set of rules, he thinks, and he by another largely of his ow n m aking. A n d therein lie s th e reason for th e ecological problems. Man has looked upon the earth as an infinite source of materi al s . But there is a growing , even if not universal, awareness that perhaps man does fit somewhere Wi thin the large r framework of natural processes and has managed to upset or im pair them to his own disadvantage. Man has app roached the planet earth as an open ecosystem. There is a constant flow of inputs of energy and raw materials and outputs of products and waste th at ulti mately are lost to the system. But all the while man has been treating the eanh as an open system, he has in fact been operating within a closed system

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which he has been constantly short-circuiting. Except for the energy of the sun all the materials available to hi m-air, water, space, and collective resources_: are those that already exist or within limits can be biologically renewed. The earth , which has been regarded as infinite, is now being discovered as finite. And if man is to exist in a finite world then he has to work with nature's rules, under which he evolved. Man has to operate within a complex of dynamic interrelated systems of which he is an integral part, and the existence of which modem man is just beginning to comprehend. Man needs to develop an ecosystem approach to the management of his world. ( p. 565; © I974 A merican Insti tute of Biological Sciences, used with pennission )

The notion that the earth is finite has, of course, led to a range of metaphors such as that of the l i fe-boat. Th is metaphor is enlarged by Hardin as fol lows : Le t us look a t an alternative metaphor, that of a lifeboat. I n developing some relevant examples the fol lowing numerical values are assumed. Approximately two-thirds of the world is desperately poor, and only one-third is comparatively rich. The people in poor countries have an average per capita G N P (Gross National Product) of about $200 per year; the rich, of about $3,000 . (For the Uni ted States it is nearly $5 ,000 per year). Metaphori cally, each rich nation amounts to a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. The poor of the world are in other, much more crowded l i feboats. Continuously, so to speak, the poor fall out of thei r l i feboats and swim for a while in the water outside, hoping to be admi tted to a rich l i feboat, or in some other way to benefit from the 'goodies' on board. What should the passengers on a rich lifeboat do? This is the central problem of ' the ethics of a lifeboat' . First we 2 must acknowledge that each lifeboat is effectively limited in capacity. The land of every nation has a li mited carrying capacity. The exact limit is a matter for argument, but the energy crunch is convincing more people every day that we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of the l and. We have been living on 'capital ' -stored petroleum and coal-and soon we must live on income alone. ( p. 566)

I t is instructive that the l i feboat metaphor gives way at a crucial point in the argument to a commonplace economic metaphor, that of natural ' capital ' ·

Powerful Versus Vulnerable Environment We contrast the vulnerability of a l i feboat with the powerful i m age o � Gaia. ary the goddess, who will, if sufficiently provoked, get rid of that evolu tt on t ntras co n i nds sta m i stake: humankind. The vulnerabi lity of the environm ent . me to human power. The human power of creation has been a long-sta n d m g the

ho Ifte Power o(Metap r

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. Western disc ourse, as has been i l l ustrated by Thoma" ( 1 983) in a chapter Jed ''The S ubjugatio n of the Natural World":

��

Plants were equally malleable. A large range of cultivated plants had been inherited from remote antiquity, but continuous breeding and experi mentation opened new vistas . Agri cultural wri ters described the great i mprovements which could be made by 'altering the species of such vegetables that are naturall y produced. totally suppressing the one, and propagating another i n i t s place ' . A gardener declared in 1 734 that man now had the power 'to govern the vegetable world to a much greater i mprovement, satis faction and pleasure than ever was known in the former ages of the world' . An infinity of exotic trees, flowers, fruits, vegetables and industrial crops was waiting to be introduced . I t was a plastic world, ready to be shaped and mou lded . ( p. 28)

Very much the opposite view is found i n Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis ( 1 987, 1 988, 1 992) in which Earth is portrayed not "metaphorically as a synonym for humans" (Lovelock, 1 992, p. I 06) but as a powerful planetary-size eco­ system capable of self-regulation and survival as a fierce maiden rather than a benevolent mother. Humans, under this metaphor, are parasites or irritants that Gaia can shake off. Lovelock scorns the notion that humans are capable of regulating Gaia, suggesting on the contrary that the best we can do is to regulate our own behavior so as not to prompt Gaia to shake us off. Lovelock's greatest strength is to have successfully combi ned a moral and a scientific discourse. His metaphor of Earth as a superorganism is a development of the 1 8th-century geologist Hutton's theory. Unlike Hutton 's superorganism meta­ phor, which could not get accredited in mainstream scientific thinking, Lovelock has inspired a sign ificant number of research projects l ooking for conceptual connections or parallels between ' living' organisms and the bio­ sphere, which earlier research had neglected . This project i s plai n l y metaphor driven . An example of the parallel is the following: The clouds over t h e world's oceans owe their existence t o t h e microscopic algae th at live in the sea. The discovery that these organisms release a quite unex pected gas, dimethyls ulphide, from the ocean surface was a direct prediction of Gaia theo ry. (Lov elock , 1 988, p. 3 8 )

L ovelock 's Ga ia metaphor has been widely debated and just as widely mis­ u nderstood, p artic ularly by those who failed to see its metaphorical character. One of the recu rrent and more ill-founded criticisms is that the portrayal of E arth as a hu m anlike body has led some Gaians to conclude that the human ce could be equated to the brai n. There is nothing i n the metaphor as ovelock deploys it that would license such a return to the microcosm/ macroc os m p icture popular i n the Renaissance .

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Anthropocentric Versus Nonanthropocentric Sources of Metaphor Muc� �f environ mental ist lang age critique ( i n p articular discussions by � _ ecofe m m 1sts and deep ecolog i sts) 1s focused on the anthropo c e n tri c nature of human d i scourse about the environment. Anthropocentri c metaphors

are one attic and storeroom . That Earth as a home is the basi c idea of the very n ot i on o f ecology ( from oikes, the Greek term for home) has sli pped the attention of many such of the targets of such critici s m . We fi n d Earth as home, s p ac es h i p

,

cri tics. A s observed by Meisner ( 1 995),

This metaphor has mi xed values. I t can connote an ethic of care for when we recognize the Eanh as our home we may be more inclined to take care of and respect it. Funhermore, on a cognitive level it expresses the panial truth that Nature is where we live. However there is a difference between feeling at home ( rooted, having a sense of place) in your community or in Nature, and feeling that it is your home. The dominant image of home in this society is that of house or apanment, and not everyone bothers with housekeeping. Funhermore, it is potentially an anthropocentric metaphor i f it implies that humans are the owners of the Eanh, si nce the Nature Home is the place where humans live. If the rest of Nature is our home, then presumably we can do with it what we wish. Arguably, the remodelling and redecorating are already underway, making the resourcist dimensions of the metaphor evident. Similarly, the metaphor is dual­ istic and rei fying in that it constructs an idea of Nature as a physical structure within which humans reside, and not something that humans themselves panially consti tute. In addition to these problems, or perhaps underlying them, is the likelihood of this metaphor being literalised: home is w here we live and so is Nature. Finally, the notion of Nature as home may be related to the problem of the i ncreasing domestication of Nature by humans. The home is a tame place and domestication itself means bringing into the home, so if all of Nature is home, will all of Nature become managed and domesticated? ( p . 1 4)

for m e tap h or, not men­ house because of the n­ fu ncti onal l i nks between i ts human and nonhu man inhabitan ts. The rela tio A e. ship between occupants and neighbors, its having a history and such lik st � m � 20th-century urban apartme n t or su burban ' sem i ' may indeed not be th 1ts . With suitable basis for this metaphor. A trad itional Black Fo rest ho use str alian s e l f- s u fficient economy of people and animals under one roof or the Au pe op l e ere Western Desert concept of nguaia (camp, home, country, place wh A more pos i tive con notati on of ' h ome '

as

a source

tioned by M e i s ner, i s that a home d i ffers from a

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tapho are stay ing or could stay ) might be more suita b le exemp lars . Th e me

ligh te ne h ome and the derived metaphor attic can be used to argue for m ore en er on th e apt home m an agement, as M yers ( 1 979, pp. 57ff. ) has argued in a ch

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of species preservation. Myers and many writers after him ti li tarian bene fits rld is sti ll an incredibly rich storehouse (our only storehouse). e wo th old that with nature and not outside it, provide all of us with all we Jive e w It c an , if tions need . But we must learn to manage it intelligently. genera ure and fut metaphors of nature, we find Fox 's few nonanthropocentric the Am ong ( 1 990, pp. 26 1 ff. ) nature as a tree, which is made up of functionally inter­ rel ated parts, both living and nonliving. And as a rather complex metaphor, invol ving both anthropomorphic and nonanthropomorphic elements we have nature as a healthy organism threatened by cancer. The resulting image of humans as planetary can cer is d iscussed by Forencich ( 1 992).

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The Environment as Purpose-Made for Human Needs Versus the Environment as Indifferent or Hostile The notion that nature was made to satisfy human needs is a theme commented on already that manifests itself in metaphors such as nature as a larder, a repository of economically useful biodiversity, and the l ike. That nature is a partner expresses a simi lar sentiment. Nature as an enemy has been expressed by a number of metaphors over the years: in the ideas of 'domestication ' of ' wild nature ' , of 'hostile environ­ ments' , of 'destructive natural forces' (see Armstrong, 1 995 ). We also find it in the practice of label ing nature amoral . An information leaflet d istributed to landholders in Numerella (New South Wales) in 1 99 5 is titled "The Wi llow-Friend and Foe," and l ike other 'weeds' or 'pests' , the wil low as a foe is being attacked in an eradication campaign. In the foll owing extract from an article titled "Should Nature Be Out­ lawed?", Barry ( 1 995) comments on the entrenched war metaphors in ac­ counts of interaction between animals and people: MIA M I -Once again we are forced to ask ourselves, as a society, whether nature shou ld be legal . Cons ider a story from the June 22 M anchester ( New Hampshire) Union Leader, which stales that, on June 20, a Laconia, New Hampshire, police officer was called to the municipal water treatment facil ity in response to-and as you read this colu mn, please bear in mind that I am not making ANY of these news pape r qu otations up-- " a report of a suspicious-acting woodchuck that woul d not let people out of the building." The officer si zed up the situation and, acc ording to the story, "determined that the animal needed to be euthanized and tried to run it over with his cruiser." So far, so good . Law enforcement experts will tel l you , after they have had a few belts, that in a situation where a member of the marmot family is holding peop le host age i n a sewage plant, the textbook response is to drive a police car over the alleged pe rpetrator, then, if necessary, advise it of its rights.

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U n fortunately, things did not go exactly according to plan. The story q uote s plant employee as saying: "When he [the officer] got out after running over it ( the woodchuck ) , I think he thought it was dead, then the thing sprung up and attacked him." At this point the officer-and if you have never been attacked by a Wood­ chuck, then do not second-guess this decision-pu l led his 9mm pistol and commenced fi ring. The story states that during the battle, the officer, seeking to escape the woodchuck , '1umped up on the cruiser and injured his knee." Fortunately, before anybody else could be hurt, the woodchuck went to that Big Burrow in the Sky. ( p. 70) a

The stand-off between humankind and nature is a perennial theme of environ­ mental discourse. Humankind Versus the Natural World

There are several sources for the metaphors that express this dichotomy. We sec it vividly illustrated in ecofeminist portrayals of man 's treatment of nature as 'rape ' (e.g . , Collard & Contracci, 1 989). The l ist is extensive, i ncluding control ler versus controlled, with various degrees of strength of control, as expressed in metaphors such as caretakers, managers, stewards and captains. Then there are owner versus i nhabitant, cancer versus doctor, manager versus v ictim and exploiter versus caretaker. Let us briefly comment on thi s last dichotomy. A particularly powerful metaphor concerned with exploitation is that of ecological i mperialism, the process by which European animals, plants and d iseases replace indigenous species native to other continents. Ecological imperialism, as is illustrated in Crosby 's ( 1 986) excellent book with the same title, paral lels and supplements other forms of one-sided exploitation and i mperialism. The devastation of the Australian fauna and flora by introduced spec ies such as rabbits, feral pigs, goats, sheep, horses, clover and lantana is no less devastating to the environ­ ment than the destruction of the deepl y conservationist Aboriginal culture, to mention just one example.

Metaphors at Work

In the Advancement of Science eren t As can be seen from the various quotations we have gi ven, the diff re nt fe metaphors each afford di fferent perceptions from whic h , in turn, dif em th ng actions might result. Studying them carefully rather th an employi

'!]! Power o[ Metaphor

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suggest, a necessary condition for exploiting their power nthi nk ing ly is, we engender to policie s. nd a de a persu to arbitrate on which of the many metaphors we have brief our not It is or ' better' and which ones 'wrong' or ' worse ' . We hope to ght ' 'ri e sh ow n ar that it would be quite inappropriate to j udge metaphors in clear ade h ave m ories. They arc tools meant to help us explore the u nknown categ se term s o f the are either useful, harm ful or useless but nei ther right nor they ol s to an d as great time scale i n which environmental processes take the en Giv wro ng. eneral ignorance, i t is not al ways easy to d i fferentiate between g d our an p l ace, . phors meta ss usele and useful It seem s a lot easier to get to know one 's own human nature and motives than the nature of nature, as Giambattista Vico ( 1 976) poi nted out. It is here that metaphors may have their most immediate appl ication. Thus we need to beco me aware of the highly tentative nature of our views of the environment; we must continually question and examine the metaphors that express our interactions with the environment; we have to identify those metaphors that have caused others and oursel ves to ignore important aspects of this relation­ ship. Most important, when consideri ng metaphors we must question the job that they do, in particular how they can advance our i nsights into the workings of nature. Metaphors that achieve this-for example, those of the ' flow ' of electricity or of the glaciers as a ' memory ' of past climates-should be distinguished from ' hot air' metaphors, such as the reduction of carbon emissions causing 'pain and anguish ' to the economy or 'green consumerism ' . It can certainly not be denied that there arc m any hot air metaphors and that more hot air is added to them as they become popularized . One also l i kes to see as many metaphors as possible turn i nto productive research programs. However, we cannot help wondering whether the issues we have touched on here may make the distinction between hot air and the genuinely hel pful exceedingly difficult. We arc not deal ing with laboratory conditions but w i th much more complex phenomena governed by an indefinitely large number of p arameters-not a single phenomenon i n control led conditions but a global sy ste m. One can bring to the analysis of this system a number of approaches. On t he one hand, there is a bottom-up approach that seeks to explain smal l aspects of reality. On the other hand, there is a top-down approach that aims at maki ng se ns� of a v ery complex whole. Knowing that a metaphor is useless is rel ati ve ly eas ier in the former domain than i n the latter. When i nvestigating th � nature of e lec tricity the metaphor of flow can be shown to be a powerful UJ �e to P art of the answer, but i n the environmental domai n, we are far from av mg form ulate d even the most central questions, let alone being at a stage wh e n we can ans we r them .

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Thus, one o f the jobs that metaphors have done and can continue t o d o is to help researchers-be it i n natural science, the social sciences or applied areas-formulate better questions. Better questions are dependent, one might argue, on constant awareness of the wider sociocultural and linguistic forces that provide the background to such q uestions. Getting closer to under­ standing involves, among other things, control over an ever-increasing num­ ber of parameters. That must involve control over and awareness of some of the less felicitous metaphors that are widely used (humankind as the final cause of evolution, human beings as the managers of c l imate) and have prevented researchers from asking better q uestions. Compare with this an analogous situation in linguistics. The metaphor of language as a self-contained , closed natural system precludes asking a large number of questions about the interdependencies between areas of communi­ cation, the participants in communicative events and the situational context in which language occurs. Once metaphors of closed systems or fi xed codes are given up, a new research program emerges. We briefly mentioned Kuhn's observation that the essence of most success­ ful scientific revolutions is that they lead to a shift in the boundary between what is natural and what is not. Let us consider one candidate for such a shift: the so-called natural disasters (earthquake, fl ood, drought, etc.). It is only recently that scienti sts have begun to consider the possibility that human agency is crucial ly involved in natural di sasters. Logging in Nepal can cause floods in Bangladesh , overhunting of beavers can lead to flooding in Canada, nuclear testing in Moraroa or Nevada may be a factor i n earthquakes, and B ritish agricultural workers ' Jack of care may have brought about drought conditions in parts of England ( for detai ls, see B utler, 1 980). Thus, Nix ( 1 993) discusses both the deficiencies of the concept of disaster as a punctiform event rather than a slow-onset phenomenon and the mistaken view that disasters are simply natural . The capacity of humans to create disasters has incre ased greatly over recent years, but the development of mechanisms to cope with them has lagged behind. A recent study in Austral ia on the boundary fence between West Austral ia's wheat belt and South Austral ia tel ls an interesting story about the role of human agency in cli mate change . The larger areas cleared for whe at farm in g have created a new minicli mate that differs markedly from that fou nd i n th e forested parts j ust across the border, where rainfall levels are sig nifi can tly higher. ure That the redefinition of the relationship between human bein gs and n at has led to quite startling d iscoveries is seen in the followin g ex am p_Ie. �e versJ ty development of a ' seei ng' (metaphorical) microchip at Adel aide U m as th e i l l ustrates what can result if one abandons the human seei ng proces s

etaphor '!!!! Power o(M

Ill

of seeing and takes insect vision as more basic (optical m odel of all forms cesses i n the si ngle 'chip' ). A report by Pamela Lyons i n the pro and rs detecto of Adelaidean ( p . 7) states, issue 993 1 8, er No vemb "Insect eyes do a lot of processing before the i mage gets to the brain. The human eye transmits the image directly to the brain, which does the processing," said Derek Abbott, part of the retina chip research team which blends the Centre's microelectronics expertise with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering's signal processing know-how. "Can you imagine a little fly flying around with a great big eyeball hanging off it? You can ' t . The human eye needs all that focusing gear and the iris, but insects don' t. With the insect, there i s no focusing and no i ris." Using a similar system, the retina chip determines the presence, bearing, range and speed of moving objects using the ultra-high-speed, very large-scale integration technology for which the Centre has become i nternationall y re­ nowned. By incorporating optical detectors and processors on a single chip, there is no need for a separate 'brai n ' , or computer. The applications for such a simple, compact artificial vision system are potentially staggering, and the research has attracted i ndustry interest and substantial government backing for international collaboration.

The fact that we have recognized 'seeing' when pred icated on insects as an anthropocentric metaphor has made i t possible to overcome the metaphor's limitation. There is, one can see, quite a bit of mi leage in unmasking the conceptual displacements that make metaphors. A very similar process can be observed in Konrad Lorenz's ecological metaph or. Rather than using the human home as the basis of his studies, L orenz chooses the aquarium as the canonical case of an ecology. An aquarium can de monstrate much more quickly and neatly than a family home can the interdepe ndencies between species, the cataclysmic effects of very small changes i n the small ecology and the important role of all rather than a few pri vil eged members of such an ecology. We have alread y commented on the work done by the metaphor of memory for the i nvestig ati on of past climates. A comparable example of this is the use of the c oral reef as a ' memory ' , as the fol lowing report notes: Unl oc king and i nterpreting the coral records provides a stunningly accurate W ee k-by - week record of weather changes that may be extended back many th usands of years. This work is being undertaken by Dr Allan Chi vas and Dr � Mic hael Gagan of the Environmental Geochemistry Group at RSES, with Dr Peter lsdale at the Australian Insti tute of M ari ne Science in Townsville. (ANU Repo rter, 24, No. 9 , 1 993 , p. 1 )

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G R EE N S PE A K

A final job that metaphors can do is to motivate certain actions or activities on the part of scientists. They highl ight perceived problems (greenhouse effect, nuclear winter, ozone depletion) that subsequently become the focus of investigation-although we note that there has been a tendency to regard them as literal descriptions. Problem recognition, so philosophers o f science argue, is the most basic step in any scholarly i nvestigation, although whether a percei ved problem makes any sense at all is not always easy to determine prior to an extensive program of research.

The Reconcil iation of Conflicting Discourses In consideri ng Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, we noted that its success derives in part from i ts abil ity to resol ve, metaphorical ly, the conflicting claims of scientific and moral discourse. It is accredited, o n the one h and, in environmentalist moral discourse with its images of Mother Earth and i ts warning against the rape of one 's mother by ma scu l i n is t scientists. On the other hand, Lovelock's idea of Earth as a supcrorganism has become accred­ ited in scientific d iscourse, fol lowing the reformulation of the origi nal me ta­ phor as an empirically testable theory. This double accreditation not unexpect­ edly has attracted criticism from ecofeminists who have accused Lovelock of misappropriating their metaphor (see Armstrong, 1 995). The role of metaphor i n reconci l ing confl ict i n discourses c an be i l lustrated particularly wel l with examples from environmental advertising. B y environ­ mental advertising we mean the promotion of green products rather than awareness campaigns such as the ones by the S ierra Club or Gre e n pe ac e . The pri ncipal problems of reconciling econom ic and moral and green d i scourse are the following:

•

The notion of production itself is a metaphor for conversion, which typically involves converting valuable substances into com modi t ies that will gradually become less valuable (e.g. , through rusting and other forms o f dete ri orati on ). The metaphors of more is better and bigger is better are not easily made co mpati ble

•

Green products are often more costly to consumers than those that are nongree n .

•

with environmentalists' ideology.

Consumers i ncreasingly are motivated by moral as well as eco nomi c ch oices, st and this motivation can be appl ied in advertising products that "do not c o the earth" or by natural izing products by m eans of metaphor. . se­ The message that good business is green business is conveyed in ad verti le b ua al ments such as the one for water conservation, where drops of water (v

TJ!! Power o(Metapllor

1 13

n at u ral res ource) are equated with money dripping out of a tap-saving water equ als saving money. The theme that saving time (which is regarded widely as equivalent to savin g mon ey) helps save the environment is developed in the advertisement for a lawn mower whose cycl ical motion o f its blades at the same time recycles th e grass, thu s having the add itional quality of not putting a strain on land fi l l . Natural ization of factory prod ucts is achieved in a number of ways-for in stan ce, in an ad vertisement for the milk substi tute Soy L i fe, by visual ly converti ng the container into a plant with roots and the verbal reinforcement of th is metaphor: picked fresh from the fridge. A final example is that of the mineral water enterprise, Evian, who, in their recen t advertisement, equate a factory with the French Alps, suppressing any m ention of bottl ing plants, bottle cleaning detergents, the dubious practice of shi pping European mineral water to the southern hemisphere and similar co nsiderations . Many similar examples of such ' green wash ing' can be found when walking through the aisles of any contemporary Western supermarket. Case Study: Metaphors in Monitoring the Environment

New and Old Tropes When looking at the contributions to the volume called Mon itoring the Environment (Cartledge, 1 992) from the point of view of their use of models in Chapter 3 , we analyzed only the role of sc ientific models and term i nologies as a rhetoric of persuasion. In this section, we return to those essays to examine them from the more general point of view of their use of metaphor and the du al ity of accreditation on which so much of the rhetorical force of Green­ speak depends. We should note that none of the contributors is a linguist and so the metaphors used arc seldom analyzed or even reflected on. These meta pho rs are used for a number of purposes : the creation of heuristic tools, ju sti fica tion of pol icies or moral positions and reconciling discussions. Al­ th ou gh many of the metaphors they usc are highly conventional , a number of con tri butors have introduced new ones-for example, J. Ph ill ipson 's ( 1 992) metap hor of the global casino: In matters of the environment we can never presume that the people and governments of nations will be like-minded. Alti tudes differ dramatically; at one �xtreme there is concern only for the interest of people like oneself; at the other, Idealistic dreaming of a world that is never to be. Attitude-either of individual , institution, or government-naturally varies according to the environmental

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G R E E N S PE A K

problem under review and is largel y determi ned by the adjudged rela tive i mpor­ tance of facts such as economics, scienti fic knowledge, social conscien ce, pu blic opinion, international pressure. Subsequent action based on what is eup he mis ti­ cally termed 'informed opinion' docs not invariably produce adequ ate safe­ guards: frequently, the reverse is the case. M an is demonstrably gambli ng with the planet 's natural resources and it is not unreasonable to think of the bio sph ere as a betting-shop or, perhaps more sophisticatedly, as a global casino. (pp. 1 97 1 98)

B u t it should be noted that few, if any, of the contributors to this v o lu m e , with the exception of Lovelock, pay any specific attention to the linguistic proper­ ties or the communicative function of such metaphors or i ndeed the question of what job they do in understanding green issues. Th is, one might wish to argue, constitutes a problem, in the sense that some argu ments could have been strengthened and others avoided had more attention been paid to the role o f metaphor. As we tried to show in earlier chapters, metaphors are not the fuzzy edges of scientific arguments nor undesirable detractors from the truth but, in many instances, heuristic tools that, when applied skil l fully, knowingly and i n the ful l knowledge that they are tools and not mirror images of real ity, can considerably advance the knowledge and understanding of environmen tal m atters. I n the few cases in this volume where metaphors are deliberately scrutinized and criticized, more powerful arguments result. Lovelock's ( 1 992) dismissal of the metaphor of humans as managers of the environment is an excellent example: Everyone these days is or aims to be a manager, and this may be why we talk of managing the whole planet. Could we, by some act of common will, change our natures and become proper managers, gentle gardeners, stewards, taking care of all of the natural life of our planet? I think that we are full of hubri s even to ask such a question, or to think of our job description as that of stewards of the earth. Originally, a steward was the keeper of the sty where the pigs lived: this was too lowly for most humans and gentil i ty raised the ' Styward' so that he became a bureaucrat, in charge of men as wel l as pigs. Do we really want to be the bureaucrats of the earth? Do we want the ful l responsibility for its care and health? I would sooner expect a goat to succeed a� a gardener than expect humans to become stewards of the earth. and there can be no worse fate for people than to be conscripted for such a hopeless task: to be made accountable for the smooth running of the climate, the compo­ sition of the oceans, the air, and the soil. Something that, until we began to dismantle creation, was the free gift of Gaia. ( p. 1 2 1 )

The new metaphor Lovelock introduces is a n anthropocentric on e , h um ans as shop stewards, that together with his subsequent metaphors of "planetary

The Power o(Metaphor

1 15

1 2) and the mechanistic "forests as air conditioner" ( p. 1 1 7 ) medi c ine" ( p. 1 ock has been criticized for not having provided a consistently vel y Lo sh oW wh Earth. of tri view c bi oc en The "Ins urance" Metaphor

Southwood ( 1 992), like other contributors to the Carl edge book, begins with an attack on the deeply entrenched notion, reinforced by the label environment, that there is a d ichotomy between the natural world, on the one hand, and human beings, on the other. He repl aces this notion with the metaphor environmental pictu re, of which human beings arc a part. In the l ight of what follows, a more dynamic metaphor l ike environmental movie would be preferable to the static picture, although that belongs to a long tradition of talking about nature as landscape. It is a movie that has been going for millions of years and where humans have become actors only recently. I n contrast to all other actors, "in tenns of speed and scale man's i mpact is now without precedent" (Southwood, 1 992, p. 6). Southwood 's main concern is with the exponential growth of such i mpact, the fact, for instance, that every child born in the United States has 200 times the impact on the environment that the hunter-gatherer child has. There must, it seems, be controls on the human impact. Southwood makes a number of very interesting observations about the order of importance of such control measures. He rates public debate and public awareness, political and legal measures as more i mportant than scien­ tific evidence, without arguing of course that the fanner shoul d not be inspired by the latter. 3 His suggestion of the way to bring about public awareness, interestingly, takes the fonn of a metaphor-that of an insurance pol icy. If humans can be convinced to l ive by this insurance metaphor, much could be achieved. We need to point out here that the concept of insurance is not a universal one and that very considerable research is needed to procure cul­ turally sensitive translations. The problems are, i n order of magni tude, com­ parable to those discussed below i n connection with saving the forests in West Afric a. L ike Sou thwood , Tickell ( 1 992) uses the insurance metaphor and recom­ �c nds that one "should consider pre-emptive action of a modest kind, rather h �e pay ing the premium on an insurance policy against relatively unl i kely d 1sas ter" ( p. 98). The " Bud get" Metap hor . �o hn M ason's ( 1 992) chapter on the greenhouse effect and global warming, 10 hn c w ith the practices of other hard scientists, makes use of metaphors and

1 16

G R E E N S PE A K

models as a deliberate strategy for exploring the unknown. The rhetoric of hi s chapter, however, relies on the use of measurements and e s tim ates based o n them to convi nce the reader. His main use of metaphor is from econom ic discourse: the budget metaphor. B u t it is not developed in any detail . We h ave a global ' budget' of carbon dioxide consisting of a large atmospheric reservoir and a smal ler one for the terrestrial biosphere. These two bi ospheres interact. The question he asks is how added man-made carbon dioxide i n fluences this interaction by adding un specified amounts to these budgets . The "Memory" Metaphor We have already come across the metaphor memory as the abil i ty t o retain information over a great length of time. Scientists can make predictions of weather, c l imate, and so forth only insofar as they c an gain u nderstanding of natural systems that store information over time. Thus, Woods ( 1 992) states, Attempts are now being made to construct models of the climate system that can be used to forecast the way in which the climate will change during the next century. If such models are to have any predictive ski l l , it can only be because the climate system has a memory extending over decades. We have seen that the memory of the atmosphere is less than one month. The land has a longer memory, but it is disturbed by man 's use of land and water. The polar ice-caps have a very long memory, but they do not change sufficiently over decades to form the basis for climate forecasting. The only component of the climate system with the potential for a long memory is the ocean. ( p. 1 44)

The argumentative force of the essays i n Cartledge ( 1 992) is, we suggest, c arried in considerable measure by metaphors such as those we have pi c ke d out for comment. There remains the question of their i ntegration into a coherent frame of thought with which to approach environmental matters. Obviously, a further research project beckons at this point. A massive study of the metaphors of Green speak is needed, with a v iew to how they mi g ht be brought together i nto a single, powerful image.

Summary

ate Our anal yses of cases of the 'displacement of concep t s ' show that the de b ta­ me about environ mental issues continues to be dominated by n um erous e bl ila v� phors-a sign of the re latively underdeveloped conceptual s yste ms a e � t e l ct in this area. They also show attempts to use metaphors to recon iC om on c seemingly incompatibl e accreditation s of scientific, moral an d e c ohere n t discourses. Not unexpectedly, these met aph ors do not add up t o a

'[!¥ Power o(Metaphor

1 17

between metaphors that set wh ol e. For in stance, there is a continual conflict 4 and others that display them as from the environment gs apart bein n up hu ma of the world system, a state of affairs referred to by J. a n in tegral part ) as "the false dichotomy . . . of nature and man" ( p . 1 97 ) . ( 1 992 n Ph illi pso considerable variation in conceptions of w h o controls o r seen ve ha We -the persistent argument of politicians and economists that whom manages we have to m anage the environment; agai nst Lovelock's view that such a notion is preposterous, the metaphors of gl obal manager and global doctor con flict. As for the real ities that should inform the environment debate, we have meas urement and numbers, but these are more metaphorical i n nature than direct i mages of real ity, as Woods ( 1 992) reminds us with regard to oceano­ graphi c data: Nowadays, the process of plotting can be automated with the help of statistics packages available for computers. Note that in producing oceanographic atlases, the values of temperature, sali nity, and so on, are treated as nu mbers. But that does not do them justice. Actually. they are not merely numbers: they are samples of a dynamical system which obeys the Laws of Nature. Treating the data statistically ignores that fact, with the result that much of the information contained in the observations does not reach oceanographic atlases. ( p. 1 28)

But the matter is not so simple. Intervening between the hu man capacity to think about such matters as the environment and the n atural world as peopled by those very thinkers are languages, relying for much of their force on systems of metaphor. If at any time there was a view among scienti sts "that real ity could be precisely described through the medium of language in a mann er that was clear, unambiguous and, in principle, testable-real ity could, and shou ld, be literal ly describable" (Ortony, 1 993, p. I )-th is assumption of log ical po sitivism can no longer be a roy al road to knowledge of environ­ me ntal matters any more than it can ful fi l l this role in psychology, l i nguistics or any other branch of knowledg e. We have tried to argue from a different perspective : the Whorfian thesis, ch aracterized by Ortony ( 1 993) as fol lows : One o f the dominant presuppositions o f our culture i s that the description and explanation of physical reality is a respectable and worthwhile enterprise-an enterprise that we call 'science ' . Science i s supposed to be characterized by precision and the abs enc e of ambiguity, and the language of science is often thought to be correspondingly preci se and unambiguous-in short, literal . . . . However, a different approach is possible-an approach i n which any truly veridical epistemological access to reality is denied. The central idea of this approach is that cognition i s the result of mental construction. Knowledge of

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reality, whether it is occasioned by perception, l anguage, memory, or anything else, is a result of going beyond the information given. It arises through the interaction of that information with the context in which it is presented, and with the knower's preexisting knowledge . . . . In this kind of view-which provides no basis for a rigid di fferentiation between scientific language and other kinds-­ language, perception, and knowledge are i nextricably interdependent. (p. 1 )

We note, agai n, the emphasis o n interdependence, which throughout this boo k occupies a key position in our analyses. In the chapters that follow, th is theme is extended to the interdependency between linguistics and natural diversity.

Notes I. This famous law can take many fonns. Our preferred version is "what can go wrong will go wrong." 2. For a study of the 'social ' grammar of 'we ' , see Miihlhiiusler and Hllf'n5 ( 1 99 1 ). 3 . He does not address, however. the important question of the medium of environmental discourse. There would seem to be ample scope for the study of newspapers, cartoons, computer programs, architecture, T-shins, greeting cards. stickers or chocolate bilbics (invented in Australia as a replacement for chocolate Easter bunnies) . 4. We note that the meaning of 'environment' constantly shifts in Grecnspeak. A panicularly crass example found on the label of a green product in Australia proclaims, "Deadly on insects-safe for the environment."

Temporal Dimensions

I

n t h i s ch apter, we turn to the ex press i o n of t i m e in e n v i ro n m e n tal d i scourse s . More prec i sely, we e x a m i n e how e n v i ron mental d i s ­

courses re flect a n d bri n g i n t o be i n g new temporal ideas a n d v i e w s . New perspectives of time and tempora l i ty are opened u p by the attempt to come to grips with the ecological c r i s i s , w h i c h is, as a l ready noted in C hapter

1 , also

conceived o f as a cri s i s o f time. W e w i l l t r y to bring out the w ay te mporal

concepts are woven into the very fabric o f environmental d i scourse, o n l y some of which appear exp l i c i t l y in a l e x i c on of t i me con cepts .

Discourse and Time Exp l i c i tly temporal d i sc ourse may look as i f it h i g h l i g h ts one top i c among othe rs i n env ironmen tal debate s , as i f t i me and temporal i ty could be regarded as a speci al subj ect matter i n d i sc u s s i o n s , for e x am p l e , o f the gree n h ouse effec t or the destruction o f g l obal b i od i versi ty. But, as we w i l l see , t h i ngs are

� ore com p l i cated . Temporal concepts do not express j u s t an aspect or d i me n ­ S i o n of the way i s s u e s are presented . Rather, t h e temporal d i me n s i o n s d i s p l ay s � dy namic of its o w n t h a t has an

impact on t h e c o n tent and for m o f a l l o t h e r I ss ue s . Mo reove r, temporal d i scourse i n t h i s fi e l d i s i tse l f c o m p l ex-a m u l t i ­ l ay ere d c ons tructi on of natural , c u l tural and i n d i v i dual t i m e s . How com p l i cated t h i s construction can be becomes evident i f we t a k e i n t o ac c o u n t th at m o s t environmental discourse grapp l e s w i t h c o n trad i c t i o n s t h at 1 19

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stem from the fact that natural and cultural developments march to different ti mescales, partly independent of one another. Furthermore, the temporal d i mensions of both natural and cultural processes are d i ffe rent from those of an individual l i fe and the horizon of experience that is opened up in a single l i fe span. These di fferences determine a spectrum of contrasts and contradic­ tions that has far-reaching signi ficance for the unde rstandin g o f both the environmental crisis ' as such ' ( i .e . , as a global problem) and our discursive accounts of it. To sum up this point, as devel oped in the previous analyses, environmental discourse is almost al ways temporal di scourse : To talk about the environment is to talk in temporal terms . A static and unchanging environment would hardly stir our interest, let alone our passions. To tal k about nature requires us to formulate assumptions or presuppositions about the temporal order(s) in which we believe ourse lves to l ive (or we believe we once lived in before the ecological crisis 'broke out ' ) . Al though all discourse unfolds in time, the temporal content of what is said or written can by no means be taken for granted-neither i n discussions and debates about envi ro n mental issues nor in metadiscursive disciplines like linguistics. Rather, these disciplines dem­ onstrate how it is possible to see even the most complex systems of human interaction in a ' ti meless' fashion. Even the laws of physics are j ust those general propositions that are claimed to be indepe nd e nt of spatiotemporal transformations. In contrast, most writings on environmental topics shows a twofold per­ spective on time. This is the presupposition of what we have called the 'recal ibration of times ' . It leads to various attempts to reconcile the temporal orders of two di fferent processes, strongly influencing the way environmental issues are presented . Some Temporal Dimensions Implicit in the Vocabularies of Greenspeak

Temporal Dichotomies Several temporal contrasts are discernible in the content of environm e n ta l wri t ings. We can identi fy at least the fol lowing: •

�

r

of natu Natural and cultural time. The contrast between the tempo ral patterning · of thell' ring rd e o e th for gs by human bem processes and changes and those created . natu re �· 11 lives can be seen everywhere in environmen tal writings. "In the en d, . . poor are goa ng be, m one way or another, the wmner. We, whe ther we are nc h o r t nature wa. 11 be tha ught to be the loser." I mplicit in this passage is the temporal tho there after people have done their best or worst. ·

•

TemPoral Dim

ensions

121

-

•

Natural/cultural and individual time. "There is no individual way out, no green

•

Objective and subjective time. "We have been living and producing goods all too

•

alternative for privileged drop-outs in Thscany or Provence. The ecological time bomb will not permit any exceptions." The li fe span of an i ndividual is not immune from the temporal necessities that emerge from interplay between the time of natural processes and the cultural temporal ity imposed upon it. long under the illusion that we can continue for ever, that the future is open and will ever be so. Now we must painfully recognise that there are objective li mits of growth, and most of our trouble has emerged from ignoring this." The unlimited future is a subjective illusion. Objectively there are temporal limits to what is possib le.

Historical and personal time. "It would be much better for us, and certainly for our children and grandchildren, if the leaders gathered in Brazi l show more courage and wisdom. if they go farther and faster. than they seem l ikely to do. In delaying we are only storing up greater hardship for the next generation or two." "When I was a child, I grew up with new record increases in productivity rates almost every day. They invented televi sion. everybody began to travel , even abroad. All the time new successes in science, medicine. You remember? Man was conquering space. Where were the limits? When I was young, I didn ' t sec any limit, you know. everything was open . . . . The growth of what they called progress seemed to me as natural as my own growth, like the sunrise every morning. Now, not even within the time span of one l i fe-well, you can say, more or less overnight-this frantic course somehow has come to a standstill. Isn't it crazy? Now everybody talks about a global disaster. . . . There is a sort of, well , ' running out of time angst' ." The scale of historical time, once greater by far than that of the individual life, has shrunk so that both now have a comparable scale.

These dichotomous patterns are ubiquitously present in all temporal dis­ course. In each, one pattern of temporality is imposed upon or ' recal ibrates' another, 'open' becomes 'closed ' , 'long' becomes 'short ' , 'cosmic' becomes 'hum an ' . Temporal Hierarchies The second environmental ist perspective on time, which like the first is as much implicit as explicit, i nvolves a threefold hierarchy of ' temporal ities' . Comple mentary to and overlapping the tirst one, this model sheds light from a d iffe ren t standpoint on the way we deal w i th temporal phenomena. Like the dualit ies, it is not specific to the language of environmental ism i n general, but, � we s hall see, it will prove to be especially useful for the analysis of this k tnd of te mporal discourse. We can differentiate three levels of meaning, rep�esen ting i mplicitly three levels of knowledge, by which we express our be l iefs ab ou t the seq uential pattern ing of events .

G R EEN S PEA K

1 22

•

Natural time. On this level we map astronomical and physical event seq uences using above all th present da orldwide- ominant systems of chronology � ! � � calendar and clock ta me. Begmrung m the R emussance and then decisively shaped

;

�

by the achievements of mechanical technology in the 1 8th century and by the corresponding Newtonian conception of absolute time, this idea has determined the concept of a natural linear order of time-the arrow drawing a continuous line along which all moments and al l singular events find thei r location. This level of order is al so implied in both teleological conceptions of development like those of Judea-Christian Heilsgeschichte or Marxist philosophy of history and anti­ teleological conceptions like that of Darwi n's ( 1 87 1 ) approach to natural history that does without an end towards which all nature strives. •

Cultural time. On this level we find historical and social conceptions of time, such intellectual , anistic, religious and geistesgeschichtliche ideas about temporal

as

processes and developments. In this catego rical framework we deal not only with all kinds of societal organizations (and thereby definitions) of time by countless social scientists, but we must also examme the grounds on which natural time orders-for example, the Newtonian time concept and its ubiquitous symbolic representations in clock and calendar-could have gained their theoretical hege­ mony and their status as a seemingly natural and transhistorical construction. To understand these grounds, we must spell them out i n terms of cultural-historical condi tions (e.g., Adam, 1 995; Young, 1 988), social and moral imperatives (e.g., Elias, 1 992; Nowotny, 1 994), and 'historical semantics'-that is the historical context of linguistic meanings in which all this took its philosophical form (e.g., Koselleck, 1 985). Essentially, we must distinguish the time of narra tion from the time of what is described or foreshadowed in that narra tion. Sometimes, things take longer to tell than to do, to debate than to implement. •

Individual time. This is the psychological and discursive domain of an individual 's

construction of his or her 'own ' time: the individual 'time synthesis' that people express, among other ways, in their various life-stories, of which each of us has a more or less extensive repenoire. Of course, thi s personal time synthesis is always related to natural and cultural ways of creating time orders. But it is not entirely reducible to them. Individual , cultural and natural time orders are meshed together, dependent on each other. The degree and nature of this mixture is itsel f highly dependent on cultural constraints, such as the preferred narrative forms by which we give meaning to complex experiences of development and chan ge (B rock­ meier, 1 995). In this process, different times are merged into a synth esis of the three modalities of ti me: past, present and future. Every individual has conti ?u­ ously to construct and reconstruct this synthesis, according to the ch an gmg ·grammar' of the changing present-that present in which these cons tructions and reconstructions always take place ( Harre , 1 997).

es

Si nce the outcomes of these formations are as unstable as the circum stanc are under which they develop, their analysis is rather c omplic ated . ory d iscursively represented in frag ile and transient c onstruction s such as mem e to reports, autobiography, or other forms in which people try to give sh ap

They

1 23 -

their 'l ife -histori es' (e.g., B runer, 1 99 1 , 1 99 3 ; M iddleton & Edwards, 1 990; van Lan gen hove & Harre, 1 993). In these processes also, the ' time-self' of an indi vi du al develops, closely linked to the forms of self-accounting of one's own life cour se as continuous in time. Mu ch recent research has exam i ned the discursive devices by which these constructions arc carried out. They have shown that in framing ourselves in time we make use of narrative techniques. We shape different temporal lines, transforming them by telling them , as Ricocur ( 1 984- 1 99 1 ) pointed out at length. This level of individual time will become particularly i mportant for our study of environmental discourse because it is here that individual envi­ ronmentalists, green campaigners and their ' subjective commitment' enter the scene and a moral tenor comes to the fore, the passionate engagement, so characteristic of most radical and even some conservative environmental writings and debates. For example, in the most recent pronouncements by world leaders, meeting in New York in June 1 997, much use was made of the phrase 'our grandchildren ' , through which individual time orders were tied into both cultural and natural time. We are thus situated in a world that presents us, whether we like it or not, with a puzzling multiplicity of natural, cultural , and individual reference systems of time, 1 which can also be represented in different sets of multilay­ ered models or 'chronotypes' (e . g., Bender & Wel lbery, 1 99 1 ). Th is multi­ temporal situatedness is, of course, part of the general human condition. B ut there are some aspects of th is picture that particularly stand out i n environ­ mental discourse. Studying these different temporal references, ram ifications and overlaps, apart from the explicit use of the concept of time, we find a great variety of examples which make evident that th is discourse, in fact, tends to operate on all three levels. Let us formulate our thesis more precisely. Linking at least two and usual ly all three of the time levels that we have identified, environmental discourse attempts to bring together different times on different levels. It tries to con­ fro nt, to com pare, to combine, and eventually to reconcile events or processes th at are temporally i ndexed in quite different respects. We i llustrate this with an other select ion of examp les. Some Examples of the Synthesis of Time Levels

�e Popul ar Treatmen t of B iodiversit y � n th is ex ample we show how temporal concepts are crucial ingredients in a d isc uss io n that, at first sight, gives an impression of atemporal ity. One aim

1 24

G R E E N S PEA K

of t h e R i o summit o f 1 992 was t o discuss and eventual ly sign th e so-ca lled Biodiversity Convention. This was the first international agreement which provides for a flow of funds from the rich northern count ri es to save the di verse life in the tropical forests before their secrets are lost to science and medicine. ( The Guardian, June 6, 1 992, "Heal ing Force of Evolution")

What we find striking and precarious in the d iscussions of biodiversity is the enormous uncertainty and the amount of spec ulation that resu l ts from i t. This is reflected in a wide spectrum of contrasting opinions of outstanding authori­ ties d i ffering in terms of rapidity, extent and , thus, the temporal dimension of the entire process. Evidently, the fundamen tal problem of th is debate is that nobody real ly knows the exact number of species that exist or have existed on Earth. All scenarios and predictions therefore depend on vague assessments and speculations. As we wi l l see i n a moment, these assessments cover indeed a wide range of (even contradictory ) options, as the number under discussion varies from 1 m i ll ion to 1 00 m i l l ion species. So how many spec ies do we have to take into account when defining the degree to which biodiversity is real ly in danger? How big is the part of life that is threatened with extinction or has already been destroyed? How much time, if any, is left? 40 years? 400 years '? 4 mil lion years? This may seem an argument about figures, but it was crucial for the justi fi cation or rejection of the convention as it is for all political (that is, legal) decisions to be taken in this tield. This, however, is not the main concern of our analysis. Our focus is the 'construction of time' in the biodiversity debate. We can i ll ustrate the relation between numerical estimates of species loss, time cal ibration and the rhetorical of conservation in Figure 6. 1 . How many species do inhabit the earth '! The d i fferent options we are offered in this presentation range between "between 8 and 80 million" speci es. Then comes an exact prediction for the year 2052. In the shadow of the 'arrow of time' we are told, "In 60 years half of al l species al ive today could be lost forever." Th is is il lustrated by a symbol often used in enviro nmen tal debate : a clock that displays 5 mi nutes to 1 2, an al arming signal that 'time is run nin g out' . Here we have an expl icit link between an i nteractio n of cultural tim e an d a natural time (human environmental depredations led to loss of spe cie s at e. tim idual greater rate than Nature could replace them) with i ndiv . As far as the format of newspaper articles is concerned, we can take �· s z article as quite representative of the arithmetical rhet orics that c harac ten k. l 0 much environmental writing-i n scientistic rhetorics, green science ta which th is text represents one mathematical variant. f th e The U . S. Republican administration was the strongest opp onent 0 biod i versity treaty. As most analysts pointed out,

�

T!.mporal Dimensions B i od i v e r s i t y

•

1 25

the A t o Z of l i fe on earth

In the decades ahead, species are likely to become extinct at an accelaratJng rata. Only about 1 .8million have been described and namad. Thera may be anything from &million to 80mllllon spades on the planet. Hall ol them could have gone before we knew they wera !hera.

Agreed

so

far

A The North mus1 help the South financially to protect plants 81 and animals.

A Which countries will V sign?

A Beneficiaries should be local communities and Indigenous 81 people who have protected them lor years.

A Status of genetically v modified organisms .

8 All aid must be In addition to current aid.

• Global Envtronmant Facility to handle cash.

A All oountries wlllcll ratify the trealy will prapara lists ol 81 prolaCI8d areas.

I

The loss of

1

plant specieS can cause the loss ot

Fig ure 6.1 SOURCE: "Healing

Force of Evolution," i n

G Finance.

141la---�-

30

Tire G uardian ,

rinal llld i1sec1 species dial dlplnd on •

I

June 6, 1 99 2 . Used with permission.

The US p ulled out of the treaty be c a u s e t h e B u s h a d m i n i s t ra t i o objects to n dev e lo pi n g countri e s ' i n s i stence that they s h o u l d s h a re i n the we a l t h c reated from the b io-tec hnolo g y and drugs e x t racted from t h e i r territories-a payment fo r p re se r v i n g t h e i r g e n e b an ks. B ri t a i n h a s no prob lems wi th t h i s , but shares the US fear t h a t fu n d i n g t h e conv e nt i on w i l l cost devel o ped n a t i o n s t o o m u c h . Ambi guous w o rd i ng m e a n s i t m i ght he di fficult t o prevent an open-ended financ i al commi tment. ( The Grtard­ ian , J u ne 6, 1 992, p. 6)

The fu n dame ntal u ncertai nty in the biod ivers i ty assessments is reflec ted i n

the un derl y i n g ti me scale s . I n c o n sequence, one c o u l d observe e x ac t l y t h i s

1 26

G R E E N S PE A K

argument emerging over the debates on the treaty. As the New Specta to r ( Ju ne 6, 1 992) reports , An official US source, quoted in the summit newspaper, also cited scientific uncenainty about the loss of biodiversity as a reason for not s i gning. These uncertai nties ' related to such fundamental issues as numbers of spec i es and rates of extinction' , and meant that 'there was little justification for concluding a strong treaty' . ( p. 6)

Notice again the melding of cul tural/natural and individual time orders. In the former, species extinctions occur, whereas in the l atter, treaties are signed by real, livi ng people. B iod iversity i n a Technical Context S o far, we have referred only to the genre of newspaper articles. One might object to our focus on the complex interweaving of time orders as typified in one popular presentation. Newspapers represent an institution that has never claimed that its primary function is to publish detai led research on specific scientific issues. So let us probe deeper into these arguments and study a text from the other end of the spectru m . We chose a highly technical firsthand ar­ ticle published in a well-renowned scientific journal and written by one of the lead i ng international experts in the field, zoologist and taxonomist Robert M. May, who has dedicated his research to the very q uestion u nder d iscussion . The article we examine is titled "How Many Species Inhabit the Earth?" (Scientific American, October 1 992, pp. 1 8-24 ) . There are some structural fea­ tures in this article that exempl i fy the main characteristics of the construction of time i n environmental di scourse. We will poi n t out these features by exam­ ining in detail the structure of the temporal re ferences impl ied i n this text. Undoubted ly, the view on time and times that emerges i n May 's text is more complicated than that given in newspaper articles. Whereas we had, for example, just one ' arrow o f time' in the article from The Guardian, we are now confronted with a number of time frames presenting a mu ltilayered picture of different natural and cultural orders and thus giving us the pos sib ility to apply the time schemes pointed out before. . . Examining May ' s text from the point of view of its exp lici t and im � h clt ht, repre sen tations of time, we find a quite d i fferentiated structure . A t fi rst s 1 g nd. e e th in we recognize the twofold scheme of natural and cultural time . Yet o we will see that the underlying temporal conception is threefold si nce i al � IS iOn uct str incl udes the time level of the individual. In fact, th is threefol d con . an essential struc ture of environmental discourse. That is to say, its fi n al ey fee o f reference is the moral motivation by which i ndivi d uals act. Th j ud g e th reatened and outraged or satisfied and complacent and so on. Th ey can

�

P01 0�

Dimensions '!r!!"po a l

1 27

h oW thin gs are and possibly decide to intervene or to bring pressure on others to do so on their behal f. Wh at is the structure of time evoked by May ? The main levels of temporal strUcture are represented by two 'arrows of time ' : natural and cultural time. The p oint of departure is marked in the fi rst sentence by the i nvocation of a nonh um an point of view with the image of the "extraterrestrial explorer." We follow his view directed by its taxonomist interests in the natural time order. Consequently, the first approach to the time situation of the earth is to its natural time, more prec isely to its "physical attributes" deriving from "uni­ versal and essentially deterministic laws" govern ing a planetary universe with "countless similar worlds." Th is is the first move of temporal reference. The second move adds to the picture the time of organic matter-the "warp of evolutionary forces" that crafted the unique "rich tapestry of l i fe on earth," still within the natural order of time. The next move adds a cultural time to create a further temporal differentiation: the "rapid rate at which wild h abi tats are being destroyed." Interest ingly enough, in the scheme outli ned so far, habitat destruction appears as if it were simply another process within the whole of evolution, even if marked with a personal val ue-"d istressing"-indicating i ts linkage to moral motivations that come with individual time. Before looking closer at this process, we should, however, notice the way in which cul tural time is introduced. This takes the form of human knowledge about and scientific research on biodiversity, more precisely "250 years of systematic research ." As the author states, despite al l our knowledge accumulated in th is period of time we do not even know how many spec ies we have already identified ( i . e . , how many have been named and recorded), a s announced b y the subtitle o f the article-''The Sad Truth Is That No O n e Knows." Th is w i l l , by t h e way, rem ain the final word of the whole article, at least as far as the overt rhetorical strategy of the author is concerned. From the point of v iew of our time analysis, i t is more interestin g to ex amine the arguments that back up th is result than to complain that they are, indeed, rather modest. B ut before presenting a schematic summary of the time scen ario th at has emerged, we must add some further temporal m arks. A l l th ese temporal indicators ar e found in t h e fi rst three paragraphs. In the fol lowing paragraphs, some h istorical i l lustrations and biographical colors are added to fles h out this picture. We encounter Aristotle and the beginning of an ordered system of the organ ic world, Linnaeus and the beginning of modern taxo nomy, and Isaac Newton representing a further mi lestone i n this chronol­ o gy of scie ntific research, itself based on a long h istory of science, that is to say, o n "centu ries of detailed astronomical observations." As far as the history of �ax ono my is concerned, only the "Victorian times" saw a short period i n Wh ic h the discovery and classification of species flourished .

1 28

G R E E N S P EA K

This introduces some new parameters of time, the rate of d iscovery of new species related to d i fferent epochs and di fferent species of birds, mammals arachnids, crustaceans, insects, fungi, and so on. For example, we learn tha; the average increase in the number of known species of birds from 1 97 8 to 1 987 is 0.05 % a year. Of course, other species display other rates. This leads up to a proposal for a "taxonomy of taxonomists" (Gaston & May, 1 992). This metataxonomy is based on the d i fferential relations between distinct species of taxonomists, the numbers of the taxonomist workforce, from 1 0,000 in North America to a global total that is "perhaps three times greater," different regions and countries, d i fferent methods of classification and different rates of progress. One of the outstanding specialists in the field confirms the huge variation i n the range of estimates of how many species there are: from "upward of 5 m i l lion species" to "six to seven m i l lion," "all the way from three million to 30 million" to a figure that "could potentially exceed 1 00 million ." What is temporal about th is numerical rhetoric'! It presents the scenario of a tragedy that can only unfold historical ly: "The number of species may be declining at a rate greater than that at which new spec ies are recorded and classified, which is itse l f a function of the number of tax onomists at work on the 'Linnaean ' project." Here we have two cultural time orders intermeshed, w i th one taking on some of the character of the natural time order, that revealed from the point of view of the "extraterrestrial traveller." This intermeshing can be seen best in a graphical representation (see Figure 6.2). Temporal Constrai nts: A Reasonable Time In the article we have just analyzed , the author reaches his "tragic" concl usion by i ntroducing a new temporal concept into the disco urse of taxonomy. The effect of this is to translate taxonomy into a new dialect of Greenspeak. He infers from his overview of the "taxonomy of taxon om ists" that even the lowest estimations prove that present methods w ill not suffi ce to discover and catalogue all species "within a reasonable time." This ex pres ­ sion i n trod uces a new temporal focus, unambiguously indivi du al . To un de�­ stand what a reasonable time is, we have to take i nto acco unt the con tex t m which i t has been introduced . D iscovering this way that a time span appears to be reasonable i n as far as it allows taxonomists to do th eir job, we can even m say what this job consists of: to classify new species before th ey beco t� extinct. Thus, reasonable time is a conjunction that correlates the ra nt cie suffi is there discovery of species with the rate of their extinction . If le to catalogue a species before i t d isappears, then this time is to be cal "reasonable."

� 0 urn:

nsions �ral Dime

1 29

Number of Species

10 - 100

aWJioa

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Index

Austin, J . L., 44 Accreditation, duality o f, 1 1 3 , 1 36 B ailey, C.-J. N., 1 39 Bataille-Benguigui, M . -C., 1 54- 1 55 Baxter, W. F. , 98 Bildungsmman, 12, 75-76, 78, 80 Boyden, S 78-79 Boyle, R., 54 British Nucler Fuels Brochure. narratological analysis, 85-87 Brown, C. H . , 1 48- 1 49 Bruner, J. S., 72 Butler, C., 72

Diversity, biological attention to, 1 77- 1 78, 1 39- 1 40 popular treament, 1 23- 1 26 technical context, 1 26- 1 28 temporal constraints, 1 28- 1 30, 1 3 1 Diversity, linguistic, 1 7 1 , 1 77- 1 78, 1 38, 1 39, 1 40, 1 4 1

..

Carbaugh, D., 1 9, 1 8 1 Carson, R . , 23, 24 Cousteau, J . -Y. 8·9, I I Crosby, A. W., 4 1 Crowley, T., 1 75- 1 76 .

Darwin, C., 1 0, 57-58 Discourse: concept of, 4 grammar of, 66 67 hunting, 1 57- 1 59 moral and aesthetic, 1 78- 1 79 scientific studies of. 54-56 de Saussure, F., 1 75 -

Education, environmental, as story, 7 8-80 Elsbree. L .. 76 Elsworth, 87-88 Elsworth's Acid rain. nanatological analysis, 87-88 English. history of, 1 43 - 1 45 Environment: powerful v. vulnerable, I 04- 1 05 purpose made, I 07 Environmentalism: Enlightment version, 1 3- 1 4, 1 43 presentation of, 3-4 temporality o f, 7- 1 2 Essences, linguistic, 37-38 Ethnoclassifications, 1 48- 1 5 1 Ethnoichthyology, 1 54- 1 55 Evolution, story o f, 76-78 Family resemblance, 37-38 Folk theories, 1 47 Franklin, K., 1 49- 1 5 1

1 99

200

GREEN S PEA K

Freud, S . , 5-6

classification, 1 47- 1 52 general characteristics, 2 1

Gaia, 62-63, 1 05 Global discourse, 1 3- 1 5 Global perspectives, 1 2, 20, 1 59 Goldsmith, T. , 53-54, 64-66 Gould, S. J . , 6, 1 80 Grammar, levels of, 1 55- 1 57 Green manifesto, narratological analysis,

8 1 -83

inventories, 1 45- 1 47 Linguistics: greening of, 1 6 1 - 1 63, 1 70- 1 7 1 , 1 72 integrationist, 43-50, 1 75 Surrogational, 43-50 Lorenz, K., I l l Lovelock, J. E., 62, 76, 1 05 , 1 1 4, 1 1 5, 1 73,

1 87

Greenhouse effect, 6 1 -62, 63 Grove, R. H ., 1 3- 1 4, 1 5 'Growth ' . 29-3 1

Mason, J., 6 1 , 1 1 5 Matthews, S. W., 1 84

Hales, S .• 56 Halliday, M . , 30, 42 H ardin, G . , 99- 1 00. 1 03- 1 04

May, R. M . , 1 26, 1 27, 1 29, 1 3 1 McLuhan, M . , 1 6 Meadows, D. L . . 9 , I I Meisner, M., 96, 1 06 Metaphor:

Hare, R . M . . 1 80 Hegel. G. W. F.. 1 0 H ughes. J. A . , 73 Ideological compromises. 1 76- 1 77 Kel ly. P.. 9 Knowledge, traditional v. scienti fic, 1 44

accreditation of, 46 anthropomorhic sources, I 06- 1 08 choice o f, 48 commonplace sources, 1 0 1 - 1 02 criticisms of, 96-99, 1 73- 1 74 economics source, 9 1 -92, 93, 95-96 for 'natural ' . 93-95, I 03- 1 05 heuristic, 99- 1 0 I ' horne' or uikoz. 1 72

Laltoff. G .• 27 Landau. M . . 76-77. 78 Lang, A . , I 4 1 Language: as cultural phenomenon, 1 74- 1 75, 1 76 as memory. 1 4 1 - 1 43 as tool- kit, 53 audits, 29 ecological approach. 1 -3. 1 63- 1 64 ecological issues, 1 64- 1 67 exotic, 1 37 'green awareness ' , 25-27 lexical poverty, 3 1 planning, criteria for. 22-27 preservation of, 1 67- 1 7 1 referential adequacy, 22-27 resources, 27-28, 1 77 social adequacy, 35-36 structure, 4 1 systematic adequacy, 3 1 -35

in advancement of science, I 08- 1 1 2 literal/metaphorical boundary, 92 machine sources, 94 managerncnt o� 1 02- 1 03 morality source, 9 1 -92, 93 of budgeting, 1 1 5 - 1 1 6 o f global casino, 1 1 3 of global manager, 1 1 4, 1 1 7 of insurance policy, 1 1 5 of planetary doctor, 1 1 4- 1 1 5, 1 1 7 reconciling conflicting views, 1 1 2- 1 1 3 role of, 5, 44-46, 47 scienti fic source, 57. 9 1 -92, 93 Media globalization, 1 5 - 1 9 Mills. W. T. , 93-94, 95 M odels: organismic, 62-63 scienti fic, 57-58 thermodynamic, 58-62

Lavoisier. A., 56 Lexicon : boundaries, 1 52- 1 54

Moklia, R., 1 53- 1 54 Morality and language, 48-49 Myers, D . • 1 06- 1 07

lrzdex

20 1

Naess, A . , 1 84 Narra tive : and chronicles, 70 authorship of, 73 categories of, 72 characteri s tics of, 72-73 conventions, 1 74 criteria for 1 74 meaning creation in, 7 1 reality conslruction in, 7 1 ex pression o f temporal experience, 7 1 Natural kinds, 56-58 ' Nature'/'natural' and the artificial, 38 and the inorganic 39 and the peopled, 39-40 and the supernatural, 40 Nature, threats to 40-4 1 and the urban. 39 Nominal/verbal preferences, 34-35 ,

.

,

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 27-28 Scientism, 5 1 , 64-66 Semantic fields, density, 1 45 Southwood R., 58 59 , 1 1 5 Space: as discursive resource, 1 9-20 globalization, 20 Space-ship Eanh, 1 00 Speech-acts, 44 Species, cultural, 1 67 Stewardship, 42 Sto ry -li ne s : Proppian functions, 73-75, 78, 80, 8 9 Elsbree ' s five forms, 76, 80 Systems, open v. closed, 1 03- 1 04 ,

-

Temporal index ing, 1 73 Temporal balance, 1 3 2- 1 35 Temporal dichotomies, 1 20- 1 2 1 Temporal discourse Temporal hierarchy, 1 2 1 1 23 cultural lime, 1 1 9, 1 22 1 36 individual time, 1 1 9. 1 2 2. 1 35 natural time, 1 1 9. 1 22. 1 36 Temporality: allegories of. 8- 1 0 an d Newtonian metaphysics. 1 0 closed futures, 7-8, I I moral aspects, 7-8 Thomas. K 1 43 Time: levels, synthesis. 1 23- 1 3 1 . 1 35- 1 36 linear v. circular. 1 3 1 - 1 32 recalibration, 60 64-65, 1 20. 1 24 synthesis of, 1 35- 1 36 '-

,

Paddock, W. C., 97 Patterson, J., 1 68 Pawley, A . , 1 57- 1 58 Photobionts, 59-60 Porritt, J., 1 8 1 Positioning: and narrative, 83-88, 89 and rhetori c s , 84-85 and speech-acts, 83-84 and s to ry -lines, 83 Pratt, M. L., 1 3 Problem and solution fo rmat 97 Pronouns, role of, 42 Propp, V. , 73-75 ,

.•

•

von Humboldt, A Reality cons!ruction, 36-37, 1 76 Resources, linguistic v. practical, 1 77 Revolutions, conceptual 5-6 Rhetoric: role of, 5 1 -52 science as , 52, 53-54, 65-67 Richards, I. A . , 45 Rowan, D., 24 Russell, B . A. 0., 6 .

.•

15

Wharf, B . L. . 1 38 Wilkins. D. P 1 56- 1 57 Wilkins. J . . 3 2 Williams, B . A. 0 1 86 Wittgenstein L.. 37-38 Wood s , J . , 1 1 6, 1 1 7 Wurm S. A., 32 .•

.•

,

,

Zipf's Law. 1 45

About the Authors

Rom Harre, lecturer, teacher, and phi losopher, has long been a preeminent and influential voice whose work is recogni zed in many disciplines. In the l ast 20 years he has been a pionee r in developing the theory and practice of discursive psychology. He is presently Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford ; Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University in Was h ington, DC . Author of more than 200 journal articles and 24 books, including The Philosophies of Science, Second Edition ( 1 986), Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology ( 1 983), Physical Being: A Theory for Corporeal Psychology ( 1 99 1 ), and Social Being: Revised Edition ( 1 993}, he has also edi ted or coedi ted another 26 volu m es, including the Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychology ( 1 985). He is the recipient of many academic awards including honorary doctorates from Helsinki, B russels, Lima, and Aarhus, and the Royden B. Davis Professor of Interd isciplin ary Studies ( 1 993). His inter­ ests range from the analyses of emotions to social theories and linguistic s B orn in New Zealand, he has held posts and lectured all over the world, most recently in China, the United States, Spai n , the Netherlands, Canada, and Peru. .

Jens Brockmeier, born in West Germany i n 1 95 1 , teac he s psychology and

philosophy at the Free University of Berl i n (Germany) and at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). He also is a Senior Visiting Member at Linacre Col lege, Oxford (England). Presently ( 1 997- 1 999), he is a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (Can­ ada). He recei v ed his Ph .D. from the Faculty of Ph i losophy and Social 203

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Sciences o f the Free University Berl in i n 1 978 and in 1 9 83 also took an M . A . in psychology, examining in his thesis the relation between cognition, lan­ guage, and culture. Since then he has taught and conducted research at various institutions of h i gher education i n Germany, Italy, Austria, England, Canada, and the United States. He has been awarded fellowships at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (Vienna, Austria), at the Centre for Applied Cognitive Sciences at the Ontario Institute for Studies i n Ed ucation ( Univers ity of Toronto, Canada), and at the Collegium Budapest, the Institute for Ad vanced Studies funded by various West-European states. In 1 997 , he received the Canada Counc i l 's prestigious John G. Diefcnbaker Award . Author of numerous studies in the fields of philosophy, psychology, arts, l i nguistics, and the hi story of culture, his most recent book ( i n German) is The Literate Mind: Literacy and the Relation Between Language and Culture. Peter Miihlhiiusler was born in Freiburg (Black Forest) in 1 947 and was educated at the Humanistische Bertholdsgymnasium Freiburg. He studied German ic languages, l inguistics, and Pacific linguistics at Stell enbosch , Reading, and the Australian National Un iversi ty. On completion of h i s Ph . D . in 1 976 h e lectured o n linguistics a t Technical Un iversity of Berlin a n d from 1 979 to 1 992 was University Lecturer in General Linguistics and a Fel l ow of Linacre Co llege at the University of Oxford, where jointly with Rom Harre he began to offer classes on language and environ ment. Since 1 992 he has been Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the University of Adelaide (South Australia). His main research interests include Pidgin and Creole l i nguistics, indigenous l anguages of Austral ia and the Pacific, pronominal grammar, and the re lationship between language and the environment.