Econarrative: Ethics, Ecology, and the Search for New Narratives to Live By 1350263125, 9781350263123

Citation preview

Econarrative

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches, Marina Lambrou Remaking Kichwa: Language and Indigenous Pluralism in Amazonian Ecuador, Michael Wroblewski Storytelling and Ecology, Anthony Nanson

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CONTENTS Figures Tables Acknowledgements

1 2 3

Introduction Beginning: Activation in Creation Narratives Identifying: Ecocultural Identity in the Seed Sovereignty Movement 4 Emplacing: Timelessness and Placefulness in Haiku 5 Enchanting: Wonder in Nature Writing 6 Leading: Ethics in Leadership Communication 7 Feeling: Emotional Narrative in Climate Change Documentaries 8 Persuading: Multimodal Genres in Food Advertising 9 Ending: Metaphor and Finding Ourselves at the End of the Road 10 Conclusion Appendix A: How the World was Made Appendix B: Credits and Permissions Glossary References

Index

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

FIGURES 1.1 1.2 5.1 8.1a–b 8.2a–e 8.3a–c 8.4a–d 9.1a 9.1b 9.2 10.1a–c 10.2a–d

Detail of Sky Woman, oil painting by Ernest Smith, 1936 A diagrammatic representation of the terminology used in this book Nightwalk, cover Extra Fresh Takeaway the Meat A Cheesy Love Story There’s a Monster in My Kitchen The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch c. 1500 The Garden of Earthly Delights Cover of Walking on Lava Little Red Riding Hood, 1810 Selected illustrations from Little Red Hat

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

TABLES 1.1 1.2 2.1a 2.1b 2.2 5.1 7.1 7.2 8.1 9.1 B.1

Narratology terms used in this book The ecosophy that this book is based on Activated participants in Genesis 1 (New International Version) Activated participants in Genesis 1 (King James Version) Activated participants in How the World Was Made Enchantment terminology used in this book A summary of the narrative structure of This Changes Everything Voiceover narration in This Changes Everything that refers to ‘stories’ Transcript of modes in Carl’s Jr American Thickburger advertisement Metaphors in extracts from The Dark Mountain Manifesto Credits cross-referenced to citations

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book was made possible because of a large number of authors, artists, poets and publishers who kindly gave permission to include extracts from their work. A full list of those who gave permission is included in Appendix B. I am extremely grateful to Amir Ghorbanpour and Anthony Nanson for their valuable comments on the draft manuscript. I would also like to express particular gratitude to John Barlow, haiku poet and editor of Snapshot Press (www.snapshotpress.co.uk) for the helpful assistance he offered and for permission to include poems published by Snapshot Press including his own. Thanks too to Mira Lieberman for her help with the analysis of the Extra Fresh advertisement. I am very grateful to four organizations that allowed me to include stills from their inspiring video econarratives: Greenpeace (www.greenpeace.org.uk), Viva! (viva.org.uk), SumOfUs (www.sumofus.org) and Vegan Friendly (vegan-friendly.co.il). I’d also like to express my appreciation to Bridget Irving (www.bridgetirving.com) for providing illustrations from her picture book Little Red Hat, and to Carolyn North for her cooperation and permission to use extracts from In the Beginning: Creation Myths from Around the World. A number of examples of econarrative were drawn from podcasts that appeared in Emergence Magazine (emergencemagazine.org), For the Wild (forthewild.world) and Finding Our Way (www.findingourwaypodcast.com). I found these podcasts full of insight, wisdom and voices that speak to our times, and thank the editors for permission to use extracts from them. Thanks also to Gosia Rokicka (gosiarokicka.co.uk) and Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio for permission to use extracts from interviews.I am grateful to Grace Marcus for permission to reprint the poetry of Anita Virgil (www.anitavirgil.com); to Lee Gurga for the poetry of Robert Spiess; to Ed Barth for the poetry of Marian Olson; to Robert Lyles for the poetry of

Peggy Willis Lyles; to David Lanoue for his translations of Issa; and to Ruth Yarrow and Wally Swist for permission to reprint their poetry. Thanks also to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to use the cover image and extracts from the book Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature by Chris Yates. Finally I would like to thank the friends who have read chapters and offered invaluable feedback (you know who you are) and the wonderfully supportive community of ecolinguists around the world.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction Robin Wall Kimmerer starts her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants at the beginning, with a Haudenosaunee story about the creation of the earth. In this Native American narrative, Skywoman falls from the Skyworld into the embrace of geese, who lower her gently onto the back of a turtle. At great personal sacrifice, other animals dive to the ocean floor to find her a speck of mud. From that point: The land grew and grew as she danced her thanks, from the dab of mud on Turtle’s back until the whole earth was made. Not by Skywoman alone, but from the alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude. Together they formed what we know today as Turtle Island, our home. Kimmerer 2013, p. 4 The recounting of this creation tale signals that Kimmerer’s book will convey a different perspective from the dominant stories of industrial civilization. The earth is not just passively created by an external power but comes about through the cooperation and effort of different kinds of beings. Other species are not just resources passively awaiting exploitation by humans but have lives and interests of their own. And the relationship with other species is one of gratitude rather than domination or ownership. Of course, it would be possible to describe in plain language how anthropocentric ideologies of domination, ownership and exploitation of nature have placed industrial civilization on a path towards ecological

collapse and how it is now necessary to move towards an attitude of gratitude towards all those species whose interaction holds together the ecosystems that life depends on. But Skywoman dancing on the back of a turtle, weaving the earth itself from gratitude towards the actions of animals, is concise, vivid, evocative and memorable. This is the power of econarrative.

FIGURE 1.1 Detail of Sky Woman , oil painting by Ernest Smith (Tonawanda Seneca, Heron Clan), 1936. Courtesy of the RMSC. Rochester, NY

Narrative is not just something that is spoken or read, it is how we understand the world, or rather ‘our world’. Our world, in this sense, is our locus of concern, embracing our family, friends, our local environment, other people and places that are salient to us in some way, and stretching

into the past as far back as is relevant for us, and as far into the future as we have the imagination to care about. The universe itself is 14 billion years old and 93 billion light-years wide, so from this perspective our sphere of concern is tiny. But from the perspective of our minds, our world is enormous, with unlimited numbers of beings and objects interacting in such a complex state of flux that it would be impossible to grasp it in its fullness. It is therefore natural and, indeed, essential that we simplify our world into straightforward structures that we can grasp – structures that are simple enough to use in our reasoning patterns as a basis for decisions. Narrative is, therefore, a means of structuring the world, of ordering the complex flux of the world into a sequence of logically connected events involving a cast of characters and a location. As Dahlstrom (2014, p. 13615) points out, narratives offer benefits in ‘motivation and interest, allocating cognitive resources, elaboration, and transfer into long-term memory. As such, narrative cognition is thought to represent the default mode of human thought, providing structure to reality’. While narratives have benefits for cognition, indeed they are the basis for cognition, they are also necessarily partial, and important details can be left out. Mackenzie (2022) provides an example of this concerning the coronavirus pandemic: All big experiences in our lives have two realities. There is what really happened. And there is the narrative, the story we tell ourselves and each other about what happened … We must see through yet another misleading story: an ‘outbreak narrative’ that portrays pandemics as primarily a sudden and unexpected battle between microbe and hero scientists seeking the cure. This cuts out the long backstory of deforestation, wildlife trade or risky farming that makes it more likely germs will jump from animals to us in the first place. MacKenzie here is assuming a real world beyond words, and a simplified version of that reality in narrative. However, narrative does more than just represent a pre-existing reality in more or less accurate ways. It is also a force which creates worlds. As Halliday (2001, p. 197) describes, ‘language does not passively reflect reality, but actively creates reality’. This is most evident in fiction, where an unlimited number of possible storyworlds are brought into being (Bell and Ryan 2019), but many aspects of the everyday

world around us can also be seen as having been brought into being through narrative and other kinds of story. What is money, a university degree, a marriage, a monarch, a government, a country, or a corporation other than a story we tell ourselves about how the world is? The Tewa author and scholar Gregory Cajete calls this ‘the creative “storying” of the world by humans’ (in Smyth 2022). McGilchrist (2021) usefully talks about ‘the world we know’, which he says ‘cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent’. The world we know arises from a complex interaction of sensory experience with the world ‘out there’ and narrative constructions. Narratives exist deep in our minds where they can influence how we think, talk and act. While these structures themselves are cognitive (Herman 2000, 2003), they can arise from and are spread by language and images in the form of oral stories, novels, films, newspapers, advertisements, histories, myths, letters, anecdotes, jokes and many other forms (Cohan and Shires 1988, p. 53). Despite their strong influence on how we and others in the society around us view the world, we often fail to notice the key narratives and stories that surround us in our culture. Through routine repetition they become commonplace and seen as just the ‘way things are’, rather than just as one possible way of structuring the world among other ways. Sometimes, though, we come across a narrative in a speech, film, or novel which challenges the conventional stories in the society around us and opens up intriguing new possibilities to rethink ourselves and the world. This is a book about econarratives, which are narratives that involve not only humans but also other species and the physical environment in interaction with each other. At this time in history, when human activity is destroying the ecosystems that life depends on, we need econarratives that can help us rethink the basis of our culture, society, economic systems and our relationships with other species and the physical environment. In fact, we need econarratives to help us rethink all aspects of life. As Naomi Klein declares as the title of her book about climate change: This Changes Everything (Klein 2014).

Narrative Narrative could be given a fairly straightforward definition along the lines of ‘an account of events, sequenced over time and space’ (Reinsborough and Canning 2017, p. 122). However, like most linguistic terms, the more narratives are probed, the more complex they reveal themselves to be. We can begin to examine the deeper levels of narrative by asking not just ‘what are narratives?’ but ‘where are narratives?’. Given our simple starting definition, they can be seen in books, oral stories, conversations, plays, films, TV programs and other texts. But we can readily observe multiple texts which have the same (or very similar) underlying structure. Take for example, the Genesis creation narrative where the same underlying story of God creating the world in six days appears in countless translations and versions of the Bible as well as plays, films and picture books. It therefore becomes necessary to separate the underlying structure of a narrative from the texts that this structure manifests itself in. In this book I call the underlying structures narrative structures, and the texts they manifest in the narrative texts. But where do narrative structures exist? One answer is in the minds of individuals who ‘know the story’. There are very few people who can remember the exact words of a particular text, but most people can produce a version of a familiar story through knowledge of its underlying structure. Indeed, it is the human ability to hear a narrative text, reduce it to its underlying structure, remember that structure, and then produce an approximate version of the original text which makes narrative such a powerful device for memory and cultural transmission. Narrative therefore, is something cognitive, in people’s minds: ‘a fundamental cognitive structuring process for the human mind to make meaning and relate with the world’ (Reinsborough and Canning 2017, p. 122). Different people will remember narrative structures somewhat differently – they may forget particular events and characters or add new ones in. However, a narrative structure can exist as an aggregate across the minds of multiple people across society, in what van Dijk (2009, p. 19) calls social cognition, rather than just in the minds of separate individuals. Narrative structures therefore also exist within particular cultures, shaping and defining those cultures.

Narrative structures come to the surface, are manifested, in particular narrative texts. For example, Kimmerer’s (2013, p. 4) rendering of Skywoman Falling is a self-contained text with a beginning (‘She fell like a maple seed … ’), a sequence of events, and an ending (‘And now that the animals, too, had plenty to eat, many came to live with her on Turtle Island’). There are many other narrative texts which tell the ‘same story’ of Skywoman Falling, based on the same narrative structure but with variations in expression. The following are depictions of the same event in three different versions of Skywoman Falling:

•

Two loons flying over the water saw her falling. They flew under her, close together, making a pillow for her to sit on. (Hamilton 1988, p. 59)

•

The geese nodded at one another and rose together from the water in a wave of goose music. She felt the beat of their wings as they flew beneath to break her fall. Far from the only home she’d ever known, she caught her breath at the warm embrace of soft feathers as they carried her downward. And so it began. (Kimmerer 2013, p. 4)

•

Far below several loons were winging their way over the water and as they gazed up they saw a ball of light coming swiftly towards them from the Sky. ‘Oooh … Oooh,’ they cried, linking their outspread wings to catch what they thought was a falling star. (North 2009, p. 14)

This illustrates the diverse ways that what is essentially the same event can be captured in different textual manifestations. In one, the birds are geese, in the other, loons. One is from the perspective of Skywoman who catches her breath; another is from the perspective of the birds who thought she was a falling star. These details add richness and specificity to the event of Skywoman being saved by the birds but without changing its fundamental nature. It is important to point out that different theorists use terms such as ‘narrative’, ‘text’, ‘structure’, ‘story’, ‘fabula’ and ‘syuzhet’ in different ways. Mieke Bal (2017, p. 5), in her seminal introduction to narrative

theory, uses the term ‘fabula’ (‘a series of logically and chronically related events that are caused or experienced by actors’) to refer to what I am calling ‘narrative structure’, and has an additional level of the ‘story’ which is the manifestation of the fabula in a narrative text. Abbott (2008, p. 16) uses ‘story’ to refer to the sequence of events and ‘narrative discourse’ to refer to how the story is conveyed. The disadvantage of using ‘story’ in a restrictive sense, however, is that it goes against the common use of the term, which can refer to a narrative structure (‘know a story’), a narrative text (‘read a story’) or a more general worldview (‘stories that society is based on’). I therefore use the terms ‘narrative structure’ and ‘narrative text’ to make it clear which of the two aspects I am referring to. I use ‘narrative’ to refer more generally to both the underlying structure and its manifestations, and ‘story’ in any of its conventional senses. The construction of a narrative is partly about imposing a structure on the complex flux of pre-existing reality. Places, happenings, and beings are selected and turned into characters, locations, and a sequence of logically connected events. That is the structuring function of narrative. There is also the creative function, where new locations, characters and events are brought into being, with the end result being the creation of a new storyworld. All narratives, I would claim, combine structuring and creation to bring into being storyworlds that are based to differing extents on preexisting reality.

TABLE 1.1 Narratology terms used in this book Narrative structure

A cognitive structure consisting of a sequence of logically connected events involving characters and locations.

Narrative text A linguistic or visual text which describes a sequence of logically connected events involving characters and locations. Narrative

A cognitive structure or text which involves a sequence of logically connected events involving characters and locations.

Metanarrative A general worldview that is held across the minds of multiple people within a culture as a cognitive structure and manifested in particular texts. Story

A narrative or metanarrative.

Econarrative A narrative that involves not only humans but also other species and the physical environment in interaction with each other.

FIGURE 1.2 A diagrammatic representation of narratology terms used in this book.

There are clearly complex ontological and epistemological issues about the correspondence between narratives and what could be called ‘objective reality’. For the purposes of this book, however, I will just note that fiction always draws from ‘objective reality’ and non-fiction always involves creative aspects. A fictional story of an environmental refugee draws to some extent from the reality of people forced to leave their devastated homes, and can influence how those who hear the story think about actual refugees. At the same time, a non-fiction documentary about refugees necessarily imposes a narrative on the ‘objective reality’ in its selection of particular characters and events to focus on, the particular ways it represents the characters (whether the refugee is shown stealing something or caring for a child), and the logical connections it imposes between events. Both are creating a ‘storyworld’ (James 2015), while drawing from the sensuous reality of the world beyond words to do so.

The characteristics of narrative Narratives come in many forms, and any attempt to draw a firm line around what is or is not a narrative is doomed to failure. There will undoubtedly be an example within the line which does not really seem like a narrative, and something outside the line which actually does seem like one. A

compromise is ‘to regard narrative as a fuzzy set defined at the centre by a solid core of properties, but accepting various degrees of membership depending on which properties a candidate displays’ (Ryan 2010, p. 345). Herman (2009, p. 15) proposes a series of characteristic properties of narrative and similarly describes them as a ‘gradient (i.e., they operate by degrees)’. Toolan (2001, p. 4) likewise gives a set of ‘typical characteristics of narratives’, as does Abbott (2008, p. 25). There are four main properties which can be drawn from these various lists to form a ‘solid core of properties’ that are particularly useful for studies of econarrative. The first is that narratives describe, construe or construct a ‘version’ of reality, which is not necessarily false, but is only one version among other possibilities. The second property is that narrative organizes the complex flux of real or imaginary worlds into characters who participate in a sequence of logically connected events that occur over time in particular locations. The third property is that narrative represents events and experiences in vivid ways that allow readers or hearers to vicariously experience them for themselves (Herman 2009, p. 14). The final property is that there are certain messages, or narrative entailments, that readers can draw out of the narrative and, if they resonate with them, draw into their own lives. That is, narratives have a ‘point’ or several ‘points’ that they can potentially convey. The first property of being one version among many holds for any kind of semiotic representation since all representation involves choices. Even the most factual of scientific narratives must choose which events to focus on and which aspects of those events are selected as being worthy of being brought to the attention of readers. For example, there is a narrative, From Big Bang to Civilisation, which appears on the science education website LiveScience (Briggs 2013). This is a scientific narrative of the origins of the universe, starting with the Big Bang then describing a series of events which include: the birth of stars; the formation of the solar system; the beginning of life; the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction; the emergence of homo sapiens; and the advent of civilization. There is nothing untrue about the narrative, but it covers a time period of 14 billion years and an area 93 billion light-years wide, so necessarily has to be selective. The narrative could have chosen any solar system to focus on but chose ‘the’ solar system, which is really ‘our’ solar system. It could have ended with the

evolution of any species that currently exists in the world rather than humans. Or it could have ended with the mass extinction event that is currently underway rather than choosing to end with human civilization. The second property is that a prototypical narrative has characters, multiple events, a temporal sequence, logical connections and a location. In some cases, there may be something missing (perhaps there is only one event, or perhaps the location is unspecified), but even so we may want to treat them as narrative since they have so much in common with other narratives. The third property, too, is a matter of degree – some narratives will create rich and vivid descriptions that enable the reader to feel that they are experiencing the events themself, while others are more expository. The fourth property, the conveying of narrative entailments, needs explanation. Many narratives, from fairy tales to anecdotes in speeches, are intended to convey particular messages to the audience – they have points that the reader is expected to take away with them and apply to their life. Sometimes the point is drawn out explicitly at the end of the narrative text. The fairy tale The Hare and the Hedgehog concludes by stating ‘The moral of this story is … that no one, no matter how great he may be, should permit himself to jest at anyone beneath him’ (Grimm 2011, p. 764). Often, however, the entailment is implicit, with hints and clues about messages that readers should be taking away with them. Readers may or may not draw out the intended entailments themselves, or they may draw out entailments that the author was not expecting them to. As an example, the story Tom the Scout-Cub by Enid Blyton (1968) concludes with an explicit entailment for the reader to take away with them: ‘If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well!’. The protagonist, Tom, learned this directly through losing out on payments because he did not do his jobs thoroughly enough. For example, instead of cleaning out a chicken house he just put new straw on top of the dirty old straw, without realizing that his payment was hidden in the old straw. In addition to the intended entailment about doing jobs well, a reader could draw out the presumably unintended entailment that the purpose of doing jobs well lies in financial rewards, rather than because doing them well can benefit the lives of others and doing them badly can harm others. The chickens, for example, could be harmed by dirty straw, and that provides an ethical reason for doing the job properly above financial gain. Texts which focus

on extrinsic goals (self-serving goals like profit, fame or status) have been shown to erode ‘our environmental concern, our long-term thinking, our civic motivation and even our wellbeing’ (Blackmore and Holmes 2013, p. 13). So Blyton’s story could be criticized on the basis of possible entailments a reader could draw out. If readers draw out entailments then that does not mean that they automatically accept them and absorb them into their mindsets. Readers are critical and can reject entailments that do not resonate. However, if a particular narrative is very common within a culture, then it could influence a large number of individuals and have an effect in aggregate on the culture as a whole. As Merchant (2014, p. 78) points out, ‘imagery found in a culture’s literature can play a normative role within the culture. Controlling images operate as ethical restraints or as ethical sanctions – as subtle “oughts” or “ought nots” ’. There are also many other properties of narrative that could be mentioned in addition to these four, including the following:

•

Events are associated with mental states and structures such as emotions, goals and plans that give coherence to the narrative. (Ryan 2010)

•

Narratives have a trajectory, with development and a resolution or conclusion at the end. (Toolan 2001, p. 4)

•

Narratives have a narrator who conveys the narrative, which could be one of the characters, a background voice, or merely an implied teller. (Toolan 2001, p. 5, Bal 2021, p. 24)

•

Narratives are based around some form of disruption to a state of equilibrium. (Herman 2009, p. 14)

Narratives will exhibit a mixture of these properties and the more properties they show, the more prototypical they are.

Metanarrative

In this book I use the term ‘narrative’ to refer to texts and cognitive structures that involve a sequence of logically and temporally connected events. However, the term is also widely used in a different sense, to mean a more general belief system or worldview that is shared widely by a group. It is commonplace to hear criticism of a ‘dominant narrative’ (in the sense of a widespread belief system) as being problematic in some sense. The two uses are not completely unrelated, however. Ryan (2010, p. 348) describes, for example, how the general idea of a ‘narrative of white superiority’ was derived from actual narratives in literature before becoming detached from them: What happens here is that the label narrative has been metonymically transferred from the stories propagated by colonialist literature or partycontrolled media to the a-temporal propositions that form their ideological message. The label remains attached to the ideological statement even after its emancipation from particular stories. The following is an example of the use of the term ‘narrative’ in this general sense of ‘worldview’. It is from the campaign organization Animal Think Tank: The old narrative – of individualism, competition, extraction and ‘progress’ – has failed us. It’s been fractured by the pandemic, the climate crisis and increasing inequality. Right now, we are in between narratives. We’re living in a time where new narratives can begin to take root in the void. We are at a crucial point in our history when the stories we tell matter now more than ever. People are primed for a different, more hopeful story – one of love, connection, cooperation and unity. ATT 2022 This description uses both the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ in a general sense to present a contrast between an undesirable set of current worldviews (individualism, competition, etc.) and a desirable set of future worldviews (love, connection, etc.). As well as the terms ‘story’ and ‘narrative’, other terms that are often used for this general concept of worldview are ‘grand narratives’,

‘metanarratives’, ‘masterplots’, ‘master narratives’, ‘big stories’, ‘stories we live by’, and ‘myths we live by’. The concept dates back to Lyotard (1984) who characterized postmodernism as a movement away from unquestioned belief in modernist ‘grand narratives’ such as Progress, Enlightenment, Emancipation, and Marxism, towards multiple, more diverse, localized narratives or petits récits. Mead (2014, p. 22) critiques the ‘big stories’ of ‘limitless growth’, ‘the idea of progress’, and ‘unearned privilege’ (the story that some people should be privileged due to race or gender). He states that ‘our view and experience of the world only change as we question the prevailing “big stories” and imagine new possibilities’ (p. 26). Midgley (2011, p. 1) uses the term ‘myths we live by’ to mean ‘imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world’, such as progress, the self-interested individual, nature as a machine, and social atomism. Macy and Johnstone (2012, p. 15) describe the ‘businessas-usual’ story that sees economic growth and technological development as the way forward for society, stating that ‘when you’re living in the middle of this story, it’s easy to think of it as just the way things are’. This correlates with Barthes’ (1972, p. 132) concept of naturalization where ‘myths’ become so entrenched in society that they become assumed to be just the way things are. Activists often call for ‘dominant narratives’ to be resisted and replaced with alternative narratives, as in the following from the environmental think tank Common Cause: Ultimately, it is dominant narratives such as individualism and consumerism which keep the powerful in power, always at the expense of marginalised communities and our living planet. It’s long overdue that our activism builds power for alternative narratives – ones that are in support of equity and the flourishing of all life. Taylor 2022 While some of what are called ‘dominant narratives’, like progress, have a temporal dimension, most do not fall into the definition of narrative as a sequence of logically and temporally connected events. The ‘big story’ of limitless growth (that the primary goal of society is continuous and endless

economic growth) does not have particular characters, a specific location, events or logical connections between events. There is, however, one key dimension that narratives in any sense have in common. That dimension is that they are only ever versions of the world, and that other versions are possible. Applying terms such as story, narrative or myth to widespread belief systems that many people see as simply the ‘one-and-only true way of seeing the world’ is a political act, designed to destabilize the belief system and open up possibilities for new ways of imagining the world to emerge. To avoid inconsistent terminology, in this book I use the term ‘narrative’ in the narrow sense which involves a logically and temporally connected series of events involving characters and a location. For the more general sense of the ‘big story’ or ‘stories we live by’, I use the term ‘metanarrative’. Metanarratives are cognitive since they exist in the minds of multiple people across society, but also manifest themselves linguistically and visually in particular texts. Narratives and metanarratives are related to each other since common narratives within a culture can contribute to the creation and entrenchment of metanarratives. On the other hand, inspirational narratives can be used to challenge and resist prevailing metanarratives. To give an example, there is a metanarrative that exists in the UK and other industrialized countries that can be glossed as IMMIGRATION IS HARMFUL TO SOCIETY. This metanarrative manifests itself linguistically in texts in many ways, including newspaper articles that describe a metaphorical ‘swarm’, ‘invasion’, ‘tidal wave’ or ‘deluge’ of migrants (Hansen and Machin 2014, p. 118), and articles that represent migrants as criminals or undeserving recipients of benefits and public services. Right-wing politicians also use the characteristic language of this metanarrative; for example, in 2022 a UK home secretary justified overcrowding an immigration detention centre with the words, ‘The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast’ (in Crerar et al. 2022). This presupposes that the arrival of immigrants threatens national security. These representations can promote hostile views of immigrants among the electorate, to the extent that unjust measures are taken by the government, such as the UK Government policy of sending immigrants on a one-way trip to Rwanda (UK Govt 2022). In this way, a metanarrative can insinuate itself across the minds of

multiple people in a culture, propelled by tabloid newspapers and echoed by politicians, with concrete and devastating effects on people’s lives. There are, however, attempts to resist destructive metanarratives of immigration. During the first coronavirus pandemic lockdown, Sachini Imbuldeniya and Darren James Smith produced a video poem called ‘You Clap for Me Now’ (Smith and Imbuldeniya 2020). The video begins with the following words, featuring professionals from a range of ethnicities: So, it’s finally happened. That thing you were afraid of. Something’s come from overseas and taken your jobs. Made it unsafe to walk the streets. Kept you trapped in your home. A dirty disease. Your proud nation gone. But not me, or me, or me [images of various professionals]. You clap for me now, you cheer as I toil, bringing food to your family, bringing food from your soil, propping up your hospitals, not some foreign invader – delivery driver, teacher, life saver. Don’t say ‘go home’, don’t say ‘not here’. The video uses a narrative structure which cleverly echoes elements of the negative metanarrative of immigration at first, but then with a sudden twist represents the disease as the invader, not the immigrants. The migrant workers, in this narrative, are cast as heroes who are growing food, teaching, working in the health service and saving lives, while the majority of the population stays at home sheltering from the disease. The population is therefore cast as the victim, with the disease as the villain. In this way, an actual narrative with events and characters challenges the harmful metanarrative and provides a new narrative to live by, one that is respectful of people who come from overseas. This is important for environmental justice, because people are often migrating from countries that contribute the least to ecological destruction while suffering its worst consequences, to richer countries that caused the ecological destruction in the first place. Another example concerns the metanarrative THE GOAL OF A CORPORATION IS PROFIT. This metanarrative is woven deep within the fabric of industrial civilization, from laws of fiduciary duty and economics textbooks to assumptions in everyday conversation. The following are manifestations of the metanarrative in two economics textbooks:

•

The objective of owners – profit maximization – has the potential to differ from that of managers. (Estrin 2012, p. 242)

•

Can the owners of a firm ever be sure that their managers will pursue the business strategy most appropriate to the owner’s goals (i.e., profit maximization)? (Sloman and Jones 2011, p. 9)

Both of these examples use presupposition to express as completely takenfor-granted background information that owners of corporations have the single-minded goal of profit maximization. In doing so, they draw from and further entrench the metanarrative that THE GOAL OF A CORPORATION IS PROFIT. This metanarrative is powerfully challenged by the excellent fictional story Giantstone, written by the Icelandic writer and filmmaker Andri Snær Magnason (Magnason 2022). This story is well worth reading, or, even better, listening to in the voice of the author (see emergencemagazine.org/fiction/giantstone). This is best done before reading the rest of this section since it contains spoilers. The narrative of Giantstone is very much a sequence of logically connected events, which starts with an architect, who describes himself as ‘not an extremist. I’m very ordinary’, throwing a brick through the window of a Range Rover. This incongruity provides a puzzle to intrigue the reader as they gradually discover the preceding events which led up to and finally explain the puzzling act. In this story, the architect produces a sustainable design for a block of flats which would be a wonderful place to live in, with beautiful views of the mountains. However, the development company insists on making changes in order to make a bigger profit, from replacing the sustainable wood cladding with environmentally damaging concrete, losing the view to the mountains, isolating the block of flats with a road between it and nature, and exploiting the construction workers who then do a shoddy job. The end result is environmentally destructive and unappealing to live in, but the owner gets extremely rich because of it. The architect is then asked to design a super-luxury house for the owner. Reflection on the stark inequality and environmental destruction caused by the relentless pursuit of profit is the last straw that causes the architect to throw the brick through the window of the company owner’s Range Rover.

The power of the narrative is in the self-reflection and emotional response of the architect as his dreams of creating sustainable housing that people love living in are crushed in the name of corporate profit: I’d never seen my job so clearly. I was a cat’s-paw, transferring quality from one person to another … If society is based on inequality, then it’s I who make inequality visible. I plunder the apartment blocks of the common people while stuffing as much luxury as I can into a 650 m2 single-family residence and create an untouchable elite. Magnason 2022 The story provides a powerful denunciation of the metanarrative that THE GOAL OF A CORPORATION IS PROFIT and the wider economic system it is part of, while also vividly describing what a sustainable alternative would look like if society was structured in a different way. My focus in this book is very much on narrative in the sense of a sequence of events which are logically connected in time, but in the context of how these narratives entrench or resist the wider metanarratives that shape cultures and influence how people treat the ecosystems that all life depends on.

From narrative to econarrative The question is, why add the prefix ‘eco’ to narrative, and how does the resultant term, ‘econarrative’, differ from just plain ‘narrative’? The prefix ‘eco’ is, of course, an abbreviation of ‘ecology’, a term coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel that refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and the physical environment. It is through this interaction that nutrients and energy cycle around ecosystems and become available for life processes to occur. In other words, ecology is the basis of the continuation of life – human life, and the lives of all other species. The term ‘eco’ therefore brings attention to the interactive processes that life depends on, and also brings with it an ethical imperative to protect and preserve these processes to allow life to continue. Narratives in general are likely to contain characters interacting with other characters in a location, so it could

be said that there is an ecological aspect to most or all narratives. However, if the characters are all human characters, within human communities, and the location is just a built environment, then the narratives are erasing connections between humans and wider ecological systems. The term econarrative (or eco-narrative) has been used in various ways. Soloshenko (2015, p. 148) writes that ‘Eco-narrative is understood as a form of environmental writing, a text that passes ecological tenets through rhetorical, linguistic and cognitive strategies.’ Heise (2010) describes econarrative as a form of environmental storytelling, including nature writing and writing which destabilizes anthropocentrism through, for example, the use of an animal narrator. Donly (2017, p. 27) describes how econarratives convey a sense of ecosystem via narration. She focuses on stories that concern nonhumans, stories that ‘compose with, not for, the nonhuman other’. The term econarratology is used by James and Morel (2020, p. 1) to mean ‘the paired consideration of material environments and their representations and narrative forms of understanding’. In this book I use the term econarrative in a general sense to mean narratives that include not only humans but other species and the physical environment among their characters and locations, and portray interactions among them. For narratives to play a role in protecting the ecosystems that life depends on they need to involve more than just the human world, which is why econarratives are so important for our future and the future of life. Collectively, and in aggregate, they are positive and to be promoted because they at least consider more than the human world. But individually, econarratives can serve ecological goals to greater or lesser extents, or even work against them, so are therefore open to criticism. Richter (2016, p. 97), for example, argues against ‘declensionist narratives about the environment, with stories about extinction, degradation, contamination, deforestation, and climate change’, on the grounds that the representation of the human as a destroyer cannot begin to create the kind of positive relationships with the earth that we need. Narratives which place humans in the role of destroyer of the environment are certainly econarratives according to my definition, but not positive ones from Richter’s perspective. Richter instead proposes what he calls Georgic narratives which promote ‘human beings intimately working constructively with the natural world’ (p. 97).

Ecosophy Whether an econarrative, or any kind of narrative, is considered positive or negative depends on the worldview, goals and philosophy of the analyst – there can be no objective measure since it depends on what changes in the world the analyst would like to see. The philosopher Arne Næss’s concept of ecosophy is useful in describing a philosophical framework that includes ecological considerations: Etymologically, the word ‘ecosophy’ combines oikos and sophia, ‘household’ and ‘wisdom’. As in ‘ecology’, ‘eco-’ has an appreciably broader meaning than the immediate family, household, and community. ‘Earth household’ is closer to the mark. So an ecosophy becomes a philosophical world-view or system inspired by the conditions of life in the ecosphere. It should then be able to serve as an individual’s philosophical grounding… Næss 1989, p. 37, emphasis in original An ecosophy provides the grounding to judge whether a narrative is beneficial (e.g., promotes action to protect individual beings and the ecosystems that life depends on), destructive (e.g., promotes actions which harm individuals and ecosystems) or ambivalent (i.e., contains both beneficial and destructive aspects). I would argue that it is important for analysts to explicitly describe their ecosophy so that the reader can understand the criteria being used to judge narratives against and therefore decide whether to accept or reject the conclusions of the analysis. Arne Næss describes the details of an ecosophy as follows: By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony … openly normative, it contains both norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs … The details of an ecosophy will show many variations due to significant differences concerning not only ‘facts’ of pollution, resources, population, etc., but also value priorities. Næss 1995, p. 8

More simply, an ecosophy can be thought of as a values system, grounded in evidence, which takes into consideration not only humans but other species and the physical environment. My own personal ecosophy, for example, contains Value Priority Announcements, which are not in need of particular evidence, such as the following: Value priority 1: The ability of humans and other species to live their lives according to their nature with high wellbeing now and in the future! The exclamation mark here follows Næss’s terminology and is a sign that this is something to be celebrated, respected and striven for. My ecosophy also contains assumptions about the world which do need to be evidencebased: Assumption 3: Current consumption levels and projected increases in future consumption make significant ecological destruction inevitable. There is, unfortunately, a vast amount of evidence to back up this statement in environmental reports such as the Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC 2022a, 2022b), the Global Environment Outlook 6 (UNEP 2019), the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2019), as well as industry predictions such as the International Transport Forum Transport Outlook (ITF 2021). For example, the IPCC (2022a) describes how greenhouse gas emissions need to drop to net zero by around 2050 for a 50 per cent chance of keeping global average temperature rise less than 1.5°C. On the other hand, the ITF (2021) predicts a 260 per cent increase in global freight by 2050, a signal of rising consumption rather than the dramatic drop in consumption necessary for net zero. An ecosophy is more than just a formal list of criteria for use in analysis – it is a deeper philosophy of life. A useful question is whether an analyst needs to follow their ecosophy in their private life beyond their research for it to have validity. My answer is that it would be an odd separation to use an ecosophy to judge others but not ourselves. However, it would also be a mistake to weaken an ecosophy to match the imperfections and limitations of private life. Instead, it would be much better to use the ecosophy as an aspirational target for both self and society to achieve as far as possible and

as soon as possible. This is the approach taken by Robert Poole in the book Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics. Throughout the book, Poole uses his personal ecosophy to judge stories as beneficial or destructive, and then towards the end of the conclusion reflects as follows: So often now I reflect upon whether my language use helps me cultivate and promote greater ecological awareness for myself but also for those around me. The field of my work has challenged me to see the hypocrisies of my existence: how can I write that but do this? I now ask that question with less frequency as my actions increasingly align with my personal ecosophy. Indeed, the continued reflective work required to shape and put into action a guiding ecosophy has contributed to me becoming a better steward of the physical world and all of its inhabitants. Poole 2022, p. 168 My own personal ecosophy, which I use throughout this book, is summarized in Table 1.2. I say ‘summarized’ because an ecosophy is something complex which changes over time and can only be partially captured in a snapshot like this. However, I believe that this is enough to make it clear why I am judging certain narratives as beneficial, ambivalent or destructive. In one word, my ecosophy is Living!, where the exclamation mark means ‘to be celebrated / respected / affirmed / striven for’. Further explanation is provided in Table 1.2. This is the ‘top level’ of the ecosophy – each of these statements can be broken down further into sub-statements. Value priority 1 calls for the selfactualization and wellbeing of all species, which, given the way that current industrial civilization treats other species implies a sub-statement along the lines of ‘Respecting the intrinsic worth of non-human species!’. And the focus on ‘all humans’ can be expanded out into social justice across gender, race, sexuality, nationality, class and so on.

TABLE 1.2 The ecosophy that this book is based on Ecosophy in one word: Living! Further explanation Value Priority 1

The ability of all humans and other species to live their lives according to their nature with high wellbeing now and into the future!

Assumption Living into the future is only possible if human activity remains within 1 environmental limits, i.e., limits to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, chemical contamination, freshwater use, etc. Assumption Only a massive reduction in overall consumption and changes in production 2 practices can keep humanity within environmental limits. Value Priority 2

Therefore, social and political transformation to reduce consumption of those who over-consume and to change production practices!

Value Priority 3

For social justice, an increase in consumption for those who currently cannot meet their needs even as total consumption reduces!

Assumption Current consumption levels and projected increases in future consumption 3 make significant ecological destruction inevitable. Value Priority 4

Therefore, preparation, adaptation and resilience, particularly for the most vulnerable communities!

One important function of an ecosophy is to bring together goals which are often pursued separately. Klein (2016) describes how movements for social justice, environmental protection and animal rights have tended to diverge, with different sets of actors pursuing different goals. Drew Lanham (2021) calls for convergence of social justice and environmental movements in particular: The two movements would have seemed disjunct at first glance: Black people demanding equity, justice, and enfranchisement as full citizens in peaceful protest; white people demanding wilderness recognition, clean air, and protection for dwindling species in hearings and op-eds. But looking deeper, both movements, then and now, contain a prevailing desire for a better world built on sustaining good for all. Social justice and the movement to steward and protect nature rise from a similar foundation… Certainly, there is no point in building a perfectly equal and socially just society if it is ecologically unsustainable because it would be on a pathway

towards collapse. And it would not be ethical to create a sustainable society if it was highly exploitative and people lived in miserable conditions. An ecosophy, therefore, can integrate social justice, environmental protection and the wellbeing of all species, with all goals to be pursued simultaneously.

This book The aim of this book is to show how econarratives can be analysed using a wide range of linguistic, rhetorical and narratological techniques to reveal underlying entailments that can influence how people think, talk and act. The analysis necessarily involves value judgements – it would be an odd form of analysis if texts about the future of life were only looked at in terms of the technicalities of the language and narrative structure rather than their potential role in building a better world. I therefore analyse texts according to my own values system, or ecosophy, which I have made explicit in this chapter. I have humility about my own ecosophy – there is no empirical test I can use to prove that the value priorities are correct in some way, although I can, of course, continue to assess the evidence that the assumptions are based on. What I can be sure of, however, is that if analysts in general use an ecosophy to base their research on, as opposed to a values system which excludes consideration of the more-than-human world, then the entire research enterprise will be better able to deal with overarching challenges we are facing at this moment in history – challenges which have inseparable social and ecological dimensions. My hope, therefore, is that readers take the analytic techniques described in this book, develop them, and apply them to many more texts, judging them according to their own ecosophies. And, more broadly, that readers find awareness of econarratives helpful in guiding their actions in everyday life, and guiding their actions within their sphere of influence as ethical leaders. Each chapter in the book will explore one aspect of econarrative (Beginning, Identifying, Emplacing, Enchanting, Leading, Feeling, Persuading, and Ending) with a focus on one particular aspect of theory (activation, ecocultural identity, placefulness, wonder, ethics, emotional

narrative, multimodal genres, and metaphor). And each chapter will analyse a specific text or collection of texts (creation stories, interviews, poetry, nature writing, leadership speeches, climate change documentaries, advertisements, and apocalyptic stories). The aim is to share insights into the workings of econarratives of different kinds, to emphasize their importance for how we treat the ecosystems that life depends on, and to open up paths for readers to critically evaluate the dominant narratives of the unequal and unsustainable society around them and search for new narratives to live by. I have chosen texts which I feel are important in some way, either because they have proved successful in capturing the public imagination, or they align strongly with my ecosophy. I have not chosen novels since they are well analysed in the area of ecocriticism (Garrard 2012, 2014, Clark 2015, Bladow and Ladino 2018), although all of the techniques I describe can be applied to longer works of fiction. I have also included some texts such as meat advertisements (in Chapter 8) which use powerful narratives but in ways that starkly oppose my ecosophy. Studying destructive texts such as these can be useful in resisting them, as well as borrowing the persuasive techniques they use and employing them for different ends. In general though, this is an appreciative enquiry, a search for positive new narratives to live by. The structure is broadly time-based. It starts with creation stories, and then explores the work of Rowen White, an indigenous Seed Keeper who draws on creation stories and the wisdom of ancestors to inspire action in the present day. The next two chapters, on haiku and enchantment, are about appreciating the present moment in an ecologically sensitive way that brings wellbeing and connection. The three chapters that then follow are about attempts to build a better world in the future, focusing on inspirational leadership speeches, environmental documentaries and counter-advertising. In Chapter 9 I look at the imagining of the end times – times when despite all the actions taken to prevent environmental collapse the world becomes increasingly inhospitable to life. The concluding chapter does not end with a cheerfully optimistic plan to ‘solve’ the emerging and overwhelming crisis that the earth is facing, but it does talk about reconnection with wolves, thriving as far as possible in the difficult times ahead, finding meaning, and rethinking who we are as humans.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER TWO

Beginning: Activation in Creation Narratives This chapter starts at the beginning, with the creation of the world. Creation myths and stories are clearly econarratives – it would be hard to imagine a creation myth that failed to consider the more-than-human world of plants, animals, oceans and land, or did not contain a sequence of connected events, from an initial state of nothingness or lack to extraordinary acts of creation and finally the emergence of the world. Creation myths may be highly salient in particular religious groups, but they also have an importance that goes beyond that, potentially influencing deep-seated understandings within cultures of the place of humanity in relation to other species and the physical environment. The influence of creation narratives on cultural worldviews is indirect and impossible to measure. However, critical analysis of dominant religious narratives from an ecological perspective is a way to bring into focus and question prevailing cultural values, particularly when considered in relation to diverse narratives inspired by indigenous and traditional cultures from around the world. This is not something new. Lynn White (1967) analysed the narratives of Christianity and claimed that ‘we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man’. White compares what he saw as anthropocentric Christian narratives with earlier pagan narratives of nature spirits who must be considered and placated. He concluded that ‘by

destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects’ (p. 1205). Similar claims are still made today, for example by the historian Yuval Noah Harari (2022) who stated that ‘it’s possible to trace a direct line from the Genesis decree of “fill the earth and subdue it” to the Industrial Revolution and today’s ecological crisis’. White saw the roots of the environmental crisis in general cultural beliefs influenced by religion, and the solution in broadening the foundations of cultural understanding to encompass more ecocentric narratives. However, White’s specific criticisms of Christianity have proven controversial, leading to a great deal of discussion and debate over the years (LeVasseur and Peterson 2017). A more general point to take from his work is the importance of analysing dominant religious narratives from an ecological perspective and exploring a diversity of narratives that can open up alternative perspectives.

Activation The Australian environmental philosopher, Val Plumwood, describes how her project of re-animating the natural world has a linguistic dimension. In her book chapter Writing Nature in the Active Voice she comments: The enriching, intentionalizing, and animating project I have championed is also a project that converges with much poetry and literature. It’s a project of re-animating the world, and remaking ourselves as well, as multiply enriched but consequently constrained members of an ecological community. Opportunities for re-animating matter include making room for seeing much of what has been presented as meaningless accident as creative non-human agency. In re-animating, we become open to hearing sound as voice, seeing movement as action … coincidence and chaos as the creativity of matter. The difference here is intentionality, the ability to use an intentional vocabulary. Above all, it is permission to depict nature in the active voice, the domain of agency. Plumwood 2010, p. 45

The ‘active voice’ that Plumwood describes here is much more than the distinction between active and passive voice in traditional grammar. In functional grammar, characters in a narrative are said to be activated when they are represented as doing, sensing, thinking, behaving or speaking, and passivated if they are merely having things done to them, being seen or spoken to. Activation is an important part of characterization, with high activation representing characters prominently as powerful beings with mental lives, engaging actively in the world, and pursuing their own interests and goals. Passivation, in contrast, can represent characters more as objects, in the background, to be acted on by others. Van Leeuwen (2008, p. 33) describes activation as follows: [Activation may be realized by] transitivity structures in which activated social actors are coded as actor in material processes, behaver in behavioural processes, senser in mental processes, sayer in verbal processes, or assigner in relational processes. [When activated] the social actor in question is most clearly foregrounded. Van Leeuwen is drawing on Halliday’s functional linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen 2013) and the roles that characters play in particular processes. Of most importance for this chapter are material processes (where someone is doing something), mental processes (where someone is thinking, seeing, hearing or sensing something), and verbal processes (where someone is saying something). Material processes involve an activated Actor and a passivated Affected participant. Mental processes involve a Senser and Phenomenon, and verbal processes involve a Sayer and Receiver (adapting the terminology of Halliday and Matthiessen 2013). Related to activation is the broader concept of salience (Kress and van Leeuwen 2021, p. 215). Salience can be thought of as the representation of an area of life as important and worthy of attention through concrete, specific and vivid depictions. This concept has proven extremely useful in ecological humanities since, as Leopold (1979, p. 214) writes, ‘we can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in’. Activation is a powerful way to create salience – if people, animals or trees are made activated participants, doing, sensing or saying things, then this pulls them out of the background and represents them prominently as

deserving attention, praise (if doing something good) or condemnation (if doing something bad). The focus in this chapter is on the characters that appear in creation narratives, the linguistic devices which give them activation and salience, and what this means for understandings of the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.

Genesis The analysis starts with arguably the most widespread and influential creation narrative of all, which appears in Genesis 1, the first book of the Bible. George Sampson (1970, p. 149) wrote that: ‘The greatest of all translations is the English Bible. It is even more than that; it is the greatest of English books, the first of English classics, the source of the greatest influence upon English character and speech.’ This refers just to one English translation (the King James Version), while the Bible has been translated into more than 700 languages and exists in countless versions, exerting an influence across the world. In examining the Genesis 1 creation story, it is first necessary to distinguish the narrative texts from the underlying narrative structure. There are a vast number of translations and versions of the Bible in the form of books, as well as plays, musicals, films, songs, oral stories and picture books. These are the narrative texts – the physical texts that people read, watch or listen to. They all, however, are telling the same underlying ‘story’ (in Abbot’s 2008 terminology) when they recount the events of Genesis 1. In the terminology used in this book, the structure which underlies all the narrative texts is the narrative structure. This is the sequence of logically connected events involving particular characters in particular locations. In the case of Genesis 1, the narrative structure can be briefly sketched as follows:

Event 1

God creates heaven and earth.

Event 2

The spirit of God moves over the waters.

Event 3

God creates light.

Event 4

God separates light from darkness (day 1).

Event 5

God creates sky (day 2).

Event 6

God creates land.

Event 7

The earth brings forth grass, herbs and trees (day 3).

Event 8

God creates the sun, moon and stars (day 4).

Event 9

God creates ocean creatures and birds.

Event 10

God blesses the ocean creatures and birds (day 5).

Event 11

God creates land animals.

Event 12

God creates humans in his image.

Event 13

God grants humans dominion over animals and the earth.

Event 14

God gives humans seed-bearing plants and fruit trees to provide food; and gives green plants to other creatures for food (day 6).

The above is just a mnemonic, using Lakoff’s (1993, p. 209) term, standing for something more subtle than words – an aggregate cognitive pattern that exists in the minds of those who ‘know the story’. The following analysis is based mainly on the King James Version and the New International Version, with some other versions discussed where relevant. It is important to point out that the analysis is only of the specific English texts as texts which could, in their own right, have an influence on people and culture. The ways that particular words are translated from the original Hebrew is beyond the scope of this discussion, and there is no intention to comment on or draw general conclusions about the religions which include Genesis in their scriptures. At the start of nearly all creation narratives there are beings or elements that are pre-existing. The first event in Genesis, as described by the King James Version (KJV), is as follows: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Gen. 1.1 KJV In this sentence, ‘In the beginning’ is the circumstance, God appears in the position of Given information and ‘created the heaven and the earth’ appears as New information. Halliday (2013, p. 114) describes the Given as the taken

for granted background information which appears on the left followed by the New, at stake, revelatory information on the right. In this case, the preexistence of God is a taken-for-granted background assumption and delineates this character from all others. Characters which pre-exist the creation have a higher relative activation to others since they are not subject to the passivating force of being created (i.e., they do not appear as Affected participants of the material process of creation). As well as being the first character introduced and the only pre-existing character, God is given salience through nomination, i.e., being given a name. Other elements that are nominated in the New International Version (NIV) are: light (called ‘day’), dark (called ‘night’), the vault (called ‘sky’), and the ground (called ‘land’). In contrast, animals are homogenized in many versions through collective nouns, hypernyms, plural nouns and plural determiners, e.g., ‘swarms of living creatures’, ‘the great sea-monsters’, ‘every winged bird’, ‘creeping things’, ‘beasts of the earth’ (Gen. 1.20–24 American Standard Version). Homogenization reduces the salience of individuals, and also their activation since they cannot be seen as independently controlling their own lives. In the King James Version (KJV) of Genesis 1, God is activated by being represented in the position of Actor in material processes of physically doing things. For example:

•

God made the firmament, and divided the waters. (Gen. 1.7 KJV)

•

And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth. (Gen. 1.21 KJV)

•

So God created man in his own image. (Gen. 1.27 KJV)

God is also activated through being placed in the role of Sayer of a verbal process:

•

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. (Gen. 1.3 KJV)

•

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. (Gen. 1.9 KJV)

Although linguistically the processes that God is involved in are verbal processes in these two examples, there is a causal link between the speech events and the resultant physical events ‘there was light,’ and ‘it was so’. This makes the role of Sayer semantically equivalent to Actor in these clauses. Table 2.1 shows all the activated participants in Genesis 1 in two versions: the New International Version (NIV) in Table 2.1a and the King James Version (KJV) in Table 2.1b. It is striking that in both versions, only God takes the role of Senser – no other participants see, hear, feel, or think. Also, aside from God, there are no Sayers – no one else speaks. God, on the other hand, is Senser of the process of ‘seeing’ 7 times in each version, and speaks frequently, being the Sayer in 18 verbal processes in NIV and 17 in KJV. In terms of physical activity, God is by far the most active of all the characters, represented as Actor of 17 material processes in both versions. However, there are also Actors from the natural world, including animals, plants, the sun, moon and stars, which participate in a total of 28 processes in NIV and 26 in KJV. This shows that the natural world is not entirely passive in Genesis 1 – it is still a world teeming with life. Considering processes of creation, it is only God who is the Actor of the processes of ‘creating’ and ‘making’. Importantly though, there are other participants who are Actors of the processes of ‘bringing forth’ and ‘producing’. An example of this is v. 12:

•

The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. (Gen. 1.12 NIV)

•

And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind. (Gen. 1.12 KJV)

Here, the ‘land’ and the ‘earth’ are represented as playing a role in creation by being Actors in these clauses. This initially appears to provide strong activation, although it does result from directly following a command ‘And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass … And the earth brought forth grass’ (Gen. 1.11–12 KJV) rather than a spontaneous expression of will. There is a similar pattern later in Genesis 1, where, following God’s command, the

waters bring forth marine animals (Gen. 1.21 KJV), and the earth brings forth land animals (Gen. 1.24 KJV). The active role of the earth and waters is important because gratitude and respect for the creator, creators or the general forces which led to creation is central to many cultures and religions. If the earth and waters are seen as playing an active role in the creation then some of that gratitude and respect could be directed towards them.

TABLE 2.1a Activated participants in Genesis 1 (New International Version) Role

Activated Participant (process)

Actor of material process

God: Spirit of God (hovering), God (creating x5, separating x2, making x6, setting, giving x2) Animals, plants and natural elements: vault/sky (separating), lights/sun/moon (separating x2, serving, marking x3, giving x2, governing x3), ground (appearing), land (producing x3), plants (bearing), trees (bearing x2), birds (flying, increasing), living things (moving), water creatures (increasing, moving x5) Humans: Mankind (ruling x2, filling, subduing, increasing) Other: Unspecified (gathering)

Senser of mental process

God: God (seeing x7) Animals, plants and natural elements: Humans:

Sayer of verbal process

God: God (saying x11, calling x5, blessing x2) Animals, plants and natural elements: Humans:

TABLE 2.1b Activated participants in Genesis 1 (King James Version) Role

Activated Participant (process)

Actor of material process

God: Spirit of God (moving), God (creating x5, making x6, dividing x2, setting, giving x2) Animals, plants and natural elements: firmament (dividing), earth (bringing forth x3), tree (yielding x2), herb (yielding x2), lights/sun/moon (dividing x2, give x2, rule x4), waters (bringing forth x2), fowl (fly, multiply), creature (moving, multiplying, filling), living thing (moving), thing (creeping x2) Humans: them (multiplying, replenishing, subduing) Other: unspecified (gathering)

Senser of mental process

God: God (seeing x7) Animals, plants and natural elements: Humans:

Sayer of verbal process

God: God (saying x10, calling x5, blessing x2) Animals, plants and natural elements: Humans:

In narrative, the order of events is of great significance, both the temporal order (which refers to whether events happen before or after each other in time) and the presentation order (the order in which the events are recounted, which may or may not be chronological). In Genesis 1, the temporal order of the creation is as follows, with small variations between versions: heaven, earth, light, sky, land, plants, sun, moon and stars, ocean creatures and birds, land animals, humans. This is also the presentation order since it is a purely chronological narrative. The meaning of temporal order is not fixed. Sometimes the most important event is represented as occurring first and as the sequence continues the importance is gradually reduced. Sometimes, though, there is a narrative progression towards some kind of goal and the final event has narrative endfocus as the culmination of previous events. While readers can read significance into temporal sequence in different ways, textual cues can point towards a particular reading. Textual cues can be seen in the following extract which describes the final event in the sequence of creation:

Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ Gen. 1.26 NIV This verse is frequently quoted and contains within it clues to what the endfocus of the creation of human beings represents. It shows that humans are unique in being the only creatures made in God’s image, and ‘ruling’ over other creatures and the earth. The repeated use of the word ‘over’ is a verticality metaphor which conveys the superiority of humans and suggests a progression of value culminating in beings of the highest value. The narrative end-focus combined with these textual cues provides an entailment that humans are unique, special and superior to other species. Entailments are messages, often existing between the lines in linguistic features such as activation and temporal order, which can be drawn out of narrative by readers and applied beyond the texts to potentially shape how they see the world. Lynn White (1967) draws out the entailment of human superiority and criticizes it: God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. And, although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God’s image. Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. White 1967, p. 1205 This appears to align with what Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine (2009) describe as ‘the most dangerous story of all … the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures’. White calls for a ‘remedy’ from within the sphere of religion: Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially

religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny. White 1967, p. 1207 However, White’s tracing of anthropocentrism back to Christianity is controversial, and, of course, Christianity is not the only religion that shares the creation story of Genesis. The entailments that White draws out are not the only entailments that could be drawn from Genesis 1. Charles Camosy (2017) draws out quite different ones: Genesis 1 and 2 are among the best pro-animal texts we could ever imagine there being. Nonhuman animals and humans are created on the same day of creation. Both share the breath of life. God commands humans to eat plants… We could add to this that the earth and waters play a role in the creation of life, as seen in the patterns of activation. If creators are to be respected then there is a potential entailment that the land and ocean are to be respected, something which is beneficial in terms of my ecosophy. Other entailments which imply human superiority or domination would work against my ecosophy if they were drawn out, making the creation story in Genesis an ambivalent narrative. The difference between White and Camosy illustrates two ways of using narratives to make ecological points – one way draws out negative entailments and criticizes them, and the other draws out positive ones and praises them. A third way of using narratives is to raise awareness of alterative stories of creation from around the world, showing how they establish a different set of relationships between humans and the natural world. A practical example of this is the work of Rowen White, a seed-keeper from the Native American Mohawk Nation, which is a constituent nation of the Haudenosaunee. In an interview (discussed further in Chapter 3), Rowen White alludes to the Genesis story of creation: That which gives us life and power and spiritual power … it’s always in the land … it’s not power over. It’s not the dominion over, but it’s a power that recognizes interdependence. White in Rokicka 2022

Having rejected the idea of ‘dominion over’ from Genesis in favour of ‘interdependence’, White describes how the Mohawk creation story establishes relationships of interdependence: In the Mohawk creation story such foods as corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and strawberries figure prominently. They grew from the body of the daughter of the original woman as a gift to her sons. These foods would then sustain them for the rest of their time here on Earth and they literally grew from her flesh and bones. So in our cosmology we see them as our relatives. White in Rokicka 2022 And White describes how, in general, ‘there is this intimacy, there are familial relationships that are encoded in creation stories that are held within many different ancestries and bloodlines’ (in Rokicka 2022). There is much to learn from econarratives of creation in cultures around the world, and in the next section I survey some of the different forms that creators take, and what those forms entail, before analysing one particular creation story in detail.

A diversity of creators In creation stories, the characters who participate in the act of creation are highly activated as they create the earth, or speak, think, sing, dream or breathe it into being. These characters come in different forms, from mysterious beings without shape, human-like deities, shape-shifters and animal-like deities, to ordinary animals who provide assistance. In reviewing the anthology Literature of the American Indian, Evers and Turner (1975) make this interesting comment: The introduction … argues that the central Native American religious principle, ‘the Great Mystery’ or Wakonda, stands for the mysterious life power permeating all natural forms … and that this power cannot properly be crystallised into the anthropomorphic God … of Western religions. ‘Wa’kon-tah lacks image, being all things’, write [the editors of the book], yet in the first selection in that chapter, the Cheyenne account of ‘How the

World Was Made’, we find Maheo (the Great Mystery?) waving his arms and pulling out rib bones in the most anthropomorphic fashion. Evers and Turner 1975, p.86 Certainly, in some stories the creators stay mysterious, while in others they are anthropomorphized to different extents. If the creators are human-like, then their power and high activation can transfer on to humans, representing humans as exceptional and worthy of respect, while relegating other species and the environment to a lower position – that of being passively created rather than active creators. In contrast, if creators are animals or animal-like, and represented as actively participating in creation, then it can encourage respect for the morethan-human world. In the Cheyenne account of ‘How the World Was Made’, various animals participate in the creation, offering invaluable assistance to the creator Maheo (who is undeniably a deity with human-like characteristics). Gilderhus (1994, p. 70) emphasizes the importance of this by writing that in the Genesis story ‘God is separate and has no creative assistance from his creatures. God is sacred’, whereas in the Cheyenne narrative ‘all creatures share in the process of creation which makes all things sacred’. From the analysis in the previous section we could add that in Genesis the earth and waters do assist God, but no individual animals or plants play a creative role. Exactly what form the creators and other activated participants take is clearly of key importance in econarratives, since it can shape which kinds of beings are offered gratitude, respect and worship. In this section, I examine some of the creation stories that have been gathered and retold by Carolyn North (2009) in the book In the Beginning: Creation Myths from Around the World (illustrated by Adrienne Robinson), as well as stories from two other collections (Hamilton 1988, Leeming 2021). In analysing traditional stories there is a danger of building false stereotypes of indigenous peoples (Reese 2007) by representing them in distorted ways to promote particular ecological viewpoints. Garrard (2012), commenting on how Native Americans are often portrayed, points out that ‘the Ecological Indian is clearly a stereotype of European origin’ (p. 135), and ‘at its cruellest, the Ecological Indian represents a homogenisation of … 600 or so distinct and culturally diverse societies’ (p. 136). It is important to point out, therefore, that in this chapter I am commenting on particular linguistic and

narratological ways of expressing creation stories in retellings of the stories, rather than commenting on the beliefs, values, culture or knowledge of particular indigenous groups. In the retold creation narratives of In the Beginning (North 2009) there are many creators who are anthropomorphic in some way, such as the deity HeWho-Makes-Himself-From-Something. This deity appears in the retelling of the Wabanaki People’s story, First Mother (p. 25), and is described as having ‘arms’, having ‘fingers’, ‘wriggling his toes’ and ‘picking up his drum’. Together these show him clearly as being in the image of a human, while also having the supernatural powers of a deity. However, my focus here is on creators and other participants in the creation who are not in the image of humans, or at least not primarily human in form. The African Bushman tale A Dream of Dreaming (retold in North 2009, p. 19) begins with an egg that contains all the things of Creation – ‘plants and animals, men and women, sun and moon and stars, wind and rain, hills and plains and all the great and small waters’ (p. 19). All of nature, then, is preexisting. The egg hatches, a caterpillar wriggles out, and then turns into a Praying Mantis – ‘the Great Spirit of the World inside a brittle insect body’ (p. 19). The Mantis then dreams the oceans into being, then mountains, grass, shrubs, trees, fruit, tubers, the first woman, the first man, the animals, sun, stars, moon, and finally fire. There is a great equality in this. All the plants, animals, humans, sun and stars are equally in the same egg and in the dream of the Mantis. Humans are not created first, and do not have the narrative end-focus of being created last. At the start of the story, humans and animals share a language and are represented in the reciprocal relationship of talking with each other (i.e., both humans and animals are Sayers), although the language is lost after the creation of fire. Overall, the patterns of activation represent the Mantis, a spirit of nature, as the driving force behind creation, and humans as members of the community of life, created along with other species without the uniqueness of resembling the creator. There is a particularly interesting creator, or rather group of creators, in The Feathered Serpent (North 2009, p. 51). This is a retelling of a Kʼicheʼ Maya creation story which was originally written down in around 1554 by a Dominican friar based on oral tales. In this story, two spirits combine – Tepeu (the Maker) and Gucumatz (the Feathered Serpent) – to create what North calls a ‘double-spirit’:

It is Tepeu/Gucumatz, the mother/father, the creator/modeler, the bluegreen bird/snake that is the Great Feathered Serpent in two aspects. North p. 51 This double-spirit creates the conditions for other creators to come into existence: the Heart of Earth, the Heart of Sky and his three flashes of lightning, Hurricane, Newborn Thunderbolt and Sudden Thunderbolt. This group are then collectively called ‘the Makers’ and participate together in the creation of the earth. The complexity of the creator defies simplification into an anthropomorphized deity, and the elements that make up the creator are all aspects of nature (bird, snake, earth, sky, lightning, and thunderbolt). In the retelling of the Chinese creation story Yin and Yang and the Dwarf P’han Ku (North 2009, p. 65), the first being that emerges is the Dwarf P’han Ku (Pan Gu in pinyin), born from the Cosmic Egg. With the help of his hammer and chisel, P’han Ku creates the earth, lifts the sky above his head, forms mountains, valleys, and rivers, causes the winds to blow, and creates the sun and moon. Then, however, he can no longer continue without a huge sacrifice. He dies and his skull becomes the sky, his skin grows into plants, his hair becomes the animals, his eyebrows the birds, his bones the rocks, and the mites on his body become the humans. Initially, the Dwarf has huge activation in chiselling the world into being, but then the credit from this activity fuses into all of life. After he dies, the anthropomorphic deity has no activation, but all of life does as it spontaneously arises from his body. The active creator and the passive creation are unified. North’s (2009) retelling of the Australian Aboriginal story Dreaming the World into Being involves a great multitude of beings who participate in the creation. The first participant is just Dreaming, which turns out to be the dream of Yingarna, the All-Mother. Yingarna gives birth to the Rainbow Serpent, whose movement creates continents and oceans as she is born, before she turns into the Sun Mother. The Sun Mother calls to awaken the Dreamtime Ancestors. These ancestors include trees (‘Ancestor Eucalyptus’), flowers (‘Ancestor Orchid’), bodies of water (‘Ancestor Creek’), and animals (‘Ancestor Kangaroo’) (pp. 82–83). Through the action of these ancestors the barren land turns into mountains, plains and life in the world. This is represented with great activation in the following extract:

And as each Dreamtime Ancestor was awakened from its sleep … the air was filled with moos and yaps and growls and croons and barks and cooees. With their living breaths and footfalls, their fighting and their feeding and their mating, they began to shape the barren land into mountains and plains, hillocks and hollows… p. 83 Here the plant and animal ancestors are Actors in the processes of walking, fighting, feeding, mating and shaping that contribute to creation. Later on, with the arrival of darkness, ‘the Animal and Plant and Human Ancestors huddled together’ (p. 85), an expression which represents humans, animals and plants equally as the subject of the verb ‘huddled’. They then cooperate together to call back the Sun. Of key importance in this story is the activated role that plants and animals have in the creation; the equivalence of plants, animals and humans in all having pre-existing ancestors in the Dreamworld; and how they all find common cause and cooperate with each other. In another collection of creation stories from around the world, Hamilton (1988, p. 3) retells an Inuit myth, The Pea-Pod Man. In this story, the creator is a character called Raven, who can transform from bird to man: ‘Raven lifted one of his wings and pushed his beak up … And when he moved his beak up, Raven changed into a man’ (p. 4). In bird form, Raven is the Actor of material processes normally associated with birds: Raven ‘flew up into the sky’ (p. 4), and ‘made his wings wave back and forth’. Leeming (2021, p. 123) describes how the Raven is one of the trickster characters that frequently appear in creation stories: ‘As a transformer and shapeshifter, he can take human form or his animal form as Coyote, Raven, the Spider or the Hare … The trickster has traditionally been an important bridge between the Great Spirit and our created world.’ And we can add that the Raven is a bridge between the human and more-than-human worlds. Another type of creator appears in an Omaha (Native American) creation story. In this story, as retold by Leeming (2021), everything that would eventually exist originally lived as spirits. These spirits descend to earth but find only water until ‘everything changed when a fiery rock emerged from the depths, causing water to become clouds and leaving land for the spirits to populate as living beings’ (Leeming 2021, p. 31). This is interesting because a non-living element, the rock, is portrayed as playing an activated role in the

creation. In this case, the rock is Actor in the material processes of emerging, causing, and leaving. Leeming (2021, p. 31) draws out an entailment of this: ‘The primary effect of this myth is to emphasize the spiritual essence, the sacredness, of the land itself.’ A final kind of creator is the ‘Great Spirit’ – a mysterious power, force, or energy which appears in many Native American creation stories. Leeming (2021, p. 31) describes how, while sometimes anthropomorphized (as mentioned above), the Great Spirit is usually more of an abstract principle or force than an omnipotent being. He describes how ‘Native Americans in their myths recognize the Great Spirit as an animistic presence in all aspects of life – the rivers, the trees, the animals, the humans, and good and evil’. If the Great Spirit is interpreted in this way, then the respect and reverence of the deity can be transferred to the more-than-human world. This is just a small selection of the incredible variety of forms that creators take in creation myths, including omnipotent deities, mysterious spirits, a panoply of human-like deities, relatively ordinary animals and even rocks. My ecosophy values the wellbeing of all species, so I celebrate the diversity and welcome stories that disrupt dominant anthropocentric narratives by giving high activation to animals, plants and other aspects of nature. If creators are respected and praised (as they are in many cultures) then an entailment of these stories is that other species and the land are to be respected and praised too. That is not to say that some stories should be discarded in favour of others, because all have their advantages and disadvantages, but what is important is opening up a diversity of stories and approaching each with a critical eye and ear for the differing ways they activate and passivate participants.

How the world was made In the final section of this chapter I will analyse one specific myth, the Cherokee story How the World Was Made as retold by James Mooney (1888) in Myths of the Cherokee (the full story appears in Appendix A). Mooney lived with a secluded group of Cherokee for a number of years, studying their culture, language and legends. However, a retelling of an oral story will inevitably be affected by the process of writing it down, which transforms

something dynamic and multi-versioned into something singular and static. It will also be affected by translation and the translator’s own worldview, and by the context of the telling. There were, for example, pressures from missionaries to record Cherokee stories in ways that accorded with biblical stories, and Cherokee leaders realized that the romantic view of myth among Europeans ‘could help convince Americans that their nations had valid claims to sovereignty and land’ (Saunt 2006, p. 675). The analysis and interpretation of the story are therefore purely of this specific English text, without any comment on wider Cherokee culture. From an econarrative perspective, what matters primarily is that this particular narrative text conveys entailments which could be drawn out by a reader, and which could influence how they see the relationship between humans and the natural world. The story begins with the following words: The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again. The Indians are afraid of this. Mooney 1888, p. 239 The Theme of the first clause, i.e., its point of departure, is the earth, which gives salience to the earth rather than the creator. At the start, the earth is Given information, being on the left, and the New information is that it is a great floating island. The narrative is therefore non-linear, starting in the present day (in present tense), with the earth already created, before going on to describe the distant future when the world grows old and worn out. It then jumps back to initial times (in past tense) when all was waters and the animals were in a crowded place in the sky. The narrative structure of the story can be briefly sketched as follows, in temporal order (or a possible temporal order since there is ambiguity about when humans appear):

Event 1

Animals and plants are made.

Event 2

Animals and plants are told to keep awake for seven nights but some fall asleep.

Event 3

The ones who stayed awake are made nocturnal predators.

Event 4

The trees who stayed awake become evergreen, others deciduous.

Event 5

All is water, the animals are crowded in the sky and want more space.

Event 6

Water-beetle looks in all directions but there is nowhere to rest.

Event 7

Water-beetle dives to find mud.

Event 8

The mud spreads to form the island of earth.

Event 9

The earth is fastened to the sky with four cords.

Event 10

Birds look for a place to land but it is too soft.

Event 11

Buzzard flaps his wings on the earth and creates mountains and valleys.

Event 12

Animals set the sun in its track, but it is too hot.

Event 13

Conjurers adjust the position of the sun.

Event 14

Humans come, a brother and sister.

Event 15

Brother strikes sister with a fish and she becomes pregnant.

Event 16

She has a child every seven days until there are too many people.

Event 17

It is made that women only have a baby once a year.

Event 18

[future] The earth grows old and worn out, people die.

Event 19

[future] All becomes water.

What is most striking in this story is the high activation of the animals. The following is the second paragraph of the story: When all was water, the animals were above in Gӑlûñ′lӑtĭ, beyond the arch; but it was very much crowded, and they were wanting more room. They wondered what was below the water, and at last Dâyuni′sĭ, ‘Beaver’s Grandchild,’ the little Water-beetle, offered to go and see if it could learn. It darted in every direction over the surface of the water, but could find no firm place to rest. Then it dived to the bottom and came up with some soft mud, which began to grow and spread on every side until it became the island which we call the earth. Mooney 1888, p. 239 This represents animals as Senser of the mental processes of ‘wanting’, ‘seeing’, ‘wondering’ and ‘learning’, Sayer of the verbal process of ‘offering’, and Actor of the material processes of ‘darting’, ‘finding’,

‘diving’, and ‘coming up’. The Water-beetle is particularly activated, and given extra salience through nomination, in fact getting three names: ‘Dâyuni′sĭ’, ‘Beaver’s Grandchild’ and ‘the little Water-beetle’. This is important, because as Popova (2015) describes: To name a thing is to acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else that has a name; to confer upon it the dignity of autonomy while at the same time affirming its belonging with the rest of the nameable world; to transform its strangeness into familiarity, which is the root of empathy. To name is to pay attention. The expression ‘the dignity of autonomy’ is a useful one, which can apply equally to high activation. Another character with very high activation is Buzzard, also nominated, and appearing (together with his wings) as Actor of six material processes and one mental process in the following extract: He [Buzzard] flew all over the earth, low down near the ground, and it was still soft. When he reached the Cherokee country, he was very tired, and his wings began to flap and strike the ground, and wherever they struck the earth there was a valley, and where they turned up again there was a mountain. Mooney 1888, p. 239 Table 2.2 shows all of the activated participants in How the World Was Made, i.e., all those who appear as Actor, Senser, or Sayer of material, mental, and verbal processes respectively. In addition there are some processes which are best classified as behavioural processes, so these are also included in the table. Behavioural processes are usually intransitive and have one participant, the Behaver, which is a role of high activation. The activated participants in the story are overwhelmingly animals, plants and natural elements, appearing 28 times as Actors, 9 as Sensers, 3 as Sayers and 9 times as Behavers. The total is 49 activated roles, compared to 29 for all other kinds of participant. Appearing as Senser implies that the animals are beings with a mental life, thinking and sensing the world around them, while Actors are represented as actively living their own lives for their own purposes. The role of Sayer is also powerfully activated because it literally gives the character a voice, although if animals are talking in human language

then this means that they have been, at least to some degree, anthropomorphized. While slight anthropomorphism can promote identification and care for animals, if it is too strong then there is a danger that the character is no longer an animal at all, but a human in all but exterior form. In this creation story, however, the anthropomorphism is minimal because the majority of processes are ones that are typical activities for animals.

TABLE 2.2 Activated participants in How the World Was Made Process

Activated Participant (process)

Actor of material processes

Animals, plants and natural elements: Water-beetle (darting, finding, diving, coming up), animals (sending out :x2), birds (finding, alighting, coming back, coming down, getting, setting), Buzzard (making ready, flying, reaching), wings (flapping, striking :x2, turning up), Owl and Panther (going about, making), trees (losing), earth/a great island (floating), Sun (scorching, going, returning), mud (growing, spreading) Humans: Cherokee (eating), we (reaching, entering), one (going), men (coming), he (striking), babies (increasing) Other: Conjurers (putting, raising, leaving), world (keeping), Unspecified Actor (fastening, making :x2, giving :x2)

Senser of mental processes

Animals, plants and natural elements: Animals (wanting, wondering, being anxious, seeing, being afraid), Water-beetle (seeing, learning), Buzzard (being tired), Owl and Panther (seeing) Humans: Indians (fearing), we (seeing, knowing) Other:

Sayer of verbal processes

Animals, plants and natural elements: Water-beetle (offering), animals (telling, calling) Humans: He (telling) Other: Conjurers (calling), Unspecified Sayer (telling, saying)

Behaver of behavioural processes

Animals, plants and natural elements: Animals (keeping awake, watching :x2, trying, dropping off [to sleep], sleeping), Birds (sleeping), Owl and Panther (staying awake), cedar, pine, spruce, holly and laurel (staying awake) Humans: People (dying), Young men (fasting, keeping awake, praying), one (fasting) Other: World (growing old)

In Table 2.2 there are a number of activated participants who are unspecified, all creators of some kind:

•

[earth] was afterwards fastened to the sky with four cords, but no one remembers who did this. (Mooney 1888, p. 239)

•

when the animals and plants were first made – we do not know by whom they were told to watch and keep awake for seven nights … (Mooney 1888, p. 240)

•

of all the animals only the owl, the panther, and one or two more were still awake. To these were given the power to see and go about in the dark … (Mooney 1888, p. 240)

•

to the others [the trees that did not stay awake] it was said ‘Because you have not endured to the end you shall lose your hair every winter.’ (Mooney 1888, p. 240)

Here we have a creator who is activated by being the Actor of the material process of making, giving and fastening, and Sayer in a verbal process. However, through the passive voice (‘was fastened’, ‘were made’, ‘were given’, and ‘was said’) the Actor/Sayer is deleted. This gives very low salience to the creator, emphasized by ‘we do not know by whom’, leaving the animals as having both the primary salience and the highest activation in the story. Human beings are created last in this story – ‘Men came after the animals and plants’. However, there is nothing in the text to suggest narrative endfocus – there is nothing unique or superior about the humans, or any clues that suggest the humans were the final stage in a cumulative process of improvement.

Conclusion How the World Was Made is an example of an ‘earth-diver’ myth – a common type of creation story where animals dive to retrieve mud which spreads out to form the land. Of the four types of creation myth that Leeming (2021) describes, earth-diver stories give the strongest activation to animals. Leeming captures the importance of this as follows:

In Indian Mystic understanding, humans are not above all other creatures, as the Bible tells us we are. Rather, humans are part of an intricate interrelated reality in which all aspects of the living world participate in the process of creation. It is not a supreme deity, but little animals who dive into the maternal waters to find the first soil in so many native earth diver creation myths … this whole sense of the role of all of nature – including humans – and the continuing creation process results in a sense of the sacredness of this earth in the here and now. p. 122 In other words, Leeming is drawing out the entailment from the story that animals, and by extension all species and the earth, are sacred. This explicit drawing out of entailments and offering them to the reader is one way of using creation stories in environmental communication to encourage readers to protect the ecosystems that life depends on. Another way of moving from analysis to practical action is to survey a wide range of creation stories and promote ones which align with the ecosophy, for example by encouraging their inclusion in school curricula; and beyond that, to encourage learners of all kinds to treat creation stories critically and consider which participants are activated and what messages this activation conveys. A final way of using creation stories in environmental communication is to discover the linguistic features that convey positive environmental messages from the stories and then weave them into writing and storytelling of all kinds. Examples would be linguistic features that represent beings from the more-than-human world as the theme of clauses, with high activation, endfocus, nomination, or individualization. The environmental anthropologist Sophie Chao (2022) eloquently expresses why activation is of vital importance to storytellers: Many of us find ourselves at a loss for words when faced with the unspeakable violence wrought by large-scale, extractive human activity on more-than-human communities of life – including those among us who are trained in the arts of narrative craft and storytelling. And yet, finding other ways to word the world is vital if we are to forge alternative futures, grounded in an acknowledgement of the consequential agency of the

myriad plants, animals, elements, and ecosystems whom humans becomewith.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER THREE

Identifying: Ecocultural Identity in the Seed Sovereignty Movement The sociologist Anthony Giddens associates identity directly with narrative. He describes how: A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour … but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual’s biography … must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story about the self’. Giddens 1991, p. 54, emphasis in original That story could visualize the self as narrowly ensconced within the human world or as interacting with a wider community of life that includes both human as well as non-human beings. In this chapter I will explore ecocultural identities, a concept that was first developed by Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor in the groundbreaking Routledge Handbook of ecocultural identity (2020). The failure of dominant cultures in the West to notice, appreciate or celebrate their inevitably ecologically embedded nature is, according to Milstein and Castro-Sotomayor, an issue of utmost importance:

Indeed, all of us, each and every one, are always participants in crisscrossing sociocultural and ecological webs of life, whether consciously or not. It is a growing majority of humanity’s obliviousness – and even active denial – of our interrelated sociocultural and ecological constructions and conditions that has us where we are today, in the midst of unfolding anthropogenic biospheric catastrophe. Milstein and Castro-Sotomayor 2020, p. xvii For the purposes of this chapter, I will define ecocultural identity in a slightly different way from how Milstein and Castro-Sotomayor use the term. Ecocultural identity, in my formulation, refers to belonging to a community that consists not only of other humans but also of members from the more-than-human world. The word ‘community’ has many possible meanings, but I am using it here to mean a group where members interact with each other in ways which support the common good of the group, or at least where there is interaction and an expectation that members contribute, even if they do so to differing extents in practice. Scott (2010, p. 135) describes the similar concept of ecological identity as follows: The primary and fundamental sense inherent in ecological identity is a recognition that one is a relational being, intimately connected to others – both animate and inanimate – through a web of relationships, and the awareness that one’s actions have varying degrees of influence on the web just as one is influenced by it. There is no membership list of the community of life, so an ecocultural identity is something which needs to be performed, primarily through the use of words that construct self and world in particular ways but also through clothing, gestures and symbolic actions (Benwell and Stokoe 2006, p. 4). In this way, membership of human communities and the wider communities of life is asserted and continually reasserted in what Giddens calls the ongoing ‘story about the self’. Benwell and Stokoe (2006, p. 4) describe two approaches to identity. The ‘essentialist’ approach sees identity as existing within people as a solid core, their real selves, whatever situation they find themselves in. However, in the complex world we live in where we are required to play all kinds of

roles, it can be hard to pin down exactly what and where the ‘real self’ is. Postmodern theorists see identity as something which is ‘fluid, fragmentary, contingent, and, crucially, constituted in discourse’ (p. 17), and this is the approach that I use here. Identity is something that has to be worked on, worked at, asserted through words and actions, and is always influenced and constrained by forces in the society around us. Milstein (2020, p. 42) describes how ecological identities are often resisted in Western(ized) cultures through ridicule, labelling, and accusations of anthropomorphism. Those who have a connection with the more-than-human world may be labelled ‘nature freak’, ‘tree-hugger’, ‘hippy’, ‘weird’ or ‘crazy’, or dismissed as only caring about the natural world because they incorrectly attribute human characteristics to it. Milstein also describes self-censoring (p. 36), where those with ecocentric sensibilities hide them, or self-denigrate themselves with expressions like ‘I know it’s weird’ or ‘I say random things’. The alternative to denigration and self-denigration that Milstein promotes is the ‘rewilding of ecocultural identity’ – the strong and bold assertion of ecocultural identities in inspirational ways: As we undiscipline the anthropocentric ecocultural self, we have the opportunity to rewild the self. In rewilding, we can embrace identities rooted in interdependency, reciprocity, response-ability, regeneration, and also regenerosity, which I define as the circular mutual gifting and nourishing integral to our ecosystems… Milstein 2020, p. 45 Of key importance from an econarrative perspective is how ecocultural identities are performed through narratives in ways that overcome dominant anthropocentric identities. Crompton and Kasser (2009, p. 12) found evidence that ‘studies of environmental identity and connectedness with nature have established that connectedness is strongly correlated with environmental attitudes and behaviours’ and argue that we must ‘change those features of society that currently support the environmentally problematic aspects of identity, and promote those alternative aspects of identity that are environmentally beneficial’ (p. 25). Leopold (1979, p. viii) expresses the link between identity and environmental action in a clearer

way: ‘We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity. When we see land as a community to which we belong we may begin to use it with love and respect.’ Eisenstein believes that the disconnection and disengagement with nature is so prevalent in industrialized countries that: An actual transformation in the way we experience being is necessary … a collapse of the old Story of Self and Story of the World, and the birth of a new one. For the self, too, is ultimately a story, with a beginning and an end. Eisenstein 2011, p. 153 The kind of new story that Eisenstein envisages centres on the concept of ‘interbeing’: The new Story of the People, then, is a story of interbeing, of reunion. In its personal expression, it proclaims our deep interdependency on other beings, not only for the sake of surviving but also even to exist. Eisenstein 2013, p. 20 In this chapter I analyse an inspirational way of performing a ‘story of interbeing’ in relation to Native American Mohawk identity and the indigenous seed sovereignty movement. However, while there is great potential to discover inspirational new stories to live by in indigenous-based movements, it is important to be aware of the danger of cultural stereotyping. The philosopher and activist Bayo Akomolafe expresses concerns that have been raised by a number of voices since Edward Said (1978/2003) published his devastating postcolonial critique Orientalism. Akomolafe (2022) describes how: I’m always wary about the story, this narrative, that there was once a time where everything was harmonious, where we had this Indigenous alignment with truth and the right relationship. And then something happened, and everything went wrong … I find that in the recent upheavals and desire to centre Indigenous realities, there is a romanticization of those Indigenous technologies that instrumentalized

them for modern anxieties … But that still might do some good work in turning our heads, our attention, our hearts, and our bodies to a different cultural formulation. There is a fine balance, therefore, between seeking out new stories to live by from traditional and indigenous cultures as alternatives to the destructive stories of consumerism and using inaccurate stereotypes to contribute to a more environmentally aware but yet still colonialist endeavour. Getting the balance right requires careful listening to indigenous voices and constant self-reflection about the ends that indigenous wisdom is used for, and who benefits from those ends. Clint Carroll, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and cultural anthropologist, also cautions against romanticizing indigenous cultures: Indigenous peoples are romanticized in ways that assume that we’re inherently connected to nature. And yet … we’re not perfect, we’re human. There’s not an innate sense of connection to the natural world like a lot of the ecological Indian stereotypes portray, but we learn from … mistakes and we encase them in stories that continue to teach us today and continue to have relevance. Carroll 2022 It is therefore possible to see some of the ecological wisdom in traditional cultures as having arisen directly from hard experiences, in environments where ecological destruction is immediately visible and immediately harmful. This is in contrast to globally linked countries where environmental destruction is often exported out of sight to other countries. The stories that arise in local indigenous environments can have a relevance far beyond them, as Carroll describes: The ethical frameworks that we have as Indigenous peoples can travel beyond the place-based relationships that are so vitally important for those frameworks … these ethical frameworks can exceed and in fact, have a lot to teach everyone else in the world, especially in this moment of climate crisis. Carroll 2022

Rowen white and the indigenous seed movement Rowen White is the leader of the Sierra Seeds organization and describes herself as ‘from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and a passionate activist for indigenous seed and food sovereignty’ (White 2022a). Her work challenges dominant narratives in industrial countries which see seeds as dead matter for exploitation, and she uses language in powerful ways to convey a new story of humans and seeds interbeing with each other in a reciprocal relationship of mutual care and sustenance. In this case, though, the ‘new story’ is actually a revival of an ancient one that has been suppressed for a long time. Through talking with Mohawk elders, White gained a deep understanding of the traditional foods that were cultivated and eaten by her ancestors. She describes how this helped her to rethink the story of her life, using the expression ‘restory-ing of my life’ which echoes Giddens concept of the ‘story about the self’: looking at this modern world and who I was as a Mohawk woman, the foods and seeds really helped me to reclaim a sense of identity and find my way home, to find that purpose and help me to restore a sense of connectedness – a restory-ing of my life through food and seed. White 2019 In this section I will investigate the way that White tells this story of self by examining three in-depth interviews which appear in Emergence Magazine (White 2019), Finding Our Way (White 2022b), and Permaculture Women Magazine (Rokicka 2022). I am looking for three types of ‘character’ in these interviews: self, other humans, and others from the more-than-human world. And I am looking for linguistic features and rhetorical techniques which weave these three types of character into a community. In this way, I am looking at identity partly according to Social Identity Theory (Hogg 2016), where identity consists of membership of an ‘ingroup’, in opposition to other people who are part of ‘outgroups’. However, the primary focus is the more inclusive communities of practice, which Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2011, p. 578) describe as:

an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in some common endeavour. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of their joint activity around that endeavour. Except, as will become clear in this chapter, it is not just ‘people’ who can be members of a community of practice. I focus on interviews because they better represent the ongoing, dynamic and contingent nature of the ‘story about the self’, as opposed to a written biography where events are often neatly structured into a linear narrative. As the interviews progress, a narrative does emerge, but in a non-linear way, where different parts of the narrative are returned to, and insights added which gradually build an overall picture. What I am looking for specifically are narratological and linguistic features that build ecocultural identities, in a search for tools that can help build new narratives to live by.

Ecocultural identity in interviews with Rowen White The following extract from Rowen White’s interview in Permaculture Women Magazine reveals aspects of a key narrative: Due to the impacts of colonization and acculturation, many native North American food systems have been dismantled and, unfortunately, they are not a part of our everyday life anymore. As a teenager I didn’t really have access to a lot of the traditional foods and to the cultural memory that goes with them. As a young woman I became interested in traditional farming and wanted to learn more about where our food comes from and to create more sovereignty and freedom through cultivation … For Mohawk people, agriculture was historically at the centre of our culture and I was very curious why it no longer was a significant part of my life and how I could reengage and restore that relationship and connection to the land. So I began to ask people, gather seeds and learn more and more about my responsibility to care for them. It led me on a 20-year-long path

to being a seed keeper. Being an educator and a mentor constitutes a central part of this role. I am helping people who are in a similar situation I was 20 years ago – curious but not having access to knowledge or seeds. White in Rokicka 2022 The earliest moment mentioned in this non-linear narrative is a time when, historically, agriculture was at the centre of Mohawk culture in the distant past. Following that was colonialization and the dismantling of food systems. This is causally connected to what happens next, which is White not having access to traditional food culture. The next event is White becoming interested in traditional farming, then talking with elders, gathering seeds and gaining knowledge. Finally, in the present, White is passing on this knowledge to the next generations, with an implication of the future. This narrative structure underlies all of the interviews. The expression ‘As a’ (e.g., ‘As a teenager’) and the copula ‘being’ (e.g., ‘Being an educator’) are clear markers of self-identification. In the extract above, White uses these markers to perform the following identities at different stages of the narrative: a teenager, a young woman, a Mohawk person, a seed-keeper, an educator and a mentor. In other places in the interviews, White uses the identity markers to represent herself as a Mohawk woman, a Haudenosaunee woman, a thought leader, a farmer, and an indigenous woman. The elements include identifications, which describe what people fundamentally ‘are’, either long-term or unavoidably (‘an indigenous woman’), and functionalizations (e.g., ‘a mentor’) which are roles that are performed at particular times (Statham 2021, p. 123). In another interview, White takes the beginning of the narrative back further, to creation myths: As a Haudenosaunee woman, a Mohawk woman, our connection to these seeds draws back all the way to our original creation story, where these seeds and foods emerged from the dying body of the daughter of Original Woman. They came from her body as a gift to her twin sons, so we would forever be nourished by these foods and seeds. Therefore, it was our responsibility to acknowledge that we were bound in a reciprocal relationship to them, that they were our relatives.

White 2019 Here the biography of the seeds and the humans are woven together into one narrative, right from the beginning. White draws out an entailment from the Mohawk creation story that we have a ‘reciprocal relationship’ with seeds, which is reinforced by the kinship framing of both humans and seeds as ‘relatives’. The kinship framing is further developed in the following extract: There is this intimacy, there are familial relationships that are encoded in creation stories that are held within many different ancestries and bloodlines. So when I say that seeds are sacred because they are living relatives, I mean it wholeheartedly. White 2019 The importance of these words is that they place seeds and humans in the same group, ‘family’, which constructs an ecocultural identity. An entailment is drawn out that, as living relatives, seeds are sacred, which encourages seeds to be respected and preserved. At another point in the interview, White elaborates on the reciprocal relationship between humans and plants: The plants gave up a little of their wildness, and we humans gave up a little of our wildness too; and we came into this covenant, this sacred covenant or this marriage. In some cultures, it’s spoken of as a marriage. We came into this relationship, and part of those agreements were to take care of one another. We were going to be bound in this reciprocal relationship, to care intimately for one another as we move forward. So the foundation of those agreements is that understanding of reciprocity. White 2019 This represents humans and plants as engaged in a common endeavour, both members of a community of practice dedicated to mutual thriving. Importantly, the linguistic construction of this extract makes humans and plants exactly equal: humans and plants are both subjects of the parallel constructions ‘gave up a little of their wildness’ and ‘gave up a little of our

wildness’. The pronoun ‘we’ in ‘we came into this relationship’ and ‘we were going to be bound’ includes both humans and plants; and ‘one another’ in ‘care for one another’ is a reciprocal pronoun. In addition, the terms ‘marriage’, ‘relationship’, ‘agreement’ and ‘reciprocity’ are all mutual two-way relationships, as opposed, for example to ‘stewardship’, or ‘domination’ where the two parties necessarily take different roles. These forms of language perform an ecocultural identity, with human beings and beings from the more-than-human world taking part equally in communities of practice dedicated to shared endeavours. One of the constructions that White uses to establish identity is the formulation ‘As an X, Y’. This pattern firstly identifies the speaker as being part of the group X and then gives further information about what that identity actually means by supplying more details in Y. The following are three examples of this:

•

As a Haudenosaunee woman, a Mohawk woman, our connection to these seeds draws back all the way to our original creation story. (White 2019)

•

First and foremost, as a Mohawk woman, culturally we’re intimately connected with food and farming because of our ancestral traditions. (White 2019)

•

As a Mohawk woman, there are agreements that I can’t speak unkind words around seeds. (White 2019)

In these examples, White uses the construction to represent a Mohawk identity as interconnected with seeds in a relationship of care. Although many of the statements that White makes are, like these, specifically about Mohawk identity, she extends the insights to include listeners/readers who are from any culture:

•

All of us – and that includes everyone who is reading it now – descend from a lineage of people who had a very intimate relationship with plants. (White in Rokicka 2022)

•

A long time ago our ancestors – mine, yours, everyone else’s – made agreements with plants that they would take care of each other. (White 2019)

•

We are all indigenous to somewhere, and we’re all called in this time to be in inquiry about decolonizing ourselves and our relationships. (White 2019)

The pronouns ‘us’, ‘everyone’, ‘our’, and ‘we’ are used here as inclusive pronouns, i.e., they include the listener and speaker in the same group. There is also a second person pronoun ‘yours’ in ‘A long time ago our ancestors, mine, yours’ that directly reaches out to the listener. White even extends the key category of being indigenous to include everyone ‘we are all indigenous to somewhere’. The specific characteristics of the ancestors that are highlighted are their agreements with and intimate relationships with plants. The implication is clear – that the listeners can follow their own journey paralleling White’s to connect with the seeds of their ancestors and forge an ecocultural identity for themselves. When White speaks of seeds entering an agreement with the ancestors then this immediately animates the seeds, representing them not merely as objects but as subjects who are conscious enough to agree. That is because of the selection restrictions (Dik 1997, p. 91) around the process of agreement which, in normal use, restricts both participants in the agreement to be human or, less often, animals. Any use outside of the restrictions triggers a metaphor, in this case animating and personifying the seeds. The following extract also represents seeds in an animate way: Many elders and people from our community made a lot of ceremony, and a lot of prayer, and a lot of offerings to ensure that those seeds were reminded that we didn’t forget about them. White 2019 Here seeds are the Recipient of the process of reminding, which selects a participant who has a mind, or at least a mental life. Seeds and plants are also animated through being the activated participant in the following:

•

The act of co-creating with the land and with the seeds. (White 2019)

•

There were wild plants who could see the potential of being in a different sort of relationship with humans, and they invited us into this co-creative dance that we call agriculture. (White 2019)

•

The seeds teach us to be generous and to share our abundance with other people. (White in Rokicka 2022)

•

These seeds have given me a trellis of hope. (White 2019)

In these examples, seeds, land and plants are the Actor of the material process of co-creating and giving, Senser of the mental process of seeing, and Sayer of the verbal processes of inviting and teaching. The process of teaching is emphasized by functionalization (Machin and Mayr 2012, p. 81) where seeds and plants are metaphorically represented as performing the function of ‘teacher’:

•

The seeds have become my teacher. They brought me through a very unconventional rite of passage. (White 2019)

•

I’ve apprenticed myself to plants. Like those have been my teachers. (White 2022b)

•

Those seeds and foods became my aunties and my grandmothers, teaching me what I needed to know along that pathway towards selfdiscovery as an Indigenous woman living in this modern world. (White 2019)

The personification of seeds is particularly strong when they are metaphorically represented with the kinship terms ‘aunties’ and ‘grandmothers’, which make them elder family members, entailing a relationship of respect. The coming together of ‘ecological’ and ‘cultural’ into one word, ‘ecocultural’ is particularly useful because it shows that culture and ecology are not two separate spheres, but are actually one. In the interviews, White

represents seeds as shaped by, shaping, and inextricably entwined with culture. She does this in many ways, but a particularly powerful one is where seeds are represented as containing culture within themselves:

•

Seeds are the foundation of agriculture but they also encode a memory of the land, the climate, the weather, as well as people’s cultural values, aesthetics and stories. (White in Rokicka 2022)

•

A seed holds this memory across the ages, and is like an unwritten record of this co-evolutionary relationship between plants, and humans, the elements and the land, all in this … compact little bundle. (White 2022b)

•

Encoded in these seeds are ceremonies, and songs, and stories and lineages, and migration stories. (White 2019)

This uses the framing SEEDS ARE INFORMATION STORES through the triggers ‘encode’, ‘hold’, ‘memory’, and ‘record’, in a way which ties culture (ceremonies, songs, aesthetics and stories), humans, and the natural world (climate, weather, the elements, the land) together into a relationship. The seeds themselves therefore become holders or symbols of ecocultural identity. There is an interesting parallel where White also represents human bodies, like seeds, as holding memories:

•

each and every single one of our bodies holds living memory of our ancestors coming into agreements with plants and animals. (White 2022b)

•

the ancestral memories that they [traditional foods] recall inside my body. In some ways, over the years, I’ve grown to know that they’re just rehydrating in my blood and in my bones these original agreements that my ancestors made with these foods a long time ago. (White 2019)

The expression ‘rehydrating’ is from the semantic domain of seeds but is applied to humans. In this framing, and the parallels drawn in various ways

throughout the interviews, humans and seeds boundary-cross, no longer being separate beings but intertwined. Some other examples of parallels and boundary-crossing are as follows:

•

Historically … seeds were considered feminine. It relates to our own reproductive system – it’s the woman who carries the seed. If you look botanically, it’s the female part of the plant that is creating the seed. (White in Rokicka 2022)

•

When we begin to strengthen the seeds, the people inherently become strengthened themselves. (White 2019)

•

The energy that is inside a seed … it’s the same essence that grew you in your mother’s womb. It’s the same life force. (White 2022b)

These parallel humans and seeds along the dimensions of gender, physiology, strength, and energy. The final example is particularly powerful because the second person pronoun ‘you’ reaches out to the reader, rendering them personally as identical to seeds along the plane of sharing the same essence, energy and life force.

Conclusion Rowen White is an inspirational leader who conveys through her words and actions new ways of living in relationship with seeds, plants and the natural world. These ways, although new to many who live in unsustainable industrial societies, stretch back to time immemorial among the cultures of ancestors of people around the world. Importantly, White explicitly critiques dominant narratives of the Western world, and the way that they frame seeds: So now, in North America but also globally, we need to rethink and rewrite the narrative of our relationship with food and seed. At the moment there is a dominant narrative in the Western world that sees plants as dead inanimate objects that we just grow, harvest, mechanize

and exploit. But that dominant narrative is really just a shallow facade around a much deeper relationship that humans have had with plants for a lot longer. White in Rokicka 2022 In contrast to the view of seeds as dead, inanimate objects, White provides a new narrative that centres around relationships. This narrative begins with the Mohawk legend of the creation of the world, where seeds and plants arose from the body of the daughter of the original woman, making them both relatives and sacred. It continues with ancient times when ancestors made an agreement with seeds that assured mutual thriving, and then on to countless generations of a culture of reciprocity and care for seeds and the natural world. After this is the painful period of colonization when these relationships were severed, and people were disconnected from seeds and the land. Then there is White’s personal story which starts with disconnection, and then joy in discovery of traditional knowledge and a reconnection with ancestors, community and seeds. Finally, there is an extension out to all communities, with the insight that everyone is indigenous to somewhere, and that all ancestors originally lived in reciprocal relationship with seeds. That is the basic narrative structure, and the detailed linguistic features of the narrative texts (the interviews themselves) convey ecocultural identity and relationships of reciprocity in powerful and vivid ways. These linguistic features include explicit identifications using the expression ‘As a’ (‘as a Mohawk woman’) and the copular (‘being a seed keeper’); kinship terms to represent seeds in the same group as humans (‘relatives’, ‘aunties’); inclusive pronouns (‘we’ including seeds and humans); reciprocal pronouns (‘one another’); two-way relationships (‘marriage’, ‘agreement’); representing seeds and plants with high animacy and activation; functionalization to show seeds performing particular roles (‘teachers’); and parallels where seeds and humans are represented as sharing an essence. Together, these features perform what Carlin (2020, p. 288) describes as ‘a practice that encourages an ecocultural identity recognising the world as animate and the self as emergent from that animate world’. This is a particularly important moment in history to be sharing narratives that perform and promote ecocultural identities, partly because

the ecological destruction wrought from disconnection is so enormous, and partly because of recent official recognition of the importance of cultural identity in ecological health. A recent report by the IPBES and the IPCC makes the following important point: Food security policies often overlook issues of cultural identities linked to food, dietary diversity and relationships to environmental health. Consequently, these policies may promote agricultural practices that run counter to intrinsic values connected to biodiversity conservation and other relational and instrumental values associated with human health and cultural identity. IPBES-IPCC 2022, p. 33 The term ‘cultural identity’ is used here, but it could equally be ‘ecocultural identity’ since what is being described is an identity which links together humans, the animals and plants they eat, the other species who are impacted by farming them, and the wider environment. I have defined ecocultural identities in terms of a story of belonging to groups that include both human and non-human members. At its heart is ‘connection’, which White eloquently expresses as: What does it mean to feel … deeply connected? Not only to my other human relatives, like the people who I’m in community with, but to feel like I have a connection to my ancestors and … a multitude of relatives, seen and unseen, plant, human, mineral, spiritual that are around me at all times … Who are we in connection to the multitude of beings that allow us to be alive in this moment … that deep storied web of understanding of who we are. White 2022b The story of self that White performs is based on traditional understandings that go back to ancient times. Given that one of the deepest metanarratives in industrial societies is one of progress, which is always oriented as going forwards being positive and going backwards negative, there is a danger of being accused of ‘going back’. White predicts and counters this argument by using the same spatial metaphor of moving forward:

We’re not going back; we’re gathering our ancestral brilliance … to create a confluence with what we hold today … and moving forward. White 2022b This provides an answer to Bayo Akomolafe’s concerns about trying to go back to a romanticized image of the past, and aligns with a sophisticated perspective on time that Akomolafe (2022) describes as follows: It is a deeply modern way of thinking to situate time on a simple linearity and to conveniently locate the Indigenous in an originary puritan past that can be resuscitated by some kind of advocacy, conservationism, preservationism, or reconstructionism. I feel that the Indigenous is melting and moving and traveling and migrating. The ecocultural identities that emerge with the indigenous ‘melting’, ‘moving’, ‘traveling’ and entering into the ‘confluence with what we hold today’ have the potential to overcome the disconnection from the natural world that is so keenly felt by people across the world. Milstein and CastroSotomayor (2020, p. xvii) write of the deep problem of disconnection: We humans are cultural and ecological beings … Yet, perhaps for an increasing majority of us humans, it seems as if our ecological selves have become steadily less accessible. Lack of earthly self-awareness in an increasingly human-centred world is reflected in the invisibility and deniability we assigned to our environmental interlinkages, impacts and interdependencies. David Abram (1996, p. 137) expresses a similar idea as a question: How did Western civilisation become so estranged from non-human nature, so oblivious to the presence of other animals and the earth, that our current lifestyles and activities contribute daily to the destruction of whole ecosystems? Whatever the reasons for estrangement, we can ask another important question: how can we encourage people to reconnect with the natural world and protect and restore ecosystems? Rowen White’s inspirational

performance of ecocultural identity, and her invitation to others to seek their own ecocultural identity is one path towards that.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER FOUR

Emplacing: Timelessness and Placefulness in Haiku One autumn morning around 250 years ago the poet Kaga no Chiyo left her house to draw water from her well. When she arrived, she found that morning glory vines had wound themselves around the well bucket. She reached down to pull them off but felt her hand held back by feelings of tenderness and care for the flowers. So, instead, she visited her neighbours and asked to receive water from them. Later, she wrote a haiku that captured this experience: 朝顔に釣瓶とられて貰い水 asagao ni / tsurube torarete / moraimizu morning glory— the well bucket being entangled I ask for water(Kaga no Chiyo) While my explanatory paragraph above was written as a narrative, the way the haiku is written – a postpositional phrase (asagao ni), followed by a verb phrase (tsurube torarete), then a verbally modified noun (moraimizu) – does not seem to convey a narrative at all. However, the narrative exists ‘between the lines’, a semantic gap between the entanglement of the bucket and asking for water that needs to be filled in by the reader in order to make sense of the haiku. If the reader is familiar with haiku they will know that haiku express

appreciation and respect for the natural world, and this fact will supply the needed information to fill the gap between second and third line with something like ‘in order not to disturb the delicate flower’. The fact that the reader must supply this for themself to understand the haiku brings it all the more powerfully to mind. Other aspects of the narrative are also suggested by the conventions of haiku. For example, although morning glories can bloom for months, the season word or kigo is asagao (morning glory) which is associated with early autumn. And beyond the conventions, the reader is free to use their imagination to fill in other details and events that happened before and afterwards. The narrative is not necessarily ‘in’ the haiku, but through the reader’s imagination and familiarity with the genre the narrative could be described as existing ‘around’ the haiku. If the narrative can be said to exist in this liminal space, it is most certainly an econarrative, bringing vivid images of the natural world to mind and expressing care and respect. But can haiku in general be considered to be econarratives? It is, of course, impossible to generalize about all haiku since haiku exists in so many languages, schools, forms and types. In addition, it is in the nature of art to be creative and break boundaries and conventions. However, it is possible to identify a particular genre of nature haiku stretching back at least as far as Matsuo Bashō in around 1680, and furthered by other Japanese masters such as Issa, Chiyo, Buson and Shiki. This tradition of nature haiku has inspired haiku writing around the world in other languages, and is drawn on heavily in what Allan Burns (2013) calls ‘the nature tradition in English-language haiku’. While keeping many of the conventions of traditional Japanese haiku, the English-language nature tradition has, of necessity due to differences in language and culture, left some behind, and developed new ones. Swede (in Burns 2013, p. 10) identifies three types of haiku. Type one is entirely nature-orientated, with no direct reference to humans or human artifacts. The following is an example: an aging willow— its image unsteady in the flowing stream

(Spiess in Burns 2013, p. 112)

Although not explicitly mentioned in type one haiku, the poet is implicitly present in the scene as observer if the haiku is read as if it were a genuine encounter. In the haiku above, there can be no wavering image of the willow without someone there to view it. Type two explicitly includes elements from both human and more-than-human worlds: summer breeze… we count merganser chicks back to the surface

(Barlow in Barlow and Paul 2008, p. 41)

In this haiku, humans appear in the pronoun ‘we’ and as the Actors of the mental process of counting. The merganser chicks are explicitly mentioned, and although linguistically they are not involved in any process, to make sense of ‘back to the surface’ the reader must fill in the material process of these water birds diving. Type three haiku focus only on the human world. I will therefore talk of the ‘nature tradition’ of haiku to refer to type one haiku, plus any type two haiku where, like the poem above, the focus is primarily on the more-thanhuman world. In this chapter, my focus is on English-language haiku, while acknowledging that many of the conventions are derived from classic Japanese nature haiku. Haiku in the nature tradition are often experiential – describing actual encounters that the poets had in nature in as direct a way as possible. Other poems are imaginative, usually drawing on wider knowledge and experience in nature even if the specifics of the events described in the poem are imagined. Unless they have inside knowledge of the poets, it is unlikely that readers will be able to tell whether a particular haiku is experiential or imaginative. However, readers can read a poem as if it is describing a genuine encounter that the poet had, imagining the poet being right there in the scene, observing and feeling moved by what they see, whatever the realities of the composition. For the purposes of this chapter, I will assume a reader reading in this way, though there are other ways that haiku could be read. The examples in this chapter are drawn from four publications by Snapshot Press, an outstanding specialist publisher of English-language haiku. The publications consist of two anthologies, Where the River Goes:

The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku (Burns 2013) and Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (Barlow and Paul 2008), and two collections, Where Rain Would Stay: The Haiku Poetry of Peggy Willis Lyles (Barlow and Gilli 2022) and The Windbreak Pine: New and Uncollected Haiku 1985– 2015 (Swist 2016). The poets focused on are John Barlow, Peggy Willis Lyles, Marian Olson, Robert Spiess, Wally Swist, Anita Virgil and Ruth Yarrow, selected as outstanding poets who play a key role in forging and maintaining the nature tradition of English-language haiku. I also draw on the Japanese haiku poet Issa occasionally to illustrate some aspects of classical Japanese haiku. The chapter will explore whether nature tradition haiku can be considered to be narratives, analyse prototypical poems in terms of time, events, location and characters, and make some concluding remarks about the place of haiku in the study of econarrative.

Haiku as narrative In this book I have, until now, talked about narrative as a sequence of connected events. However, haiku often describe only one event: snow in the hollows the white-winged raven half-rolls into spring

(Barlow in Burns 2013, p. 314)

Sometimes there are no verbs or processes so there seem to be no events at all: among lily pads across the wind-scoured pond— flowers of etched ice

(Swist 2016, p. 74)

However, in this haiku perhaps there is an implicit event, a moment when the poet, Wally Swist, lifts his eyes to look across the pond, notices the etched ice flowers, and is moved by the experience in some way, so much so that he writes a haiku about it. If we think of it this way then we can imagine this

moment of epiphany as part of sequence of events which include approaching the scene, staying for a while, and then leaving it to later transform the experience into a poem. In addition to the implied narrative of the poet, we can also imagine events that happened within the scene that precede and follow the event being recorded. In the following haiku, the events that follow immediately afterwards are easily imagined: field of geese— in a nearby ditch the coyote paces

(Olson in Burns 2013, p. 216)

The coyote may get his meal or walk away hungry – it is up to the reader to imagine the specificity of future events, but this haiku is very much a moment in an ongoing narrative with a sense of something important about to happen. In the following haiku, preceding events are easily imaginable: this morning too the wren calling its dead mate

calling (Virgil in Burns 2013, p. 134)

The word ‘mate’ presupposes a time in the past when the wren was together with his/her partner; ‘dead’ presupposes an event where the mate died, and ‘too’ presupposes at least one past event where the wren was calling for their mate. From what we know about death, the event that follows is certain – the wren will receive no reply to the calls. While it is rare for haiku to so vividly conjure up preceding and future events, there must always have been events occurring in the scene before and after the moment captured by the poem. While the wren and coyote were in the middle of their own sequence of events, we can imagine the poet approaching the scene, observing it, feeling moved by it, leaving, and then later writing a poem to capture the experience. The haiku, therefore, can be thought of a moment in time where two untold but imaginable narratives (of the poet and the wren or coyote) intersect and are brilliantly illuminated, but just for a second, what Kacian (2009) calls ‘the lightning strike of poetry’. That is not to say that poets engage with their subject for only a moment – it may be a long observation

and interaction, but the haiku itself is a carefully chosen moment within that engagement. The flash of lightning is, in fact, a common theme in haiku: lightning flash— the wind in the trees fills with rain lightning flash… the river’s torrent shifting stones

(Swist in Burns 2013, p. 211)

(Lyles in Barlow and Gilli 2022, p. 136)

But can a ‘flash of lightning’ be a narrative if a key defining aspect of narrative is a sequence of events? In the mathematical definition of ‘sequence’, there can certainly be just one item in a sequence, or even no items – the ‘empty sequence’. Abbott (2008, p. 13) describes how some theorists insist that there are at least two events in a narrative, one happening after the other, and some also insist that the two events are causally related. However, Abbott believes it would be a mistake to restrict narrative in this way since it is the same process of representation that goes on whether in a single event or as multiple events. And indeed, in haiku we find other key aspects of narrative such as characters, location, actions and vivid depiction which allow the reader to vicariously experience the event. In this chapter, I am going to claim that haiku is a special case of narrative, which shares some properties with prototypical narratives, but, also, following Kacian (2009), has some properties that are actively opposed to narrative in its traditional sense. Haiku, I will claim, are both narratives and anti-narratives at the same time, a paradox which sits comfortably with the Zen influence on haiku where paradoxes are a path towards seeing beyond the artificialities and limitations of conceptions rather than simply a sign that something is incorrect.

Haiku and consciousness One of the key functions that a prototypical narrative has is to simplify the complex flux of reality (or the reality of a ‘possible world’ in the case of

fiction and imaginative haiku) into a set of discrete temporally and logically connected events concerning a set of characters in particular locations. This simplifying and reifying function can be seen as the operation of ‘left-brain’ consciousness (McGilchrist 2021). It is well established by science that ‘functional lateralisation is a fundamental principle of the human brain’ (Karolis et al. 2019), that is, the two halves of the brain differ in the functions they perform. Although there are complexities to consider, in general the left hemisphere can be thought of as focusing on logic, rationality, language and manipulation of the world and the right hemisphere ‘paying open, sustained, vigilant attention to the world, in order to understand and relate to the bigger picture’ (McGilchrist 2021). Both forms of consciousness play an essential role in day-to-day functioning, as well as forming part of what it is to be human. However, McGilchrist and many other commentators over the years have expressed the idea that there is an imbalance in modern life between the two sides, with the logical, rational, narrowly focused attention of the left side valued more highly than the more intuitive, all-encompassing, larger-picture consciousness of the right side. Ecologically, this has the effect of human manipulation of the world taking place at an ever-increasing pace based on simplified understandings and goals, unslowed by more careful attention to the bigger picture of what is valuable, what needs protecting and what damage the manipulation is causing. McGilchrist (2021) goes on to state that: I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, everflowing whole. Although McGilchrist (2021) blames the objectivizing ‘mentality of modern western thinking’ which he believes is ‘a hindrance, not help, on the path to truth’, it is not just modern western thinking that has been described as imbalanced. There are traditions going back thousands of years that have been suspicious of the abstraction from direct experience that occurs with

conceptualization and the linguistic reduction of reality. D. T. Suzuki (1970, p. 5) writes, of Zen Buddhism, that: Zen is not necessarily against words, but is well aware of the fact that they are always liable to detach themselves from realities and turn into conceptions. And this conception is what Zen is against. He continues by saying ‘Satori is emancipation … When I am in my isness, thoroughly purged of all intellectual sediments, I have my freedom in its primary sense’ (p. 17). Suzuki describes how some haiku is infused with the spirit of Zen. In their focus on the direct experience of a genuine moment of connection with the natural world and their refusal to adorn the experience with metaphor or symbolism, these haiku are an attempt to present the world as it appears directly to the senses, rather than as mediated by abstract conceptualization. They therefore encourage apprehension of the world using the more holistic and immediate right-hemisphere consciousness.

The present moment The representation of a moment of direct presence and connection with an ‘other’ is achieved through a number of linguistic and semantic means. The first is that nature tradition haiku are almost always written in the present or present continuous tense: sunny hollow— the startled black snake ropes through tall grass

(Swist in Burns 2013, p. 208)

walking into and out of the sound of the brook

(Swist in Burns 2013, p. 206)

Sometimes there is no tense at all because there are no verbs in the haiku, making the poem timeless yet immediate:

morning sun a rainbow of beetle wings in the lucid web

(Lyles in Barlow and Gilli 2022, p. 93)

When there are no verbs, other elements can introduce present temporal aspects to haiku, for example the adverb ‘suddenly’: rising moon suddenly the white owl

(Olson in Burns 2013, p. 217)

In haiku, the plants and animals that are depicted tend to be ordinary ones that the poets come across in their daily life – ones which readers are also likely to come across if they live in a geographically similar region. In Burns’s collection there are occasional mention of animals such as boxturtles, dolphins, hippos, black bears and regionally specific birds which few would have everyday encounters with. However, there are also plentiful haiku about aspects of nature which are accessible across a wide range of locations, such as apple trees, blossoms, blackbirds, buttercups, caterpillars, crows, doves, ferns, flies, frogs, gulls, leaves, mushrooms, pines, snails and stones. There are also haiku about the sun, wind, rain and clouds which are accessible to everyone. These ordinary animals, plants and other aspects of nature are represented as just doing what they would usually be doing, for example: nightfall… a heron’s silhouette lifts from the reeds all day circling the one tree he knows raven fledgling summer stillness: raindrops touch the hill of the red ants

(Barlow in Burns 2013, p. 309)

(Olson in Burns 2013, p. 217)

(Lyles in Barlow and Gilli 2022, p. 83)

sprinkle of spring rain the snail clings to a fallen willow branch

(Swist 2016, p. 30)

In these haiku, the heron (via the shadow), raven, raindrops and snail are Actors of the material processes of lifting, circling, touching and clinging, all actively participating in the world according to their nature. Encounters such as these with everyday nature suggest the poet is being spontaneous rather than deliberately seeking out rare wildlife, which dispenses with ‘plans’ that would stretch beyond the moment. The spontaneity of encounter is described to perfection in the following classic haiku by Issa: 雨落に生へ合せたり草の花 amaochi ni / hae awasetari / kusa no hana in the rain gutter too wildflowers have sprouted

(Issa in Lanoue 2022)

Of key importance is the tendency for nature tradition haiku to avoid overt metaphor and symbolism. As Virgil (1997, p. 145) puts it: In haiku, things are not like other things: they are simply themselves. Cat is cat. Cold is cold. A pine is a pine … This is what constitutes the absolute shock of pure imagery within the finest haiku. While it is possible to find metaphorical haiku, there is an expectation that in the absence of particular textual cues, all characters and locations stand only for themselves, and not metaphorically for others. Stryk (1985, p. 12) describes the ideal of a poet who ‘presents an observation of a natural, often commonplace event, in plainest diction, without verbal trickery’. Ō oka (1997, p. 103) similarly describes how in the ideal haiku, nothing is contrived – that with each word only having one meaning, there is no need to seek hidden references. Unless carefully constructed, references to other times and other places embedded in the haiku could pull attention away from the present moment.

Another form of anchoring in the moment is the use of sense images – descriptions of what is being sensed through sight, smell, touch and taste rather than an objective description of what is there (e.g., ‘I saw three black shapes against the horizon’ versus ‘There were three birds’). In Anton Chekhov’s famous dictum ‘Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass’, the glint of light is a sense image. Sense images are always momentary because of the transient way that the external world makes us aware of itself through our senses. The following are examples of sense images of sight, sound, smell: light up under the gull’s wing: sunrise

(Yarrow in Burns 2013, p. 176)

filtered through pines the pygmy owl’s staccato— flecks of moonlight

(Yarrow in Burns 2013, p. 178)

nothing to separate the hill from its mist… oystercatcher calls

(Barlow in Burns 2013, p. 312)

the scent of rain as the tree frogs start first star river fog… the sound of geese coming in from the sea

(Lyles in Barlow and Gilli 2022, p. 37)

(Barlow in Barlow and Paul 2008, p. 24)

These place the reader in the perspective of someone who is in the scene, lifting their eyes to catch the light glancing off the gull’s wing, turning their ears to the sounds of birds or smelling the rain. The onomatopoeia of ‘staccato’ helps the sounds of the owl to echo in the reader’s mind. In contrast, objective descriptions such as ‘there are gulls’, ‘there is an owl’, ‘it is raining’, only provide facts rather than this image of direct experience.

With a sense image, facts are also conveyed, but often require some inference on behalf of the reader. In the expression ‘the sound of geese / coming in from the sea’, both the sound and the geese are coming towards the observer, who, as indicated by ‘river fog’, is on the land. This shows (rather than tells) the fact that this is the arrival of migrating geese. In combination with seasonal references, sense images allow a great deal of information, including facts, sensuous experience, and emotions to be packed into just a few words. Linguistically, the expression ‘the sound of geese’ places ‘geese’ as the modifier within a noun phrase, a subordinate place to sound which is at the head of the noun phrase. The theme (in Halliday’s sense of the ‘point of departure’) of the first haiku above is the light, with the gull appearing only as a modifier wrapped in a noun phrase. The rain, pygmy owl and oystercatcher are equally just modifiers (of ‘scent’, ‘staccato’ and ‘calls’, respectively). This subordination of the phenomena of nature to the senses of the poet can be seen not as anthropocentric but rather as a technique to place the poet (and vicariously the reader) within the scene, experiencing it for themselves. Together, the present tense, the spontaneous encounter, the sense images and the lack of metaphor come together to present a moment in time, unhindered by abstract concepts, ideas of the past, the future, or distant places.

Timelessness While haiku are nearly always in the present tense, if they are referring to genuine encounters then the actual event is something that happened in the past, written sometime after the event itself. However, the event is relived as present in the imagination of the reader while reading, so haiku take a past event and open it up to being relived time and time again in the future. This can be thought of as the timelessness of haiku, an immediate and present fleeting moment captured and able to be relived again and again at any time in the future. As Barnhill (2007) describes, for experiential haiku:

It has been called the ‘haiku moment,’ an intense focus on the moment at hand. The haiku poet enters into a total absorption in the present as a boundless temporal space, which Zen has termed the Absolute Now. Events described in haiku have duration, from a short lightning flash to a raven fledgling ‘circling all day’ (in Olson’s haiku above), but what is timeless is the moment of realization, of epiphany, and the single-minded focus on one event happening right now rather than events that came in the past or future. That is not to say that the sense of past and future is entirely missing from haiku – indeed haiku often celebrate aspects of nature precisely because they are fleeting, and in the near future will be gone. This is illustrated in the following haiku from Issa, which is rooted in the present but actively considers the future: さく花や此世住居も今少し saku hana ya / kono yo-zumai mo / ima sukoshi cherry blossoms— residents of this world, too a short time

(Issa in Lanoue 2022)

The phrase ima sukoshi can be translated as ‘now a little bit’ where ‘now’ represents the present moment and ‘a little bit’ represents the (short) future. The word mo (too) shows humans and cherry blossoms as identical along the plane of having a precious but transient existence. The following haiku also captures the transience of life: so few feathers left it barely has a name the melting snow

(Barlow in Burns 2013, p. 315)

This also takes place in the present moment, but there are implicit echoes of the past, a time when this was a bird, with a name, alive and leading a life. Another temporal dimension concerns how ‘all haiku are essentially in conversation with all haiku that have gone before, and all haiku that will follow, not least through factors such as seasonality’ (Barlow, personal

communication). Seasonality itself contains within it elements of the past and future – the first flowers of spring bring memories of the cold winter, and the last leaves falling from trees in autumn are signs of the winter to come. Barnhill (2007) resolves the seeming paradox of being in the present moment while being keenly aware of what the seasons have brought and will bring: I believe that one can experience the moment as a moment in a seasonal cycle, one can experience all things as … precious because all is precarious, and still be wholly focused on the present. Terms such as ‘haiku moment’ and ‘Absolute Now’, I suggest, are fundamentally code words for: a complete immersion in the present without concern or attachment toward the past or future, but also with a sense that everything is fleeting, that this moment will never come again, and thus that the present has unqualified value. Timelessness, then, is different from eternity and different from a moment – it is a moment capable of being relived forever, the background awareness of what comes before and after accentuating rather than distracting from the focus on the present.

Placefulness Haiku poet and scholar Jim Kacian describes how haiku ‘surrenders one dimension (time) to gain another (depth)’. However, haiku could equally be seen as compressing the dimension of time in order to give prominence to place. In this view, the two key dimensions of haiku could be considered to be timelessness and placefulness. Langhone (2018) describes placefulness as an active practice rather than simply being in a place: ‘Placefulness can be described as an embodied and mindful practice to engage deeply with place’. I am using the term place here to mean a physical location that someone finds themself in, but much more than that. Included in place are everyone and everything else physically present in that location at that moment. And in the spirit of interconnectedness, the ‘someone’ experiencing the place can be considered part of the place too since they are there in exactly the same

way as the sparrow or morning glory they are interacting with. The ‘someone’ is the poet (if the haiku records a genuine encounter), but also the sparrow who is equally experiencing place, a place which happens to have a watching human in it. And through reading the haiku, the reader vicariously experiences being in and part of the place. I am therefore using place in a much more experiential and multi-perspectival sense than just a ‘location’. Places are conjured most directly in haiku through mention of the physical features of the terrain (a ridge, marsh or field), the weather (wind, rain or snow), and specific plants and animals getting on with their own lives in the foreground or background. They are also brought to mind through sense images of these aspects of nature, as discussed above. Barlow (in Barlow and Paul 2008, p. 215) describes how the name of a particular species that the reader is familiar with can provide rich additional details about the physical location. He gives the example of the (whitethroated) dipper, which, unless affected by adverse weather: is found along clean, shallow watercourses strewn with exposed boulders for the bird to perch on – usually those that flow quickly through wooded upland. Regardless of season, the mere mention of the bird can evoke multi-sensory images: the sound of the tumbling water; the smell of the riparian woodland; the glint of the river or stream as the light filtering through the trees plays on its surface. The season word (kigo), while being a temporal indicator to show where in the cycle of seasons the event is taking place, also acts as a marker of placefulness, bringing to mind the sights, smells and sounds we know are likely to be present in place at that specific time of year. In Japanese haiku, there are literary associations between animals, plants and particular seasons which have been established over hundreds of years of tradition. In English haiku, kigo can include explicit words describing the season, words that mention migratory birds who appear at a particular time of year, the blooming of particular flowers, words describing the temperature, the emergence of animals who remain hidden for much of the year, the quality of light, or distinctive seasonal sounds and smells. The following examples illustrate an explicit season, spring, in the first example, and an implicit season, early autumn, in the second:

spring drizzle: rounding the thorn a drop of light

(Yarrow in Burns 2013, p. 175)

first cool evening— between the cricket chirps the longer silence

(Yarrow in Burns 2013, p. 174)

Although there are fewer examples in English-language haiku, there are many Japanese haiku that refer to specific places that are famous for their beauty. For example, Matsushima which brings to mind countless pineforested islands, or Kyoto and Nara, which evoke exquisite ancient temples: 松島の松に生れて小すみ哉 matsushima no / matsu ni umarete / kosumi kana born in the pines of Matsushima… this little nook

(Issa in Lanoue 2022)

鹿の子の跡から奈良の烏哉 shika no ko / no ato kara / nara no karasu kana following behind the fawn a crow of Nara

(Issa in Lanoue 2022)

Within place, it is possible to trace the relative positions of figure, ground and background (Giovanelli and Harrison 2018, p. 45). The positioning is achieved through grammatical means as well as through underlying semantic knowledge. disappearing into the beaver pond’s dark water falling snow

(Swist in Burns 2013, p. 210)

In the haiku above, snow is the figure because, grammatically, it is the Actor of the processes of falling and of disappearing. The water exists only as part

of a prepositional phrase, and does not take part in any processes, so is clearly the ground. There is also the beaver, who is faintly present in the background through our knowledge of the role of beavers in damming rivers to create ponds. crumpled iris from the marsh a crane unfolds

(Lyles in Burns 2013, p. 167)

In the above haiku, the iris starts as the figure by being placed as the theme of the haiku, with the marsh, as head of a prepositional phrase, being the ground. But then the crane suddenly appears. Because the crane is the Actor of the material process of unfolding, it becomes the figure, pushing the iris into the ground both literally and metaphorically. Placing animals and plants as figure is a way of giving them salience – conveying a story that they are important and worthy of attention. When these animals and plants are not only represented as figures but also as activated participants, doing, saying or thinking things, then this gives them extra salience, potentially absorbing the reader into the occurrences and life of the place. The following haiku represent a fox, kingfisher and fern actively, as Actors of material processes: first snow on the wheat stubble— the young fox pounces

(Barlow in Burns 2013, p. 309)

kingfisher plucking silver from the dark lagoon

(Lyles in Burns 2013, p. 166)

pause in the thrasher’s song a fern uncurls

(Lyles in Burns 2013, p. 168)

In the prototypical nature tradition haiku, there is no metaphor or symbolism which could rip the reader’s attention away from place, conjuring up a

different place that the haiku is metaphorically gesturing towards. There are also no references to places other than the one that the poet is standing in, sitting in, or crouching down in. With the mind clear, attention can focus on place and experience it directly as it is – the Buddhist ideal of suchness (tathata), or sonomama in Japanese. Suzuki (1970, p. 17) explains that: When the mind … free from intellectual complexities and moralistic attachments of every description, surveys the world of the senses in all its multiplicities, it discovers all sorts of values hitherto hidden from sight… Through attempting to represent the world sonomama (as it is), haiku avoids some of the artifice and simplifying tendencies of narrative. As Bashō explains, ‘however well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural – if the object and yourself are separate – then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit’ (Bashō 2005, p. 33). This brings us to the paradox of haiku: the attempt to allow the world to reveal itself without distortion through the poem, while the poem itself is constrained and contrived. In Japanese, prototypical haiku contain 5-7-5 phonemic units (on) with many rules about kire (cutting words), kigo (season words), etc. There is more freedom of form in English-language haiku, but it is still an obviously constrained art form. Rigby has an intriguing way of resolving this paradox: How then does the work of art ‘save’ the earth by disclosing it as unsayable? It does so, I would suggest, precisely to the extent that it draws attention to its own status as text and hence as a mode of enframing. In this sense, the literary text saves the earth by disclosing the nonequation of word and thing, poem and place. It may do so in a variety of ways [including] qualities that declare them to be artifacts, carefully crafted works of poietic techne … Only to the extent that the work of art is selfcancelling, acknowledging in some way its inevitable failure to adequately mediate the voice of nature, can it point us to that which lies beyond its own enframing. Rigby 2004, p. 437 In other words, the haiku are describing experiences with frogs, bees, sparrow and deer but the contrivance of their form calls out to the reader that

this is a mere representation, done as authentically as possible, but only representation, and that the reader should go out and experience the rich true reality for themself. The same applies to Japanese art which represents bamboo, a bird, a fish through just a few roughly drawn strokes of a brush rather than a full and realistic depiction. It is both representing something of profound beauty and calling attention to the fact that it is a mere representation.

The value of haiku In an age of unbelievable destruction, as ecosystems, cultures and lives are being eradicated, the question arises of whether there is any value in a poem about flowers entangling a bucket, a frog leaping into a pond, wildflowers sprouting in a gutter, or a nightingale drenched by rain. Val Plumwood (2008) argues that ‘ecological thought has to be much more than a literary rhapsody about nice places, or about nice times (epiphanies) in nice places’. She argues that it must bring awareness to shadow lands, the places where the environment is ruined to produce the products used in the ‘nice places’. Spahr (2011, p. 69) is ‘suspicious of nature poetry because even when it got the birds and plants and the animals right it tended to show the beautiful bird but not the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat’ (p. 69). Shoptaw (2016) writes that if a ‘nature poem leaves its reader in still contemplation of Mother Nature’s creatures, it risks being complacent’. He argues that ecopoetry needs to be both environmental and environmentalist. Haiku in the nature tradition very rarely mention the causes or effects of environmental destruction. More common is the promotion of compassion towards the natural world, for example in the following haiku: whipping wind a starling drinks from pavement cracks dusk fading— a pheasant drags its broken wing into taller grass

(Barlow in Barlow and Paul 2008, p. 189)

(Swist 2016, p. 22)

All fear gone in its soft dark eye dying cottontail

(Olson in Burns 2013, p. 220)

A spring breeze rises— breast feathers ruffle on the dead sparrow

(Spiess in Burns 2013, p. 109)

a tree with heart rot— its one living branch laden with ripened wild plum

(Spiess in Burns 2013, p. 109)

These haiku kindle compassion through representing hard circumstances (the alliterative ‘whipping wind’), injury, dying, death, or a combination of life and death. In the sparrow haiku by Spiess, the sparrow is dead but the feathers being ruffled by the breeze are a small sign of movement that recalls the life it once had. In a similar way, the exuberant life of the one living branch of the rotten tree highlights the poignancy of the death of the rest. The haiku about the cottontail places the reader in the position of looking into the eye of the dying rabbit. Haiku which encourage us to notice and feel compassion for ordinary animals and plants around us play a potentially important role in kindling care for all parts of the ecosystems that life depends on, rather than just the charismatic mega-fauna that appear in nature documentaries. In addition to arousing compassion for ordinary and often overlooked animals, plants and aspects of the physical environment, haiku potentially have another important role, in combating what Michael McCarthy (2020) calls ‘the invisibility of nature’. McCarthy describes how with the advent of farming, then settlements, then towns, then cities, ‘nature is not only forgotten but increasingly invisible’. It is both disappearing physically as numbers of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles drop dramatically, as well as mentally as we become absorbed in screens, cars and covered

shopping centres. This has a serious impact on wellbeing since our bodies evolved in an environment teeming with life and we are adapted only for that environment. McCarthy (2020) points to research which shows the clear connection between experience of nature and both physical and mental health. But more than that, he describes how our genetic adaption to a living environment is ‘the key to who we are’. The coronavirus pandemic, while having horrific consequences around the world, also ‘made the natural world visible again, and led people to look upon it, and reflect’. He sums up his ideas with the words: Those who have sought it have not been disappointed in the natural world, in its ability to console us, repair us, and recharge us; most of all, in its ability simply to be there, often unrecognized and unacknowledged, but giving life to every one of us, even as human artifacts are crumbling all around. The nature writer Kathleen Jamie makes a similar point: We’re equipped with these senses that have come with us through millions of years of evolution, and to stop for a moment and use them to notice a blade of grass or a cobweb in the window, means we’re saying ‘Stop. Everybody shut up for a minute, including myself, stop telling me what to think, what to believe in.’ Maybe a radical noticing could be part of our solution. If you’re stopping to notice, you’re not actually trashing [the planet]. Jamie in Brooks 2021 Elsewhere, Jamie continues with the idea of the radical power of noticing: ‘When we step outside and look up, we’re not little cogs in the capitalist machine. It’s the simplest act of resistance and renewal’ (Jamie in Crown 2012). Haiku can only work to reconnect readers with nature if they apply the perspective of attentive care modelled by the haiku poet to their own experience in nature beyond the reading of the poem. If, inspired by haiku, they perform ‘radical noticing’, then this can only be an act of resistance if it is accompanied by a simultaneous disentanglement (to at least some degree) from the consumerist, life-denying tendrils of transnational capitalism. This

partly depends on how well haiku resonate with particular readers, but also on how the act of reading haiku is framed, for example, in courses that use haiku as a path towards environmental awareness (Jacobs 2001, Gilmour et al. 2022). Gilmour et al. (2022), for example, use haiku in secondary education in Japan with the intention that ‘students gain insights into the power of language to construct meaning, create values, nurture relationships, influence actions, and understand how language choices are significant for agency to create personal, social and environmental wellbeing’. A final, but vital, point is that access to natural spaces is highly unequal. If haiku can point towards reconnection with nature, and that reconnection can bring health, wellbeing, and self-actualization, then, as McCarthy (2020) demands, access to natural spaces should be a fundamental human right.

Conclusion In my previous work on haiku (Stibbe 2012, pp. 145–165, 2021, pp. 94–97), I described how the linguistic devices in Japanese haiku can encourage appreciation of and respect for the ordinary nature that surrounds readers in their everyday lives. In this chapter, I have looked primarily at English haiku, and considered their use of narrative to take the reader out of time and into place. However, Kacian (2009) believes that the focus on the present moment makes haiku not just different from narrative or story, but actively anti-story. By anti-story, he means that haiku resist the simplification of experience into discrete events with discrete characters and logical connections between events. There is, however, much that haiku shares with narrative, in particular the characters, the locations, the events (albeit often only one), and the attention to detail which pulls the reader into experiencing the event vicariously. Implicit in haiku (if read as a genuine encounter) is the larger narrative of the poet coming to the place, engaging with it in a momentary flash of insight, and then leaving the place moved by the experience. And there is also the untold narrative of the place, where there must have been preceding events and will undoubtedly be subsequent events. Ultimately, whether haiku is considered narrative or not depends on the narratological theory being applied. If, like Abbott (2008, p. 16), the theory

includes single events, then yes, haiku is narrative; but if the theory insists on more than one event then it is not. A more interesting question is whether it is useful in a pragmatic sense to bring haiku into the fold of the topic of this book, econarrative. The fact that there is a chapter on haiku here illustrates that I do believe it useful to classify haiku this way, even if haiku are nonprototypical econarratives where the temporal dimension has been reduced to a moment and the focus is on place. However, at the same time, Kacian’s view of haiku as anti-story, anti-narrative, also seems to capture something essential about the workings and intentions of nature tradition haiku. In the end, it appears that narrative aspects and anti-narrative aspects combine together to give haiku its potential to inspire people to reconnect with the natural world around them. Bate (2000, p. 283) claims that ‘if mortals dwell in that they save the earth and if poetry is the original admission of dwelling, then poetry is the place where we save the earth’. Rigby (2001, p. 19) counters this, however, by writing: What are poets for? I too would like to believe that poets can in some measure help us to ‘save the Earth.’ However, they will only be able to do so if we are prepared to look up and listen when they urge us to lift our eyes from the page. Certainly, the power of haiku depends on whether the reader applies the attentive and caring perspective of the poet to their own encounters with nature and discovers for themself moments of deep absorption in place. If they do, then they may gain health, wellbeing, self-actualization, a sense of the preciousness of all life, and hopefully be inspired to protect the ecosystems that life depends on.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER FIVE

Enchanting: Wonder in Nature Writing There is a scene in the Japanese animated film Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro) that is a good illustration of the experience of enchantment. In this film, two girls and their father move to the countryside to be near their mother who is being treated in a nearby hospital. The scene in question occurs when the girls cross a small bridge on the way to their new home. Halfway across, they stop and look down at the stream. The shot then changes to some small fish which glint in the sunlight, then back to the girls who show delight in their faces. The dialogue is simple. The older girl, Satsuki, says さかな！ほらまたひかった (Fish, look, they shone again). This models to a young (and older) audience how to find joy and enchantment through direct connection with ordinary nature, as opposed to the distractions of video games or theme parks which promise so much in terms of enchantment but offer so little. The director, Miyazaki Hayao, makes the following comment about the film: In my grandparents’ time, it was believed that spirits [Kami] existed everywhere – in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything. My generation does not believe this, but I like the idea that we … should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything. Miyazaki in Boyd and Nishimura 2004, p. 16

When this scene was dubbed into English by Fox Studios, there was a significant change to the wording. Instead of さかな！ほらまたひかった (Fish, look, they shone again), the younger girl, Mei, is made to ask ‘What are those little things swimming around?’ and Satsuki answers ‘I don’t know. Goldfish maybe or something’. This is something quite different from the enchantment of the original, and closer to scientific intellectualization which seeks to categorize what appears to the senses. On the other hand, as Curry (2019, p. 89) points out, ‘enchantment obviates the need for any questions’. The loss of belief in Kami follows similar trends in belief across the Western(ized) world that occurred following the enlightenment and industrialization. Weber gave a famous lecture, Science as Vocation, in 1918 in which he stated: Thus the growing process of intellectualization and rationalization does not imply a growing understanding of the conditions under which we live. It means something quite different. It is the knowledge or the conviction that if only we wished to understand them we could do so at any time. It means that in principle, then, we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable forces but that, on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment of the world. Unlike the savage for whom such forces existed, we need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control the spirits or pray to them. Instead, technology and calculation achieve our ends. This is the primary meaning of the process of intellectualization. Weber 1918, p. 12 emphasis added Weber associates the reductionism of scientific intellectualization with the disenchantment of the world. There has been a great deal of discussion and debate since he made these remarks (Cascardi 1992, Mishima 2020), and enchantment and disenchantment have been defined in many different ways. For the purposes of this book, however, I have created a simplified description (in Table 5.1) of how I use the term ‘enchantment’ and related terms in this book, with full awareness that there is far more to these concepts than can be summarized in a single sentence.

A disenchanted perspective sees the world in terms of objects, machines, resources, assemblages of parts, measurements, and quantities of stuff rather than qualities of being. Abstraction away from the particularities of life can be enormously powerful in scientific discovery, but the ends we use those discoveries for will ultimately depend on our broader engagement with the world.

TABLE 5.1 Enchantment terminology used in this book Enchantment

A feeling, experience or realization that another being or place is magnificent, divine, sacred, ethereal, exquisite, magical, or sublime.

Transcendent enchantment

Enchantment based on gods, fairies, spirits or other supernatural phenomena which are seen as existing on a separate plane from the ordinary reality of the world.

Immanent enchantment

Enchantment based on direct experience with other humans, other species, the physical landscape or human artifacts. Any sense of sacredness or divinity lies within the beings or objects themselves rather than in a separate plane.

Disenchantment A view of the world as consisting of material objects which interact with each other as the result of predictable (or potentially predictable) mechanical laws that govern matter, energy, space and time.

While Weber saw the transcendent enchantment as being superseded by the disenchantment of science, a re-enchantment of the world does not necessarily imply a return to transcendent enchantment. Instead, it is possible to overcome the limitations of mechanistic reductionism and become re-enchanted with the human and more-than-human world as it is. My reason for focusing on this kind of enchantment is because I believe it can provide what Rachel Carson (1965) described in The Sense of Wonder as: [a gift to children of] a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. Unlike Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy which children may be enchanted by for a while until they go through the ritual disenchantment of being told

they are just inventions, a sense of enchantment with the natural world could be indestructible. Despite ecological destruction, some aspects of the natural world will remain, and will remain enchanting for those who are open to connecting with them. Religious texts, spiritual texts, myths, legends and stories which describe or invoke transcendent enchantment can reorient people to actual places and the natural world and encourage respect for them. Nanson (2011, p. 120) describes how ‘the meeting of my knowledge of myths and legends with my direct experience of the places where these stories are set produced a heightened – ‘enchanted’ – perception of both the places and the stories’. In this way, place-based myths can evoke both transcendent enchantment in taking the listener to other worlds, as well as immanent enchantment with their immediate surroundings. Transcendent enchantment has an important role to play in ecological awareness, but my focus in this chapter is on texts which describe or evoke immanent enchantment by celebrating the ordinary, natural world around us in as direct a way as possible. There is often a hierarchical distinction made between the sacred and profane; the spiritual and the material; the sublime and the mundane; the heavenly and the earthly; the supernatural and the natural. The experience of immanent enchantment involves finding joy in the profane, the material, the mundane, the earthly, or the natural – perhaps having a sense of them being sacred, divine or sublime, but entirely in themselves for what and who they are. As Curry (2021, p. 12) puts it, ‘Why, then, the tendentious requirement for something higher (“super”) to be added the lives of embodied beings in the more-than-human world in order for enchantment to take place?’ If texts describe the experience of finding enchantment in the ordinary natural world then this could allow readers to experience enchantment vicariously while reading, and perhaps encourage them to seek out similar experiences for themselves. The key question is: what narratological and linguistic features convey enchanted encounters with nature? As Willmott (2018, p. 9) describes, ‘many acts of literature are machines for wonder, and I think we need to understand, admire, and teach how they work’.

The language of disenchantment Any attempt to use language to re-enchant the world does so within the context of prevailing discourses of disenchantment. These discourses must be resisted, and life-affirming alternatives found to their reductionist abstractions and techno-economical framings. I will therefore begin with a brief discussion of the language of disenchantment, in order to make the working of enchanting language more visible through comparison. Curry (2019, p. 91) is scathing about one particular form of linguistic disenchantment: High theory, violently abstracting, conspires with low profit-motive to bring about the disenchantment of the world. Living nature and its myriad qualities are turned into mere quantitative stuff to be measured, carved up and sold off, which is justified by ‘ecosystem services’, ‘natural capital’ and other euphemisms for exploiting and enslaving. The kind of language that Curry has in mind is evident in ecosystem assessment reports, such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA 2005), and the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA 2011). I have previously analysed these reports in terms of erasure, looking at how they fail to represent the natural world, or represent it in the background or in a distorted way (Stibbe 2014). However, the language of the reports can equally be seen as disenchanting, or conducive to disenchantment, and I will briefly sketch some of the features which contribute to this. The first feature is a move away from concretely imaginable plants and animals – a nightingale, otter or fox – to superordinate categories such as mammals, amphibians, species, flora and organisms. Even more abstract are composite terms that combine two or more abstractions, including ecosystems, biodiversity, components of biodiversity, assemblages of species, or ecological complexes. It is hard to imagine being enchanted by an ‘assemblage’. At least these superordinate terms are within the natural world, however, unlike terrestrial, marine and freshwater resources, commodities, provisioning services, or ecosystem assets which turn animals and plants into human possessions. Another form of disenchanting language is when animals and plants are not represented as individuals who can be

counted (and therefore ‘count’) but become instead mass nouns such as biomass or timber, measured in mere tonnages of stuff. Another form of disenchanting language is when animals and plants are reduced to the function that they perform in expressions such as pollinators, primary producers, or dispersers. There is also a sense of disenchantment when the more-than-human world is represented as inert through a lack of activation. In ecosystem assessment reports, animals, plants, forests and rivers are rarely represented as doing, thinking, sensing, communicating or any processes which hint that they are beings who are living their own lives for their own purposes. Of course, ecosystem assessment reports are not narratives – they lack specific characters, locations, events or logical connections between events. This reduces their power to vicariously bring readers into places and find enchantment there. There is no narrator, or any kind of character who is engaged with the ecosystems that are being described. The ‘repertoire of empiricism’ (Potter 1996) is used to remove any hint of fallible human involvement in the process. For example, in the expression ‘Model results suggest that land degradation leads to a substantial reduction in water recycling’ (MEA 2005, p. 91) the ‘model’ is the subject of ‘suggesting’ rather than any human interpreter. The observers vanish in passive sentences, for example ‘multicriteria analysis was designed primarily to accommodate optimization across multiple objectives’ (MEA 2005, p. 100, my emphasis). In this way, the explorers of the natural world vanish, and what they discover through their sensuous experience of the world is erased through abstraction. In The Re-enchantment of the World, Morris Berman writes that: Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and thus not really a part of the world around me. The logical end point of this worldview is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not me; and I am ultimately an object too, am an ‘alien’ thing in a world of other, equally meaningless things. Berman 1981, p. 17

A critique of the reductionism and economism in scientific endeavours should not be read as anti-science or anti-rational, however, a stance which opens the door to a vast range of egotistical New Age spiritualities, conspiracy theories and pseudo-science (Bookchin 1995). Instead, scientific consciousness and rationality can be seen as having a key role to play in addressing ecological issues, but so do more personally engaged and enchanted ways of being in the world, ones which are often dismissed and sidelined in modern societies. If science and technology are tools, enchantment with the natural world can be the hand that guides those tools, ensuring that they are used to protect rather than destroy the natural world. Rachel Carson is a perfect example of a scientist who remained enchanted with the natural world, and this enchantment led her to use science to protect it (Carson 1965, 2000).

Investigating the language of enchantment From this brief exploration of the language of disenchantment we can see that at a minimum, the language of enchantment would represent animals and plants with high activation, as count nouns, as concretely as possible, as beings in their own right rather than resources or human possessions, and would represent humans as engaged in relationship with them rather than being detached and objective observers. However, there is much more to the language of enchantment than this. To explore how language can be used to enchant the natural world, I will start by sketching some characteristics of immanent enchantment, and then look at how linguistic and narratological features in the texts can describe and evoke these aspects of enchantment. The following list of characteristics synthesizes and adapts some of the perspectives expressed in two book-length discussions of wonder and enchantment: Glenn Willimott’s Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment (Willmott 2018), and Patrick Curry’s Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life (Curry 2019). Immanent enchantment can be described as an event which involves some or all of the following:

•

A ‘self’ who is experiencing enchantment and an ‘other’ that they are enchanted by: ‘Enchantment … is nothing if not a relationship between two subjects’. (Curry 2019, p. 10)

•

A sense of the self expanding, merging with the other, or an oceanic feeling of transcending the narrow confines of the self. A ‘union whereby the experiencing subject, being extinguished, vanishes’. (Curry 2019, p. 10)

•

An aesthetic appreciation of the ‘other’: ‘Wonder … is anchored, arrested by certain objects beheld by the senses or imagination standing out in some way as aesthetically seductive or evocative. (Willmott 2018, p. 18)

•

An attitude of non-possessive generosity, care, and love towards the other: ‘True enchantment seeks only the continued existence and wellbeing of the beloved other person, place, artefact or whatever’. (Curry 2019, p. 10)

•

A suspension or reduction of analytic thinking: ‘To be wonder struck is to arrest thought, to yield oneself, a kind of immersion’. (Willmott 2018, p. 7)

•

Purposelessness: a lack of goal-directed behaviour, planning or instrumental objectives. (Willmott 2018, p. 8)

•

A change in perception of time and place: Enchantment is ‘actually much bigger on the (enchanted) side … By the same token, time stops. Or at least, goes very, very slowly’. (Curry 2019, p. 9)

•

An ethical transformation (as part of a wider process): ‘enchantment can reveal profound truths, lead to deep values, and become central to a life well-lived’. (Curry 2019, p. 8)

While there are more features that could be pointed out, this list provides a useful starting point for exploring the language of immanent enchantment.

Nightwalk: A Journey to the heart of nature The text I will analyse in a search for linguistic ways of evoking the features of enchantment is Chris Yates’s Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature. My reason for choosing it among countless examples of enchanting writing is that it uses language in ways that demonstrate so many of the characteristics of immanent enchantment in a straightforward, accessible and authentic way. The book itself is exactly what its title says it is – it is a non-fiction walk at night by the author in which he journeys from twilight to dawn and is enchanted by chance encounters with nocturnal nature along the way. The genre of the book is New Nature Writing, a genre which eschews sublime encounters with spectacular nature in distant places and instead (among other things) opens up paths to reconnect with more mundane and overlooked local nature in the UK. New Nature Writers have explored nature in urban settings, in ‘edgelands’ such as industrial estates, railway sidings, and container ports, and featured the magnificence of unloved animals such as pigeons, starlings, rats, or crows (Lilley 2017, p. 4). In the case of Nightwalk, Yates opens up the possibility to experience, enjoy and find wellbeing and value in local nature during hours that would otherwise be spent indoors under artificial lighting. As Stubbs (2019, p. 11) describes: Nocturnal … writing can also allow modern writers to address Said’s call for a more engaged rendering of place, by focusing on the night and exploring who lives there, what it looks like, how it differs from the day time, and that it is not a place to be feared, but a manifest new half of our lives, our cities and our neighbours to discover. In the following sections I will explore the narratological and linguistic features that Yates employs to describe and vicariously evoke enchantment with the natural world in general, and specifically at night.

FIGURE 5.1 Cover of Nightwalk by Chris Yates, reproduced with permission from HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © (2014) Chris Yates

Purposelessness The narrative structure of Nightwalk is based around the extremely common scaffold of a journey. It is, almost, a Hero’s Journey of the form that Joseph Campbell so famously and influentially described: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. Campbell 1949, p. 23 The overall narrative structure is very straightforward. There is the preparation for the journey, the departure from home, numerous events in which Yates encounters the living and physical world around him, and

finally, the return home. There are also micronarratives embedded in the overall narrative structure – anecdotes from when Yates was a child, when he was raising his own children, and when as an adult he explored the natural world on other occasions. Putting aside the micronarratives for a moment, there is a very literal venturing forth from the ‘common day’ (as Campbell put it) to the night-time world; there is plenty of ‘supernatural wonder’ (of a kind) as I will discuss; there is a homecoming, and perhaps the ‘boons for his fellow man’ could be a sharing of the enchantment of the night for others to discover. What is missing, however, is the ‘decisive victory’, or more generally, any kind of goal-directed, purposeful activity or accomplishment. It is therefore a form of Hero’s Journey, but there are some key differences. In terms of the narrative text, the first event ‘preparation for the journey’ is written in the present tense, making it immediate, with the future used in anticipation of the upcoming venture: As I write this … I am sitting by a window … in about an hour, both trees will stand black and formless against the twilight … and only then, when the world landscape is in silhouette, will I set out … to walk across the narrow midsummer night until the sun reappears in the morning. Yates 2012, p. 4 The preparation itself appears to consist merely of drinking tea and waiting for the sun to set. Later on we find that Yates has packed a flapjack, crisps and banana, but has not gone to the trouble of preparing a sandwich. This lack of preparation adds to the sense that this is not an epic journey, but instead ‘the nocturnal stroll is a more random event’ (p. 4). The word ‘stroll’ has connotations of purposelessness and the departure, when it does occur, is undramatic: It was almost ten thirty by the kitchen clock when I stepped out into the shadowy garden. Yates 2012, p. 19 From this sentence, the book changes to the past tense, as is common in storytelling. The events that follow, encounters with the more-than-human

world, occur in a strictly linear order from sunset to sunrise, aside from the embedded micronarratives, as Yates walks directionless in the natural world beyond his house. While strongly sequenced, the events miss the kind of logical connections between them that would construct a larger plot. For example: Instead of climbing the slope behind the house I followed a path along the foot of it until the trees gave way to steep open pasture. Yates 2012, p. 23 Neither in this sentence nor the surrounding ones is there an explanation of the decision to follow one path rather than another. There is no ultimate objective to guide the choices made. Yates also makes this purposelessness explicit:

•

The only concern I have about progressing towards an objective as if I am late to see the sunrise from a favourite vantage point. (Yates 2012, p. 31)

•

I rarely have … fixed intentions, the walk itself being a fairly random exercise and the observation of wildlife no more than a chance event. (Yates 2012, p. 159)

The replacement of ‘objectives’ and ‘intentions’ with ‘chance’ and ‘random’ links to a key aspect of enchantment: the fact that it can never be deliberately planned for – it just arises spontaneously. As Curry (2019, p. 15) puts it, ‘For enchantment is wild and unbiddable … So it can be invited but never commanded’. Making plans and establishing objectives are exactly the kind of systematic rational thinking that takes a back seat in enchantment experiences. Finally, the ‘homecoming’, which can be a dramatic and triumphant event at the end of a fantasy Hero’s Journey, is instead as understated and uneventful as it could possibly be: I came down the final slope, where the trees overhang my house, walked through the small wilderness of garden and quietly, because people were

still asleep upstairs, let myself in. Yates 2012, p. 212 There is no victory or achievement to share with a welcoming crowd, no self-congratulation on a mission successfully accomplished. In one of the micronarratives early on, Yates shares with the reader the sense of wonder he had as a child when he first experienced nature in the dark. The fact that he still experiences the dark in this way shows that it was ‘a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life’ (as Rachel Carson put it in the quote above). There are many features in the book which palpably convey this sense of wonder.

Encounters The central feature of enchantment is meeting and merging (to a certain degree) of the self, and an ‘other’. As Curry (2019, p. 17) puts it: Enchantment is always an embodied encounter in an actual set of circumstances with a highly specific, indeed unique, other … it is therefore never abstract, generic or universal. In Nightwalk, Yates has encounters with a great array of wildlife, plants and physical elements of nature, including an oak tree, hare, badger, thrush, tawny owl, roe deer, fallow deer, a moth, rabbit, wood pigeon, nightjar, some snails, a lizard, a glow worm, the moon, stars, and breezes. The following is a typical example: I was walking along one of the deeper valleys when, thirty yards ahead, a white fallow deer stepped out of a bank of white fog. For a few spectral moments we stood facing one another before the deer slowly climbed the left-hand slope and faded into the trees. Yates 2012, p. 124 In this example the location of the encounter is described; the deer is described with specificity as a white fallow deer and given salience through activation – the deer is the actor of the material process of stepping out and

is in the foreground against the background of the fog. There is a moment of connection with the reciprocal pronoun ‘one another’ and the way that both Yates and the deer are included in the pronoun ‘we’. They are further connected by both simultaneously being the Actor of the process of standing. In the above example, the deer is specified only in terms of colour and species, but in other cases, Yates includes detailed descriptions. The following are examples for a lizard, an oak tree and a breeze:

•

I … stopped to share a few seconds with an astonishing creature – a slender golden-coloured lizard with sepia stripes running from head to tail and bold flecked markings along the velvety-looking flanks. (Yates 2012, p. 57)

•

I knew it [an oak] well, having discovered it back in the 1980s when I first explored these hills, and though I normally visit it in daylight, it seems so much more wondrous at night. The east face of the trunk is so deeply grooved and contorted with age that, in daylight, it looks like a spiral of entwined crocodile. (Yates 2012, p. 78)

•

What surprised me was the strength of the breeze – certainly not a wind, but a fairly constant flow into the column of trees and yet not seemingly beyond them into a nearby wood; nor was there any sensation of moving air at ground level; only the upper halves of the trees were trembling. (Yates 2012, p. 28)

These include physical descriptions of the colouring, markings and texture of the lizard; a simile to give an unusual mental image of the bark of the tree; and since a ‘breeze’ cannot be seen directly, Yates describes the strength, flow, and results of the breeze. These features contribute to individualization where the lizard, tree, and, unusually, a breeze, are represented as unique beings rather than just members of a category. There is also positive evaluation with the appraising items ‘astonishing’, ‘wondrous’ and the words ‘velvet’ and ‘golden’ which have positive associations of luxury.

In several encounters, the moment of connection is conveyed through Yates looking into the eyes of the other:

•

We [Yates and a badger] stared at one another across an ancient history that I could only imagine but to which he still belonged. (Yates 2012, p. 109)

•

I heard that delicate hoof-step when it was almost in touching distance. For a moment we stared at one another, both weighing up the situation. The deer was obviously unhappy with me because it suddenly bellowed a ferocious bark leapt backwards and bounded away over the hill. (Yates 2012, p. 62)

•

A hare that seemed almost the size of a roe deer reared up onto its hind legs and raised its head so that we were looking at each other eye to eye – and what strange high set eyes they were, staring with a terrible intensity, expressing something much wilder and stranger than I could imagine. (Yates 2012, p. 39)

When animals and humans are represented as staring or looking at each other, it emphasizes that both are beings with eyes and a mental life, engaged in the same process at the same time, in relationship. Eye contact implies both physical and emotional closeness, with the physical closeness emphasized by ‘almost in touching distance’ in the case of the deer, and the apparent enormous size of the hare due to its proximity. As Curry (2019, p. 80) describes: Such enchantment further strengthens when one looks in the other’s eyes and sees, at the same moment is seen as, another person, with all that entails: subjectivity, sentience and the capacity for suffering and joy. And yet, there are also aspects of distance in the description – the separation across history with the badger; the ‘strange’ eyes of the hare, expressing something ‘stranger than I could imagine’. Then there is the pronoun ‘it’ to describe the roe deer, a pronoun which Yates often uses when describing animals. Animal rights activists sometimes decry the use

of the pronoun ‘it’ for animals: ‘Language that continues to refer to them as “it” … concretizes living beings in the category of object, not subject’ (Merskin 2022, p. 1). This is true in many cases, but in Yates’s writing the pronoun choice seems to indicate respectful distance and awe of the other rather than objectification, because of the positivity of the context. As Curry (2019, p. 13) points out: Perhaps, more than anything else, enchantment is a matter of relationship. That in turn requires each party to be distinctive and therefore different, creating a gap between them over which they can meet. That in turn creates a ‘third thing’, something new in the world: a metaphorical you-and-me, or a this-but-also-that.’ Curry 2019, p. 13 The distancing techniques emphasize the gap, while the connecting techniques emphasize that this gap has been partially bridged, and it is in the partial bridging of the gap that enchantment occurs.

Magic and the supernatural Immanent enchantment is very much enchantment with and by the real world around us rather than supernatural beings or forces. However, the sense of wonder can feel as if we are in the presence of something extraordinary from another plane of existence. Writers can therefore use the language of the supernatural to represent or evoke feelings of wonder, and it remains immanent so long as there is no suggestion that something actually supernatural is occurring. In the following examples, Yates uses the words ‘ghostly’, ‘magical’, ‘spell’ and ‘miraculous’, which are part of the semantic field of the supernatural:

•

Though I don’t believe in ghosts anymore, I like the way a place can become ‘ghostly’ simply because a change in conditions charges its atmosphere with a new energy. (Yates 2012, p. 123)

•

The apparent magic of perfect timing [when animals appeared immediately after being mentioned in conversation]. (Yates 2012, p.

138)

•

Despite the fact that an animal running for cover in the dark is an unremarkable event, what made it magical was its first-timeness. (Yates 2012, p. 14)

•

As long as I kept looking straight ahead the illusion kept working, but then something broke the spell. (Yates 2012, p. 36)

•

There is something miraculous about the way the bird materializes out of a clear night sky. (Yates 2012, p. 29) [with emphasis added in each example]

While these examples use the lexicon of the supernatural, they also distance themselves from anything actually supernatural. This is highly explicit in ‘Though I don’t believe in ghosts anymore’. It is more subtle through the hedging of ‘apparent magic’, the spell that was broken being an ‘illusion’ and the inverted commas around ‘ghostly’. And anything supernatural about the ‘magical’ experience of an animal running for cover in the darkness is discharged by the word ‘unremarkable’. Another example of supernatural description is the way that Yates describes a bird ‘materialising out of a clear night sky’ as ‘miraculous’. Even without the word ‘miraculous’, the term ‘materialising’ can invoke a frame of magic, since one of the three key things that fictional wizards or entertainment magicians do is to make things vanish, transform, or materialize. The following are examples which could more subtly evoke the frame of magic through the use of these terms:

•

[snails] would materialize at the foot of each tree … (Yates 2012, p. 74)

•

There was something else: a vague movement along the tree’s edge, something running not quite soundlessly, yet very fast into deeper shadow where it vanished. (Yates 2012, p. 14)

•

The most ordinary stretch of countryside can be transformed by starlight into an area of outstanding natural beauty. (Yates 2012, p.

161)

•

The view south … had become completely transformed by the sunlight. (Yates 2012, p. 196)

•

I like the way my familiar surroundings are differently transformed by the twilight as I walk through them. (Yates 2012, p. 10) [emphasis added in each extract]

Transformation has a particular enchanting quality as day transforms to night and night transforms to day, as Curry (2019, p. 88) points out: Transitional and therefore ambiguous times of the day and of the year are potentially the most enchanting: dawn (between first light and sunrise) and dusk (between sunset and darkness). In addition to describing the cause of the supernatural-seeming experience, Yates also describes the effects on his emotions, using the terms ‘awestruck’, ‘enchanting’, and ‘wondrous’:

•

As a small child I was fairly awestruck by each newly discovered creature. (Yates 2012, p. 158)

•

Less magnificent than a sunrise, but more enchanting, a moon rise is irresistible. (Yates 2012, p. 46)

•

[an oak tree] seems so much more wondrous at night. (Yates 2012, p. 75)

Mystery Half-way between the certainty of science on one hand, and the supernatural on the other, is mystery. At the lexical level, Yates evokes mystery through terms such as mysterious, curious, enigmatic and shadowy:

•

I liked the way the orderly landscape seemed to grow wider and more mysterious as the twilight faded. (Yates 2012, p. 13)

•

[context] And though clear of mist, even the slopes around me shimmered with a curious light. (Yates 2012, p. 179)

•

Backlit by the low sun, her image through the lenses had almost the same enigmatic quality as a nocturnal silhouette. (Yates 2012, p. 182)

•

The shadowy presence of foxes and deer in the nearby woods. (Yates 2012, p. 53) [emphasis added in each extract]

Mystery is central to enchanted experiences because enchantment is not a rational process of recognition, categorization, knowledge, facts or rationalizations. It is, instead, a pure experience of sensing and being. One way that Yates captures this is to describe moments where he becomes aware of the presence of an ‘other’ but without realizing what that ‘other’ is.

•

My slightly huffy breath after running up the slope had drowned the sound of a different kind of breathing. When I first became aware of it I thought I was hearing the sound of water. (Yates 2012, p. 28)

•

when I looked round towards a line of anthills or maybe molehills up against the pale northern skyline I was intrigued to see that one of them was alive … I was, apparently, looking along an animal’s back, and though I refocused carefully it was impossible to tell whether the creature was heading away from or towards me so completely was it merging into the dark of the slope. (Yates 2012, p. 107)

Eventually, Yates realizes that in the first case it was an unusual nocturnal breeze, and in the second case a badger, but that moment of not knowing before the discovery and classification can occur is a moment of heightened awareness. As Yates puts it: One of the reasons an animal has more presence in the dark is simply because its glimpsed, half-seen shape tantalizes like the whole of nature did when I was an infant. Yates 2012, p. 159

The celebration of the mystery of darkness helps redress a cultural imbalance between day and night that is prevalent in industrialized countries. As Curry (2019, p. 92) describes: We grossly overvalue light while irrationally fearing darkness … Identifying light with logos, reason, heaven and maleness drives us to disparage the sources of enchantment in mythos, emotion, Earth and the female.

A change in thought patterns The mystery of an encounter forces a change in thinking away from rational thought and language towards an altered state of consciousness. Yates conveys this through invoking frames of hypnosis, dreaming and meditation with the words mesmeric, mesmerising, dream and mantra:

•

The skylark’s undulatory song was so mesmeric. (Yates 2012, p. 175)

•

From the edge of the trees to my left, a wood pigeon began to coo, repeating his familiar soft-toned mantra – a mesmerising sound in that setting. (Yates 2012, p. 46)

•

Skylined by a field of stars it [a hare] seems to loom right out of a dream. (Yates 2012, p. 159) [emphasis added in each extract]

Another way Yates uses to represent an emotional, rather than cognitive, response to animals is through describing a physical bodily reaction when they are first observed:

•

If I saw [a hare] running across an open stretch of grassland it always popped my eyes. (Yates 2012, p. 38)

•

Our jaws dropped in astonishment [at a nightjar in the road]. (Yates 2012, p. 137)

•

I heard a rustle from the trees behind me that stopped me in my tracks. (Yates 2012, p. 14)

Popping eyes, jaws dropping, and stopping suddenly all suggest a moment of frozen thought and pure observation.

Time One of the biggest disenchantments occurred with the imposition of clock time. Clock time requires no reference to the movements of the sun, moon or stars, to the changing seasons, or to anything in the natural world – it is purely cognitive and analytic. Macnaghten and Urry (1998, p. 146) go as far as to say that clock time ‘is now revealed as not intrinsic to nature but as the massively powerful agent involved in the subjugation of nature’. Jay Griffiths (2000), in Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, asks her readers ‘if you have ever felt that Western modernity’s time is coercive, crushing and overwound’ (p. vii) and then invites them to ‘Leave “the time” behind you and see a few of the myriad times across the world’ (p. 4). Griffith’s book then takes the reader on a journey to vicariously experience other, more enchanting, ways of experiencing time. The first words of the first chapter in Nightwalk are ‘Time is short in midwinter … but in midsummer time is long’ (Yates 2012, p. 3). This is a simple statement, but it radically opposes clock time, since an hour or minute of clock time is always exactly the same length whatever the season. As Yates crosses over the threshold to start his journey, he writes, ‘It was almost ten thirty by the kitchen clock when I stepped out into the shadowy garden’ (Yates 2012, p. 19). After that, clock time is left behind and Yates enters non-linear time. One innovative way that the book locates itself in non-linear, cyclical time is through the illustrations. Each of the twenty-six chapters starts with line drawings of flowers and plants against a background which starts off white in Chapter 1, but then shades through ever darkening grey until Chapter 13 when the background is completely black. It then starts lightening again until by Chapter 26 it is completely white. In addition to representing time as cyclical, Yates also uses other forms of expression to distance himself from linear clock time:

•

Time hadn’t truly existed for me once the first stars had appeared last evening. Several eternities seemed to have passed since then. (Yates

2012, p. 167)

•

My consciousness of time is vague and mostly non-existent. (Yates 2012, p. 31)

•

I have no idea how long I stood watching the stars grow brighter. (Yates 2012, p. 31)

Here clock time is resisted by being represented as not existing, distorted by seeming to be eternal, or vague or unknown, adding to the sense of mystery. At one point, Yates names an alternative form of time, the ‘rhythm of the night’, and not only describes it but makes it appear more accurate than clock time: mechanical time … could never synchronise to the shifty rhythm of night. With its phases, pauses and unpredictable slips, it not only contradicts the clock, it makes a mockery of it. Yates 2012, p. 99 At a key moment in the book, Yates reflects on the nature of time in the dark: Normally, the present is just a transition point, a bit of a blur between one thing and the next, yet in the untroubled and mostly unrevealing dark, past and future have less relevance and I can find myself in a place of endless immediacy, a place known to every wild animal, a timelessness. Yates 2012, p. 182 The immediacy of being in the present moment that is so important in haiku poetry (see Chapter 4) is also a central feature of enchantment. As Nanson (2021, p. 47) describes: In focusing attention on the actuality of the here and now, storytelling helps instil a sensual connection with the environment and provides a channel by which nature can speak to modern society … It nurtures a perception of landscape as enchanted, even sacred, and of other creatures as conscious and worthy of our compassion.

Stubbs (2019, p. 125), however, finds something even more intriguing in the last nineteen words of the above quote from Nightwalk (‘I can find myself in a place of endless immediacy, a place known to every wild animal, a timelessness’): Here, the daybreak experience brings Yates beyond time, but even more intriguingly, beyond his species’ particularity, to what he describes as the temporally immediate perspective of the wild animal that underlies our own human nature. Indeed, immediately following this key paragraph, Yates rejects clock time once again and replaces it with a timelessly immediate encounter with a wild animal, a hare: In that other Monday morning all the clocks were getting ready to take over. Throughout the night they had been swinging their hands in futile gestures, but soon they would be in command again. However, on the hill, I was once more the focus of an animal’s unblinking gaze. Yates 2012, p. 182 By using the personification of the clocks as actors in the material process of swinging their hands and being in ‘command’ and contrasting it with the wildlife encounter, Yates is representing reconnection with nature as a liberation from the tyranny of clock time.

Space In addition to a distorted, novel or alternative sense of time, Willmott (2018, p. 109) notes that experiences of enchantment often also include a new perception of space, particularly a feeling of space stretching out beyond the self into a vastness beyond. We can see this in Yates’s writing:

•

As the skyline sank down over the sun’s face so I briefly observed the actuality and immensity of earth’s perpetual spin. (Yates 2012, p. 169)

•

Everything seemed on a grander scale; the valley I’d walked through earlier now appeared deeper … The line of trees to the west … had withdrawn to a vast distance, while the northern skyline loomed much higher than before. (Yates 2012, p. 100)

Here the words ‘immensity’, ‘ grander’, ‘deeper’, ‘vast’, and ‘higher’ are part of a lexical set of scalar words that convey the self experiencing, or even merging with, something larger than itself. The verb ‘loomed’ also conveys connotations of height and size. The unusual feelings of space do not necessarily have to involve something enormous – Willmott (2018, p. 34) describes something more subtle: ‘I prefer to think of it – this disruption of frames of reference by a sensuous experience of another’s extent in relation to self … as a powerful playing with scale’. This is very clearly evident in the following quotes from Yates: My angle of vision and the halo of twilight made it [a roe deer] appear not only larger than it was, but also slightly unreal – a mythic descendant from the time when all this was one vast medieval deer forest. Yates 2012, p. 24 Here a roe deer, a small goat-sized deer, appears larger than the reality, which is a playing with scale. The enchanting effect is emphasized with words that have magical associations ‘unreal’, ‘halo’, ‘mystic’, and the vastness of the scale of the medieval deer forest. The reference to the temporal marker ‘medieval’ brings in a dimension of distant time, which is something that appears in other places too through the temporal markers ‘millennium’ and ‘ancient’:

•

[an oak] has withstood over half a millennium of weather (Yates 2012, p. 79)

•

Ancient woodland … had shaded these valleys for thousands of years. (Yates 2012, p. 69) [emphasis added in both extracts]

In general, both space and time are experienced in unusual or distorted ways, which gives an altered sense of the reality of what is, actually, a very

real and concrete experience.

Soundscapes In Western(ized) cultures the primary way of perceiving and understanding the world is through a visual mode. There are numerous expressions in English which equate the visual sense with knowledge, understanding, intelligence or truth. The expression ‘I see’ can be synonymous with ‘I understand’; ‘shed light on’ or ‘illuminate’ can mean ‘reveal the truth’; ‘bright’ and ‘brilliant’ can mean ‘intelligent’; ‘clarify’ can mean ‘explain’; ‘enlighten’ can mean ‘inform’ and the list goes on. In the British National Corpus (BNC 2007) the words ‘see’ and ‘saw’ appear more than four times as often (4.3 times) as the words ‘hear’ and ‘heard’. An experience of enchantment goes beyond intelligence, rational truth and knowledge, so given the associations of these with the visual it is natural that enchantment goes beyond visual sensing of the world to aural and other forms of perception. In fact, Carlyle (2021, p. 287) describes how ‘environmental entanglements may be most acutely accessible through the perceptual register of sound … the audibly entangled wild’. The night setting in Nightwalk is the perfect occasion to dim visual perception and focus on the aural. In contrast to the general usage in the British National Corpus, the words ‘see’ and ‘saw’ appear only 1.14 times as often as ‘hear’ and ‘heard’, a much better balance of visual and aural. Yates describes a conscious effort to attune to the soundscape: So I learnt … to sit for maybe an hour, focusing with my ears, using the sounds of paw-patter or antler-click to colour in the invisible shapes. Yates 2012, p. 15 He conveys the sounds here using compound nouns paw-patter and antlerclick that include a physical feature of an animal in the first half of the compound and then a sound in the second. The aural dimension is much stronger than the visual, which exists only in the expression ‘invisible shapes’. Yates also brings the sounds of the forest and field to the vicarious hearing of the reader through numerous onomatopoeic words:

The interior of any summerwood after dark is nearly always gently clicking, rustling, pattering and squeaking as the many mostly small creatures busy themselves with their nocturnal routines. Yates 2012, p. 70 The conjunction ‘as’ here links the sounds to the creatures, who are represented with high activation. The sounds therefore become evidence of animals living their own lives for their own purposes. Beyond sound, Yates extends the extraordinary sensory nature of an enchanted encounter through the use of synaesthesia: the dense night and the echoing ring of trees sharpened the edges of his voice, giving it a brightness that was sometimes dazzling. Yates 2012, p. 82

Conclusion Patrick Curry’s Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life begins with the following words: What is enchantment? Its moments are short but deep: eyes meet, and everything has changed – … walking through a landscape charged with mystery – being carried away by glorious music … Most simply, enchantment is an experience of wonder. It can vary in intensity from charm, through delight, to full blown joy. Curry 2019, p. 7 This describes to perfection the enchantment in Chris Yates’s Nightwalk: A Journey to the Heart of Nature, where he walks through a mysterious landscape, made more so by darkness, experiences wonder, and finds joy. In this chapter I have investigated some of the narratological and linguistic features that convey the enchanted experience, allowing readers to experience it for themselves vicariously and, perhaps, encouraging them to seek out similar experiences for themselves.

To summarize briefly, the following are some of the features which convey and potentially evoke immanent enchantment: A sense of purposelessness is conveyed in the narrative structure through a lack of logical connections between events that tie them into a larger plot or plan. Enchanting events consist of an encounter with an ‘other’ where that ‘other’ is individualized through specific description; represented with high activation as living their life for their own purposes; and given positivity through a positive appraisal pattern. There is a representation of connection and closeness, which can arise from descriptions of physical proximity, eye contact, reciprocal pronouns, shared pronouns (we), or conjoined roles in processes (The deer and I stared at each other). As well as closeness, there is distance, which is conveyed by the pronoun ‘it’, explicit mention of a divide, or distancing lexical items such as ‘strange’. It in is the distance and then its bridging that the enchantment lies. The lexical set associated with magic and the supernatural is used to give encounters an extraordinary feeling, while hedges or explicit counterstatements ensure that there is no implication that anything actually supernatural is going on. A temporary sense of mystery is created by conveying sense images of the ‘other’ before its identity is revealed. Time is untethered from the regular clock and represented as something which can be stopped, extended, contracted, or cycled, using various linguistic devices or the visual device of a series of lightening and darkening illustrations. Space is represented as different from usual by objects appearing larger or smaller than they are, or by an emphasis on vastness. Non-dominant senses such as the aural are given prominence, with synaesthesia highlighting the extraordinariness of the encounter. Finally, there are a range of lexical items which explicitly represent enchantment, ‘enchantment’ itself being one of them, but also ‘awe’, ‘wonder’, ‘astonishment’, and physical proxies of emotions such as ‘stopping in my tracks’, or ‘my jaw dropped’. Describing how enchantment is conveyed through a list of linguistic and narratological features could be considered a highly disenchanting activity in itself. There is nothing enchanting at all about the previous paragraph. However, features like these can be subtly incorporated within texts of all kinds to counteract the prevailing dominance of disengaged, disenchanted, and disinterested discourse in powerful circles. Anything from ecosystem assessment reports to biology textbooks could begin to convey enchantment

with the natural world – going beyond simply conveying facts towards promoting engagement with and compassion for the natural world. Most importantly, the features of enchantment can be employed in creative writing to produce texts which encourage people to go beyond the narrow preoccupations of a techno-consumerist culture and find wellbeing in ways that revere rather than destroy the natural world. As Willmott (2018, p. 10) describes: We need to read into wonder, to expose how we both produce it and curtail its feelings and powers. Not to demystify or disenchant it, but to learn its real magic. In terms of my ecosophy, there is much to celebrate about Nightwalk, in particular the portrayal of finding wellbeing through non-consumerist activities, and the respect and reverence for animals, plants, woods, streams and the natural world in general. However, there are clearly social justice issues too, since there are limits to the availability of open green space that can be accessed safely at night that vary along lines of race, gender and poverty. Discourses which encourage enchantment with the natural world are one part of a jigsaw puzzle that must also include pieces that dismantle the barriers that prevent people from accessing and finding wellbeing in green space, and that work towards wider systemic change so that the ecosystems that life and enchantment depend on are protected and regenerated. Enchantment, then, needs to be the bedrock of activism rather than an escape from the world. As I mentioned, Rachel Carson is a perfect example of someone whose experience of the natural world was full of enchantment, as described in The Sense of Wonder (Carson 1965), but whose actions went far beyond simply finding wellbeing, meaning and fulfilment in nature for herself. Carson also used her training as a scientist to actively work towards protecting the natural world through her opposition to pesticides and other harmful agricultural practices. Her book Silent Spring (Carson 1965) was one of the most influential pieces of environmental writing of all time, and what makes the writing so powerful is the way that she combines reverence and wonder for the natural world with authoritative scientific discourse.

The importance of wonder and its relation to care is described by Pope Francis in his encyclical letter Laudato Si’ (2015): If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then … care will well up spontaneously. In this chapter I have described, with the help of Nightwalk: A Journey into the Heart of Nature, some linguistic and narratological features that convey enchantment, opening up possibilities for readers to experience it vicariously and seek it out in their own lives. There are far more features than the small range I described, and there are endless shining examples of enchanting writing and oral storytelling out there waiting to be explored.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER SIX

Leading: Ethics in Leadership Communication James Phelan (2014) describes the intersection between narrative and ethics in the following way: Narrative ethics explores the intersections between the domain of stories and storytelling and that of moral values. Narrative ethics regards moral values as an integral part of stories and storytelling because narratives themselves implicitly or explicitly ask the question, ‘How should one think, judge, and act – as author, narrator, character, or audience – for the greater good?’ In Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, Alastair McIntosh makes an interesting observation. He describes how: The ancients blamed natural disasters on moral degeneration … the biggest fear of the ancients was of flooding, and that on a global scale that threatened cities near the coast. From a modern scientific perspective this fear probably had little to do with human badness, but much to do with both the plate tectonics of the Earth’s crust and … to ‘natural’ prehistoric climate change. McIntosh 2008, p. 109

Certainly in texts such as the King James Bible, which McIntosh quotes, we can see the use of narrative to create strong and vivid connections between natural disasters and human immorality: And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart … The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence … And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die. Gen. 6.5 KJV There are three expressions here which are explicit ethical terms: ‘wickedness’, ‘evil’ and ‘corrupt’, where wrongdoing is built into the meaning of the word. The word ‘violence’ is an implicit moral term because although it has connotations of wrongdoing it does not necessarily imply that the perpetrator is unethical in all situations. There are intensifiers too: ‘great’, ‘every’, ‘only’ and ‘continually’, which emphasize the depth of the unethical behaviour. And finally there is the narrative structure, which is part of the narrative of Noah and the flood. In this part of the narrative, there are logical connections between the events of God perceiving the unethical behaviour; the negative emotional reaction to it; and the punishment. Even more interestingly, McIntosh points out that ‘But if the ancients over-pathologised their psychic condition, we today go to the opposite extreme’ (p. 112). Certainly, when we look at the language used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issues of ethical culpability for the climate catastrophe are often sidelined. For example, the following is from the IPCC AR6 report (IPCC 2022b, p. 11): Human-induced climate change … has caused widespread adverse impacts … The rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt … Climate change has caused substantial damages,

and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater and coastal and open ocean marine ecosystems … observed impacts have been attributed to human-induced climate change … In all regions extreme heat events have resulted in human mortality… This describes a whole set of harms: ‘adverse impacts’, ‘substantial damages’, ‘irreversible losses’ and ‘human mortality’. The set is logically linked to the agent causing the harm through the words ‘caused’, ‘led to’, ‘attributed to’ and ‘resulted in’. Importantly, the agents that are causing harm are ‘climate change’, ‘the rise in weather and climate extremes’ and ‘extreme heat events’. In other words, the harm is blamed on physical factors rather than, say, unethical governments or lawmakers, corrupt corporations or corporate decision makers, greedy over-consumers or environmental criminals. Humans are mentioned only as a modifier in ‘human-induced climate change’, which sets humans up at one remove from the actual agent, climate change, which is the head of the noun phrase. Even here though, this is humans in general, rather than the minority of humans who are most responsible. Truscello (2018, p. 263) made this point about blame in a similar case – a film which described ‘humanity’ as the asteroid causing the sixth extinction. He writes, ‘Of course, “humanity” is not the asteroid. Over-consumptive, industrialised, capitalist humanity is the asteroid’. In the IPCC quotation above, the nominalization and passive voice erase the actor who is causing the harm, e.g., ‘impacts’, ‘natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt’ and ‘human mortality’. The expression ‘human mortality’ can be compared with Greta Thunberg’s more vivid words ‘People are suffering. People are dying’, which turns the nominalized ‘mortality’ into a verb. She used this expression in her famous speech to world leaders at the UN Climate Summit which started: People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! Thunberg in Diaz 2019

There seems to be such a reluctance among those with power to attribute any kind of blame for the climate emergency that it falls to youth activists like Greta Thunberg to bring an ethical dimension to the debate. This is what she said in a speech for the European Economic and Social Committee: We need to focus every inch of our being on climate change, because if we fail to do so then all our achievements and progress have been for nothing and all that will remain of our political leaders’ legacy will be the greatest failure of human history. And they will be remembered as the greatest villains of all time, because they have chosen not to listen and not to act. But this does not have to be. Thunberg 2019a The term ‘villain’ immediately opens a narrative frame which divides the world into the ethical ‘heroes’ and unethical ‘villains’, and casts political leaders in the role of villain, albeit in a hypothetical future where they continue to fail to act. These examples from Greta Thunberg are of what I will be calling in this chapter a performance of ethical leadership. They are ethical arguments (with ‘How dare you!’ and ‘villains’ indicating unethical behaviour, and the implication in ‘all you can do’ of an unethical lack of action). More than that, however, they are attempts to bring into being a new reality, one where leaders treat solving climate change as the key goal of society rather than economic growth. In using the facticity-reducing expression ‘fairy tales of eternal economic growth’, Thunberg is challenging a master narrative that is deeply woven into the fabric of society – that ECONOMIC GROWTH IS THE GOAL OF SOCIETY. One of countless examples of this master narrative manifesting itself is a speech from the leader of the Labour Party in the UK given five days after the UK experienced a 40-degree heatwave for the first time ever. He said that in order for workers to have secure, fairly paid jobs, ‘we need three things: growth, growth, growth’ (BBC 2022). Three months later the Conservative Prime Minister echoed these words, saying ‘I have three priorities for our economy: Growth, growth, growth’. This was followed by promises to scrap green levies, increase road building, approve fracking and

grant up to 130 oil drilling licences. Typically the metanarrative of ECONOMIC GROWTH IS THE GOAL OF SOCIETY places emphasis on financial gain for the few under the disguise of benefiting everyone, while disregarding the harm to the many from the environmental destruction that is caused (Costanza et al. 2014). It takes leaders like Greta Thunberg to stand up and resist this simplistic and dangerous metanarrative. In this chapter I explore how performances of ethical leadership navigate the tricky waters of ethics – do they veer towards the fiery condemning wrath of the King James Bible, the emotional conviction of Greta Thunberg, or the cool rational avoidance of ethical issues in the IPCC AR6? And what role do narratological and linguistic features play in this? I will discuss some theoretical considerations first, above all what I mean by ‘ethical leadership’ and why I have been careful to talk about a ‘performance’ of ethical leadership rather than an ‘ethical leader’. After discussing theory, I will examine a series of ethical leadership performances from a range of speakers. These are primarily from Inspirationbase: A Collection of Ethical Leadership Speeches for Research and Teaching (Stibbe 2022). Inspirationbase consists of a corpus of speeches and interview extracts from more than twenty-three leaders, selected by members of the International Ecolinguistics Association for their social and ecological importance.

Ethical leadership The concept of ethical leadership, understandably, has a wide range of definitions in the literature and there is no objective way to decide which of these is the ‘correct’ one. Each definition has advantages and disadvantages in different contexts and for different goals. I will briefly discuss a few approaches to ethical leadership before outlining a framework which is specifically tuned to the goals of the study of econarrative. One approach to ethical leadership is cited more often than any others – that of Brown et al. (2005, p. 120): Ethical leaders are models of ethical conduct who become the targets of identification and emulation for followers. For leaders to be perceived as

ethical leaders and to influence ethics-related outcomes, they must be perceived as attractive, credible, and legitimate. They do this by engaging in behaviour that is seen as normatively appropriate (e.g., openness and honesty) and motivated by altruism (e.g., treating employees fairly and considerately). This represents ethical leadership as personal behaviour that fits into currently existing norms of what is seen to be ethical. The problem with this approach is that in an unjust and unsustainable society the prevailing ethical systems are unlikely to be sufficient to lead to the massive changes that are necessary to avoid ecological destruction. When Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpets, discovered that the company he led was causing immense environmental destruction he made the comment: One day early in this journey it dawned on me that the way I’d been running Interface is the way of the plunderer; plundering something that’s not mine, something that belongs to every creature on earth … I stand convicted by me, myself alone, not by anyone else, as a plunderer of the earth, but not by our civilisation’s definition. By our civilisation’s definition, I’m a captain of industry. In the eyes of many a kind of modern day hero. Anderson 2005 Clearly, if Anderson had just modelled behaviour in line with the prevailing ethics of the society he was part of, then he would not have been motivated to transform Interface into a more sustainable company. By condemning himself, and those like him, with the explicit moral term ‘plunderer’, he was stepping out and advancing an ethical position that went beyond that of the prevailing ethics of his society. The expression ‘belongs to every creature on earth’ even attributes intrinsic worth beyond the human world, something rare in the world of business or politics. Anderson could be considered a ‘moral entrepreneur’, using a term first put forward by Becker (1995). As Kaptein (2019, p. 1136) explains: Contrary to Brown et al.’s (2005) suggestion, an ethical leader is not only a moral person and a moral manager who demonstrates normatively

appropriate behaviour and follows the current ethical norms. An ethical leader is also a moral entrepreneur who creates new ethical norms … [and] contributes to the development of both society and the trust of stakeholders. An ethical leader then, does not just follow the ethical norms of an unjust and unsustainable society, but works to change society and change those norms. And this is where econarrative comes in because, as Ben Okri (1996) astutely observes: Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories that individuals or nations live by and you change the individuals and nations themselves. Okri 1996, p. 21 Drew Westen (2011) makes a similar point directly about leadership: The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be. Applying Westen’s and Okri’s perspectives, ethical leadership involves working with words to change the fundamental stories that people and nations live by. There is, in fact, a theory of leadership broadly along these lines, that of Smircich and Morgan (1982, p. 258): Leadership is realised in the process whereby one or more individuals succeed in attempting to frame and define the reality of others … They emerge as leaders because of their role in framing experience in a way that provides a viable basis for action, e.g., by mobilising meaning, articulating and defining what has previously remained implicit or unsaid, by inventing images and meanings that provide a focus for new attention, and by consolidating, confronting, or changing prevailing wisdom. Smircich and Morgan’s theory, useful as it is, is just about leadership in general rather than ethical leadership in particular. We could say that ethical

leadership involves an attempt to define the reality of others in ways that align with a particular ethical framework. Different leaders will have different ethical frameworks, but I would argue that to be considered truly ethical any framework must consider not only the human sphere but also the ecosystems that all life depends on. After all, there is no point in creating a perfectly fair society based on an ethical framework of human equality if that society is unsustainable and is on a path towards collapse.

Ecosophy The concept of ecosophy, described in Chapter 1, is a useful way to think about the ethical framework that leaders base their communication on. An ecosophy in this sense is simply an ethical/normative framework which takes into consideration both humans and the more-than-human world. Sometimes leaders are explicit about their ecosophy. For example, Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, and activist involved in the seed movement in India and around the world. In an interview she describes her ethical framework as follows: I evolved the concept of Earth Democracy on the basis of my philosophy and practice that we are part of the Earth, and human freedom and human wellbeing depends on other species. We are not superior to other species; we are inter-beings. Anthropocentrism is a violent construct. Earth Democracy allows us to shift from economies and cultures that kill and democracies that are dead to living economies, living democracies, living cultures of the Earth, sharing her abundance, respecting her limits. Shiva 2021a Here Shiva gives her ecosophy a specific name, ‘Earth Democracy’, and outlines some of its tenets, particularly the aspects of interconnection and equality with other species. An important aspect of ecosophy in the context of ethical leadership is that it is not just an abstract philosophical position, but a framework for action in the world. This is expressed clearly by Shiva with the expression ‘my philosophy and practice’. Another example of an

explicit ecosophy is the concept of ‘integral ecology’ put forward by Pope Francis, which has a strong resemblance to Vandana Shiva’s: Integral ecology is an invitation to an integral vision on life, starting from the conviction that everything in the world is connected and that, as the pandemic made sure to remind us, we are interdependent on each other, as well as on our Mother Earth. Pope Francis 2020 It is quite rare for leaders to explicitly convey their ecosophy, however. More often the ecosophy is conveyed indirectly through implications. An example of this can be seen in the quotation below from well-known ethologist, Jane Goodall, who has been the UN Messenger of Peace: Now we realize, and we’re realizing more and more, that other animals also have emotions and feelings. They feel pain, they feel fear. And what are we doing to them? They too are refugees and losing their homes. They too are homeless. They too are dying and suffering. Goodall 2003 This frames animals as ‘refugees’, a term usually reserved for humans. The adverbs ‘also’ and ‘too’ convey a whole set of things that humans and animals share, including the series of negative circumstances and feelings. The implication is that if we assume that humans are worthy of moral consideration, then animals should be too. The rhetorical question ‘And what are we doing to them?’ implies that therefore we should not be harming them. In this way it is clear that Goodall works within an ecosophy of recognizing the intrinsic value of animals and avoiding harm to them. In her public work, Goodall is active in using narratives to change the perception of animals in line with her ecosophy. As she says elsewhere: I’ve often said that to make change you must reach the heart, and to reach the heart you must tell stories. The way we write about other animals shapes the way we see them – we must recognize that every individual nonhuman animal is a ‘who’, not a ‘what’. Goodall in Merskin 2022, p. 9

In saying this, Goodall is recognizing the power of narratives to stir emotions, change how people see the world and therefore how they act in the world.

Narrative leadership The ‘stories’ that Goodall tells include narratives, such as the following: When I was first in Gombe in 1960 – I remember so well, so vividly, as though it was yesterday – the first time, when I was going through the vegetation … I saw this dark shape, hunched over a termite mound, and I peered with my binoculars. It was, fortunately, one adult male whom I’d named David Greybeard – and by the way, science at that time was telling me that I shouldn’t name the chimps; they should all have numbers; that was more scientific. Anyway, David Greybeard … was picking little pieces of grass and using them to fish termites from their underground nest. And not only that, he would sometimes pick a leafy twig and strip the leaves – modifying an object to make it suitable for a specific purpose – the beginning of tool-making. The reason this was so exciting and such a breakthrough is at that time, it was thought that humans, and only humans, used and made tools. Goodall 2003 Goodall could have used the abstract language of science, e.g., ‘chimpanzees show the most diverse and complex tool-using repertoires of all extant species’ (Sanz and Morgan 2007, p. 420). However, the use of narrative here brings the reader into a vicarious encounter with an individual, David Greybeard, peering over his shoulder and noticing the specifics of what he is doing with the tools. The individualization occurs through nomination (the specific name ‘David Greybeard’) and through the pronoun ‘he’ instead of ‘it’. And David Greybeard is activated by being the actor of a series of material processes which represent him as living his life for his own purposes. The use of the emotion word ‘exciting’ suggests to the reader what emotion they should feel in response to this vicarious encounter. The aside about scientific language alludes to Goodall’s

discursive struggle with editors to depict chimpanzees in ways that represent them as subjects of a life rather than as objects to be experimented on. All in all, Jane Goodall is a great example of a leader whose life and work is based on an ecosophy, and who uses language in ways that attempt to transform dominant ways of thinking about animals. In Telling the Story: The Heart and Soul of Successful Leadership, Geoff Mead conveys an approach he calls Narrative Leadership:

•

The notion of narrative leadership … means taking responsibility for consciously using story to make meaning with and for other people. (Mead 2014, p. 27)

•

Successful leadership depends on the stories we tell and … how well they speak to the needs of our time. (Mead 2014, p. 3)

The approach calls on leaders to ‘question the prevailing meta-narratives and imagine new possibilities’ (Mead 2014, p. 96), then bring the most attractive of those possibilities into being through the use of narratives. An illustration of narrative leadership is a moment where the activist and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez powerfully reframed reality by changing just one letter: Interviewer: I’m Joe Billionaire. I made widgets. I sold those widgets. I made billions of dollars, you know, selling those widgets, making those widgets. Therefore, those billions of dollars are mine. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Well, you didn’t make those widgets, did you? Because you employed thousands of people and paid them less than a living wage to make those widgets for you … You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages. You made that money off the backs of undocumented people. You made that money off of the backs of black and brown people being paid under a living wage. You made that money off of the backs of single mothers. And all of these people who are literally dying because they can’t afford to live. And so no one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars. Ocasio-Cortez 2020a

The change from ‘make’ to ‘take’ may be just one letter but it radically challenges the dominant metanarrative in capitalist countries that those who own the means of production are entitled to the profits from them, even if realizing those profits relies on other people’s labour. In terms of narrative, there are two opposing narratives. The first narrative is projected onto a fictional character who is made to explicitly convey the dominant metanarrative in the first person, with four events: making widgets, selling widgets, receiving money, then deserving to possess that money. The fourth event is logically connected to the first three through the pronoun ‘therefore’ which indicates that those three premises are sufficient to prove the conclusion. Ocasio-Cortez replies as herself, addressing Joe Billionaire with the second person ‘you’, which is a direct form of address that is potentially intimate or confrontational depending on the situation. Ocasio-Cortez’s narrative starts with a direct contradiction of the first premise, and then reframes it as exploiting others who do the actual work. The final sentence summarizes a new story to live by, one where the super-rich are seen not as wealth-creators but as wealth-takers. Although this does not specifically mention ecological issues, staying within environmental limits will require a massive reduction in consumption, which for social justice must come primarily from the rich. The short extract from Ocasio-Cortez is an example of ethical leadership performance through narrative, which is something that happens in the moment, in communication between people. It is possible to refer to this as ‘leadership is happening’ (Drath and Palus 1994, p. 4), which is a more dynamic way of conceptualizing ethical leadership as opposed to placing people in the category of ‘ethical leader’ or ‘sustainability leader’ based on a fixed set of characteristics such as ‘caring’, ‘morally-driven’, ‘holistic thinker’, or ‘altruistic’ (e.g., Visser and Courtice 2011). It also means that anyone can perform ethical leadership – it is not reserved for particular kinds of people, or people who happen to have a named institutional role as a leader. As Mead (2014, p. 41) puts it: Narrative leadership challenges the framework of meanings embedded in the dominant discourse of leadership because it offers ways of thinking about and practising leadership that are open to anyone trying to make a

difference, whether on the world stage, in organisations, in communities, or at home.

The distinctive language of ethical frameworks In one of her many memorable speeches, Greta Thunberg stated the following in a talk to the World Economic Forum: The bigger your carbon footprint is, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility. Adults keep saying, ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is. Thunberg 2019b The use of the words ‘moral duty’ and ‘responsibility’ invoke a deontological ethical framework (Davis 1993). The use of the metaphor of the house on fire is a powerful way of conveying the harm that will occur if leaders fail in their duty. Every philosophical ethical framework, whether it is utilitarianism, deontology, divine command, virtue theory, categorical imperative or an ethics of care (Fryer 2014), has associated with it a characteristic type of language. Leaders are rarely explicit about the philosophical framework they are using (e.g., ‘From a utilitarian perspective …’, ‘From a deontological perspective …’), but can still draw on frameworks through using forms of language associated with them: ‘duty’, ‘responsibility’, ‘obligation’ and so on in the case of deontology. The following are examples from US senator Elizabeth Warren, and Vandana Shiva:

•

I believe in science. Climate change is real. And we have a moral and economic responsibility to make changes in this country starting right

now! (Warren 2019)

•

The highest duty is to grow and give good food in abundance … And the worst sin is to let someone go hungry in your neighborhood, not grow good food, and worse, sell bad food. (Shiva 2021b)

The word ‘sin’ in the second example is part of a religious frame and so points towards a divine command framework, where what is seen as right and wrong is determined by holy scriptures. The divine command framework is more explicit in the following: I think the first very important gift of the Vedas is to recognize that the universe is divine. The smallest grass, the tiniest rivulet is an expression of the divine. And that’s why it’s not an accident, you know, we hold our rivers sacred except now with industrialism and urbanization we are polluting them … when I go to the villages, women will do sacred ceremonies with indigenous seed … But the part that has always been a very, very powerful idea from the Upanishads … ‘We live in a sacred universe which is for the wellbeing of all. Enjoy her gifts without greed. Taking more than your share is theft.’ Shiva 2021b There are several words that trigger a religious frame – ‘divine’, ‘Vedas’, ‘sacred’, and ‘Upanishads’ – and then the specific command from the Upanishad in the imperative mood. While it is rare to see a direct statement of divine command such as ‘It is unethical because the Bible states …’ outside of directly religious discourse, there are often more subtle uses that allude to the divine command framework by using religious terms or mentioning religious texts. Another ethical framework, which tends to be used more subtly than explicitly, is utilitarianism. According to utilitarianism, ‘an ethically right action is one which brings about the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people’ (Fryer 2014, p. 55). Its distinctive language consists of weighing up positive and negative impacts of decisions in terms of ‘happiness’, ‘suffering’ or similar, and mentioning the number of beings

affected. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invokes utilitarianism in the following example: the unsustainable brutality of an economy that rewards explosive inequalities of wealth for the few at the expense of long-term stability for the many. Ocasio-Cortez 2020b This statement includes a positive attribute ‘wealth’, a negative attribute ‘expense’, and a weighing up of the numbers involved through the term ‘few’ for the benefit, and ‘many’ for the detriment. The finding is judged as unethical through the implicit ethical terms ‘unsustainable’ and ‘brutality’. There are no explicit moral terms like ‘wrong’, or ‘unethical’ here, but the utilitarian framework makes it clear that this is in fact a strong ethical judgement. Ocasio-Cortez also uses the language of the categorical imperative framework, particularly Kant’s formula of universal law: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (Kant in Fryer 2014, p. 101). This is evident in the following quotation: In front of reporters, Representative Yoho called me, and I quote, ‘fucking bitch’ … [this] was not just an incident directed at me, but when you do that to any woman, what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters. In using that language in front of the press, he gave permission to use that language against his wife, his daughters, women in his community, and I am here to stand up to say that is not acceptable. Ocasio-Cortez 2020c Again, there is no explicit mention of the categorical imperative, but the description takes the maxim behind an action and applies it universally. Following this, Ocasio-Cortez then expands from the personal narrative to the general issue:

This issue is not about one incident. It is cultural. It is a culture of lack of impunity, of accepting of violence and violent language against women and an entire structure of power that supports that. Ocasio-Cortez 2020c This ‘structure of power’ is, according to ecofeminism, the root cause of the oppression of both women and nature (Adams and Gruen 2014, Mies and Shiva 2014), and this act of ethical leadership by Ocasio-Cortez forms part of a movement to resist it. Another framework is virtue theory, where the focus is not on duty or the consequences of actions, but on a person’s character, whether they are an ethical person or not (Pence 1993). Following Aristotle, this is often defined through lists of virtues that an ethical person would have. We can see the characteristic language of virtue ethics in comments made by Pope Francis, where he mentions three virtues (honestidad, responsabilidad and valentía in the original Spanish) and then repeats them to emphasize their importance: With honesty, responsibility and courage we have to put our intelligence ‘at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral’ … capable of placing economy at the service of the human person, building peace and protecting the environment … I would like these three key words – honesty, courage and responsibility – to be at the heart of our work today and tomorrow. Pope Francis 2019 One final framework that is of great importance in analysing econarratives is an ethics of care (Slote 2007, Gilligan 2012). Like ecological systems, an ethics of care has interconnection at its core: The ethics of care starts from the premise that as humans we are inherently relational, responsive beings and the human condition is one of connectedness or interdependence. Gilligan 2011

Within this framework, emotion is not something to be sidelined as a distraction from a rational moral calculus, but central to the process of ethical decision making: Such emotions as sympathy, empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness are seen as the kind of moral emotions that need to be cultivated not only to help in the implementation of the dictates of reason but to better ascertain what morality recommends. Held 2007 Although the ethics of care is sometimes seen as an adjunct or complement to other ethical systems such as utilitarianism, Slote (2007, p. 2) claims that ‘an ethics of caring can work for the whole of ethics or morality’. The distinctive language of an ethics of care consists of a range of emotional terms that indicate a positive interconnection with others, including care, compassion, love, sympathy and empathy that are placed within an ethical argument. As an example, the writer and human rights activist Onjali Qatara Raúf uses an ethics of care in describing how the first book she read, Black Beauty, inspired her to join Greenpeace and become involved in protecting animals: [I realized] how amazing a book could be in regards to transporting me to a world that I would never have thought of otherwise. We didn’t have horses around, so I didn’t think about horses. But it made me care about horses and the way people treated animals. Rauf 2019 Here she represents the specific emotion of care for horses as the basis of the more general ethical principle of how animals should be treated. The Mexican indigenous climate activist Xiye Bastida makes extensive use of the language of an ethics of care in her speeches: And so, indigenous peoples’ cosmology is that you take care of the Earth because the Earth takes care of you. And you need reciprocity. You need to give back. And right now I’m seeing a lot of indigenous voices being lifted up, including in today’s global strike. And we’re saying all that

knowledge of taking care of the Earth for thousands of years is so important, because the environmental movement didn’t start 60 years ago. It’s always been here… Bastida in Goodman 2019 This represents ‘care of the Earth’ as a two-way process between the second person generic ‘you’, which reaches out to include the hearer and humans in general, and the personified ‘Earth’. The pronoun ‘you’ is both the Actor in the behavioural process of caring in ‘you take care of the Earth’ and the Beneficiary of the same process in ‘the Earth takes care of you’. The reciprocal nature of the relationship is emphasized by ‘you need reciprocity’ together with the expression ‘give back’, which presupposes that the earth previously gave to ‘you’. The ethics appear in ‘you take care of the Earth’, with an implied ‘should’ between ‘you’ and ‘take’. The authority is built up through a call to tradition in ‘for thousands of years’. Bastida also portrays the relationship of reciprocity vividly through a personal narrative: My mom would take out the food that we brought. And I would particularly remember her taking out tortillas. And so the prayer would begin. Thank you to Mother Earth for gifting us with air, water and the places for our food to grow. Thank you to the hands who planted the seeds. Thank you to the hands who harvested the corn. Thank you to the hands who made the tortillas and for the transportation that it took for all of us to come together and share this beautiful moment. That is how I grew up, with a mindset that we have to thank everything. We have to thank the Earth because it gives us everything we need to live. It gives us shelter, food, and all that it asks is that we protect. And to grow up with that love for the Earth. That reciprocity and that reciprocal love and understanding was just how my whole world was depicted to me. Bastida 2020 This econarrative encompasses earth, air, water, land and people, and shows their interconnections within an ethics of care triggered by the word ‘love’ in ‘love for the Earth’ and the many relations of reciprocity (thanks in return for service). The narrative starts with the specific remembered

moments of interaction between characters, and then widens out from the single first person pronoun ‘how I grew up’ to the generalized ethical imperative ‘we have to thank the Earth’ in the first person plural. The earth is personified as a ‘Mother’, who is the Actor and Sayer of the processes of ‘giving’, and ‘asking’. If the earth is personified, and the orientation is towards gratitude, then this potentially works against the thoughtless exploitation that can occur when the earth is seen merely as a container of resources.

Reshaping society The key aspect of the performance of ethical leadership is the use of language in powerfully persuasive ways that encourage people to rethink the ethical basis of the society that surrounds them. There are often two stages in leadership econarratives – a revealing of the deeply problematic metanarratives that underpin unsustainable societies, followed by a proposal for alternative stories to live by, often ones that are based on traditional or indigenous perspectives. In the following example, Vandana Shiva criticizes dominant metanarratives, or, in her terms, ‘assumptions’: Colonialism and industrialism have destroyed the Earth and indigenous cultures through four false assumptions. First, that we are separate from nature and not a part of nature. Second, that nature is dead matter, mere raw material for industrial exploitation. Third, that indigenous cultures are inferior and primitive, and need to be ‘civilised’ through civilising missions of permanent colonization. Fourth, that nature and cultures need improvement through manipulation and external inputs. Shiva 2021a In this extract, Shiva reveals four assumptions or metanarratives, which are represented negatively through the appraising items ‘destroyed’, ‘false’, ‘dead’, ‘mere’, ‘exploitation’, ‘inferior’, ‘primitive’, and ‘manipulation’. These all act as implicit ethical terms which imply that colonialism is unethical. Shiva then replaces the destructive metanarratives of industrial civilization using a narrative structure to convey new stories to live by:

Yesterday, women from my region in the Himalayas gathered at Navdanya for a millet festival. The Green Revolution [that revolutionised India’s farm production in the 1960s-70s] named them ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ grains. But they [yield] 10 times more nutrition using 10 times less water. Members of Navdanya were calling me during lockdown to say that the Gardens of Hope we started provided food for their families and communities in spite of lockdown. Food and culture are the currency of life. And while we are overwhelmed by disease and death, a living food culture can show the light to the path of life. For me, food sovereignty is sovereignty over your life, livelihood and health. We are interconnected, therefore food sovereignty is an ecological process of co-creation with other lifeforms. Shiva 2021a This is a complex structure which starts with a particular event happening ‘today’ in a particular location, then jumps back to the Green Revolution in the 1960s/1970s which is personified and made the Actor of spreading the false assumptions. The narrative then goes forward to specific events in lockdown in another location, and then on to a conclusion and general statements about what it all implies. These statements provide a new story to live by which Shiva calls ‘food sovereignty’. Antonyms represent this new story as the opposite of the assumptions of industrial society: ‘living’ instead of ‘dead’, ‘sovereignty’ instead of ‘exploitation’, and ‘interconnection’ rather than ‘separation’. The expression ‘ecological process of co-creation with other lifeforms’ instantiates an ecocultural identity, where humans and other species work together in common cause. And the positive appraising items ‘life’, ‘living’, ‘light’, and ‘health’ represent the new story as a desirable path. What makes this a performance of ethical leadership is that the metanarratives that Shiva is resisting are ones which oppose her ecosophy of Earth Democracy, and the ones that she promotes align with it. I will discuss one further example of reshaping society, which comes from Hawaiʻi but bears similarities to Vandana Shiva’s approach in India, partly because the two countries experienced the same brutal colonialization. The econarrative I will look at comes from an enlightening interview, Reclaiming Aloha (Osorio 2022a), with Jamaica

Heolimeleikalani Osorio, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi who describes herself as ‘a Kanaka Maoli aloha ‘āina educator, activist, and artist whose ‘ohana has been living, working, and bettering Hawai’i since time immemorial’ (Osorio 2022b). In the interview there is an econarrative about the concept of aloha, which Osorio prefaces by contrasting the tourist board’s superficial use of the term (a greeting expressing love, kindness and peace) with its authentic traditional meaning. The narrative itself begins with a temporal marker ‘at the time of just the natives, before the arrival of people like Captain Cook’ (Osorio 2022a), and goes on to describe the prevailing ethics of that time. These ethics were based on relationships of ‘intimacy and care’ among people, i.e., an ethics of care. Osorio describes how with the ethics of care there was a great deal of freedom in intimate relationships so long as they were consensual and boundaries were respected. This resulted in strong community bonds, where the whole community became ‘ohana, a family. This intimacy was shared with the land: in the land, and that which fed us, we learned how to give each other pleasure through pleasuring the land, or through watching our other-thanhuman kin pleasure each other, or the land. A great example is watching a Manu ‘O‘ö or a honeycreeper sip the nectar of ʻŌhiʻa Lehua blossom. That teaches us about giving pleasure to women, that we see ourselves as a part of ʻāina, a part of land and a part of creation. Osorio 2022a The word ‘pleasure’ is used as verb here, which gives it sensual/sexual connotations, and ‘give pleasure’ is used in the same way. The Actors of the processes of ‘pleasuring’ or ‘giving pleasure’ are we and other-than-human kin. The Affected participants are also we and other-than-human kin via the reciprocal pronoun ‘each other’. This intimate intermixing of the human and more-than-human creates ecocultural identities, which are explicitly confirmed with the expression ‘we see ourselves as a part of ʻāina, a part of land and a part of creation’. The focus on pleasure and intimacy sets up a positive appraisal pattern for this time in history, and it is represented as a constant state, or equilibrium.

Equilibrium is, according to Todorov’s classic theory, the initial state of many narratives: The minimal complete plot can be seen as a shift from one equilibrium to another … The two moments of equilibrium, similar and different, are separated by a period of imbalance, which is composed of a process of degeneration and a process of improvement. Todorov and Weinstein 1969, p. 75 In Osorio’s narrative on Aloha, the first full event after the establishment of equilibrium is most certainly a degeneration: But of course, a lot of that changes with the coming of foreigners. The first kind of wave of that change, of course, is with Captain Cook, and these early arriving, Europeans and their interest in buying sex, essentially, buying women. And of course, that changes the way we think about intimacy; it changes the way we think about consent; and all of that comes with all kinds of problems around disease and death. Osorio 2022a This imposed sexist ideology is denounced by the appraising items ‘disease’ and ‘death’ and the jarring application of the commercial transaction frame to human beings (‘buying women’). The next event continues the degeneration stage with the arrival of missionaries in the 1820s, who: start to import really particular ideas about what kinds of intimacy are appropriate, and what needs to be policed out or mocked or removed. And here is where we see this really drastic transformation in the way that we conceive of our ‘ohana (what some may call families) … we didn’t have words for auntie and uncle, everyone in the generation above us was mākua, was a parent, and everyone in our generation was a sibling. When you look at the way Christian ideas around intimacy and relationships, what they really did is they reduced us into these really isolated households. Osorio 2022a

This sets up a contrast between the cultural structures during the equilibrium stage, where ‘ohana was extended to a wide community, and the isolated structures that were imposed by the colonizers. The transformation is represented negatively as a degeneration through the negative appraising item ‘reduced us’ and the negative semantic prosody of the word ‘isolation’. After equilibrium and degeneration, Todorov describes a process of improvement that will result in a new equilibrium. Because industrial civilization is unsustainable, and so many indicators show things getting worse, econarratives tend to express the new, positive equilibrium as something in the future to be striven for: So when we talk about, as Hawaiʻians, as Native people, when we talk about nation-building, when we talk about governance, when we talk about land back, we also need to be talking about how do we come back to each other, because it is those intimate practices of pleasure and consent and desire, that actually create a different world that we can live in. Osorio 2022a The description ‘coming back together’ describes the improvement that is necessary, and the expression ‘a different world that we can live in’ describes the new equilibrium which can come into being through action. Osorio ends this narrative with a powerful call to action: Why not topple capitalism? Why not topple patriarchy? Why not burn so much of this to the ground and start again, with something that not only is more authentic to who we are, but will also give life back to the earth, give life back to that which feeds us and give purpose back to our lives … we just need more and more of our people to know these stories and know these songs and believe in them and have faith in themselves once again to change the world. Osorio 2022a The power of this statement derives from the metaphor of ‘topple’, which turns the more abstract ideas of ‘capitalism’ and ‘patriarchy’ into something

concrete and tall that can be pushed over. The loss of vertical height symbolizes a loss of power ‘over’ people. The metaphor then shifts to burning, with another loss of vertical height and power reflected in the expression ‘to the ground’. These metaphors are wrapped up in a tricolon (three-part list) of rhetorical questions that cognitively engage the audience in searching for an answer. The expected answer is, of course, ‘There is no reason why not’, and then the call to action gives a list of four reasons why it would be desirable. The expression ‘authentic to who we are’ invokes the deep level of identity – that the changes being described are not surface changes but go to the core of who people are. The words ‘give life back to the earth’ makes this an econarrative by including not only the human dimension but also the more-than-human world. The final remark on knowing, believing and having faith in stories as a path to changing the world testifies to the important place of econarrative in reshaping society away from the colonial stories that underpin an unsustainable and unequal society towards new stories to live by. Osorio’s narrative makes it abundantly clear that what is needed is not just technological change, not just cultural change, but also change in the ethical organization and orientation of society. This is the kind of fundamental change that performances of ethical leadership can aim to create.

Conclusion In this chapter I have described leadership as something that happens in interaction between people in particular locations, whether face to face or at a distance as one person reads words written by another or listens to recordings of their words. This makes language part of ecology, playing a role in the life-sustaining interactions among humans, other species and the physical environment. Narratives too, since they are primarily conveyed through language, are intrinsically interwoven with ecological systems. Narratives can inspire people to protect or destroy the ecosystems that life depends on, and through narratives leaders of all kinds promote particular forms of behaviour, whether destructive or beneficial. Ethical leadership, in my formulation, occurs when the econarratives that a leader conveys align with their ecosophy, their vision of the ideal relationships of humans with

each other and the wider ecosystems. And an effective ethical leader uses narrative in powerful and persuasive ways that help make that vision a reality.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER SEVEN

Feeling: Emotional Narrative in Climate Change Documentaries In this chapter I explore the role of emotion and emotional reasoning in econarrative, using as examples two very different climate change documentaries: An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, and This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein.

An inconvenient truth It was an unlikely box office hit, firstly given that it was presented by Al Gore, who the Washington Post in 1999 had described as ‘the highestranking boring man in the land, or so the polls say’ (Merida 1999) when he ran for president of the US; secondly because it was a PowerPoint presentation, and thirdly because it was about climate change, a topic which had singularly failed to capture popular imagination at the time. But An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim (2006), went on to take $53m in box office earnings, is in the top 15 highest ranking US documentaries of all time and was a key factor in Al Gore’s joint winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Mead (2014, p. 87) describes how ‘An

Inconvenient Truth interweaves information, argument, and stories together so brilliantly that it won him an Oscar, a Grammy and a Nobel Peace Prize’. It is, in the words of Rosteck and Frentz (2009, p. 2) ‘a very important instance of contemporary rhetorical practice’. In this section I will explore the skilful mixture of paradigmatic and narrative presentation, ideational and interpersonal functions, and logos and pathos behind the film’s success. I will describe how an emotional narrative (a logically connected series of emotional events) can be a key part of an econarrative, inspiring engagement and aiding retention of the key message.

Modes of thought In his classic book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Jerome Bruner (1986, p. 11) describes ‘two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality’. The paradigmatic mode ‘deals in general causes, and in their establishment, and makes use of procedures to assure verifiable reference and to test for empirical truth’ (p. 13). This leads to ‘good theory, tight analysis, logical proof, sound argument, and empirical discovery guided by reasoned hypothesis’ (p. 13). On the other hand, the narrative mode leads instead to ‘good stories, gripping drama, believable … historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place’ (p. 13). Herman (2009, p. 2) expresses this through an example: ‘Science explains the atmospheric processes that … account for when precipitation will take the form of snow rather than rain; but it takes a story to convey what it was like to walk along a park trail in fresh fallen snow as afternoon turned to evening in the late autumn’. Bruner was not the first to notice these two forms of meaning-making, and indeed begins his book with the following quote from William James: ‘To say that all human thinking is essentially of two kinds – reasoning on the one hand, and narrative, descriptive, contemplative thinking on the other – is to say only what every readers’ experience will corroborate.’ Another related pair of concepts that are useful for analysing narrative are Halliday’s (2013) ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. The

ideational metafunction is the role a text plays in representing an external reality including events, actions and states, along with the participants who are involved in them and the circumstances they take place in. The interpersonal metafunction, on the other hand, establishes relationships among the characters in the text, and between the text and the reader. Finally, two of Aristotle’s ‘modes of persuasion’ are relevant here. Logos is persuasion through logic, proof, reason, facts and figures while pathos is persuasion through influencing the audience’s frame of mind, primarily by eliciting an emotional response.

Paradigmatic presentation I will start the analysis of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth with a scene that is primarily informative, paradigmatic, propositional, ideational and focused on logos. In this scene, Gore is explaining the albedo effect in the Arctic: When the sun’s rays hit the ice, more than 90 percent of it bounces off right back into space like a mirror. But when it hits the open ocean more than 90 percent is absorbed. And so, as the surrounding water gets warmer, it speeds up the melting of the ice. Right now, the Arctic ice cap acts like a giant mirror. All the sun’s rays bounce off, more than 90 percent, to keep the Earth cooler. But as it melts and the open ocean receives that sun’s energy instead, more than 90 percent is absorbed. So, there is a faster build-up of heat here, at the North Pole, in the Arctic Ocean and the Arctic generally, than anywhere else on the planet. The talk is accompanied by animations where the sun, sea, ice and sun rays are represented diagrammatically. There is enough detail for the viewer to recognize the different elements, and moving lines show how they interact, but much less detail than a photograph. The low photorealism shows that the scene is meant to be a generic representation of ice anywhere rather than particular ice in a particular location. While other parts of the film had background music to stimulate an emotional response in readers, this section has no music. It is purely ideational, conveying the facts. In Herman’s (2009, p. 92) terms, it is an explanation rather than a story:

‘Whereas stories are prototypically concerned with particular situations and events, it can be argued that explanations by their nature concern themselves with ways in which, in general, the world tends to be.’ The first event is the sun’s rays hitting the ice and then bouncing off, which is located in time by ‘right now’. The second event consists of the ice melting. The third is the sun’s rays now being absorbed by the ocean, and the fourth is a fast build-up of heat. There are logical relations between the events, so the loss of ice is causally related to the build-up of heat. There is, therefore, a trace of narrative here, but the time periods are vague, the events just happen rather than any conscious characters actually doing anything, and the location is a large area on a map rather than being a specific location that the viewer is imaginatively placed into. This kind of informative representation is common in environmental communication and is important for conveying some basic laws of physics that are necessary to understand the extent of the problem of climate change. However, what is missing are characters who are responsible for causing climate change, and those who suffer most from the impacts, although in this section Gore does go on to talk about the impact on polar bears.

Mixed paradigmatic and narrative presentation The second scene is one of the most memorable from the film. It has paradigmatic aspects, but narrative aspects are also introduced through the inclusion of a salient and appealing character. The character is a frog, who is shown in a brief cartoon as jumping into a beaker of water that is being heated up. The words that Gore speaks are as follows: [Voiceover to a cartoon on the screen] If a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it jumps right out again because it senses the danger. But the very same frog [emphasized through intonation], if it jumps into a pot of lukewarm water that is slowly brought to a boil, will just sit there and it won’t move. It’ll just sit there, even as the temperature continues to go up and up. It’ll stay there, until [pause] until it’s rescued. It’s important to rescue the frog. [Back to Al Gore presenting] But the point is this: our collective nervous system is like that frog’s nervous system. It takes a

sudden jolt sometimes before we become aware of a danger. If it seems gradual, even if it really is happening quickly, we’re capable of just sitting there and not responding. One of the reasons it is memorable is the humour that occurs when the tension is broken by the words ‘it’s rescued’ – the frog does not boil to death after all. Since the frog is a stylized cartoon drawing the photorealism is low, which creates an overall low modality (Kress and van Leeuwen 2021, p. 159) or claim to truthful representation. Linguistically, the reduction in modality is created by the whole sequence being conditional – it is something which would happen to any frog in similar circumstances rather than a specific one. The low modality suggests that the sequence is not actually about a real or fictional frog, but instead has a symbolic meaning – the frog is an analogy for something else. Al Gore explains what that ‘something else’ is after the cartoon is over. There is a clear narrative here, the sequence of events starting with the frog jumping into the beaker, the temperature going up, the frog getting warmer, and then being rescued. The shape of the beaker with its integrated thermometer, the fact that it is sitting on a burner, and the white bench give the indication of a location – a biology laboratory, albeit a low modality generic one. In his explanation following the cartoon, Al Gore then provides the mapping to make the analogy make sense. He explicitly maps the frog onto humanity, which he depicts as a singular entity with a common nervous system. This explicit mapping is enough to allow the reader to make all of the other implicit mappings: the danger maps to global warming, the process of ‘just sitting there’ to a lack of climate action, and the beaker of water to the earth. Implicit mappings are recovered from the context and require the reader to make them in their minds in order to make sense of the analogy. What is powerful about this narrative is that the imminent and certain danger of death to a sensitive creature like the frog is easily imaginable and the cause of the danger is readily apparent. This is in contrast to climate change, where the causes are much more complex and the future effects more diverse and difficult to pinpoint exactly. While this scene has a clear narrative element, the lack of specificity in the characters and location means it is a blend of paradigmatic and narrative presentations.

Narrative presentation The third scene I will analyse follows directly on from the frog scene and is highly compelling and moving. Unlike the cartoon frog in a generic laboratory, the characters and location in this sequence are very specific and represented with a high degree of realism. As Bruner (2010, p. 46) describes, narratives, ‘unlike logical propositions cannot be context free, cannot live in a vacuum … setting is crucial’. The words of the scene are as follows, all spoken by Gore as a voice-over: I don’t remember a time when I was a kid when summertime didn’t mean working with tobacco. I used to love it. It was during that period when working with the guys on the farm seemed like fun to me. Starting in 1964 with the Surgeon General’s report, the evidence was laid out on the connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. We kept growing tobacco. Nancy was almost 10 years older than me, and there were only two of us. She was my protector and my friend at the same time. She started smoking when she was a teenager and never stopped. She died of lung cancer. That’s one of the ways you don’t want to die. The idea that we had been part of that economic pattern that produced the cigarettes that produced the cancer, it was so painful at so many levels. My father, he had grown tobacco all his life. He stopped it. Whatever explanation that seemed to make sense in the past, just didn’t cut it anymore. He stopped it. It’s just human nature to take time to connect the dots. I know that. But I also know that there can be a day of reckoning when you wished you had connected the dots more quickly. The visual images that accompany these words all have high photorealism – they are images of real people, including a young Al Gore, his family, his sister Nancy, all in the real location of the farm they grew up on. The location is emphasized by a close shot of the sign ‘Gore Farms’ and triggers of a farming frame – tractors, harvest, crops, barns, etc. The realism of the characters and the strong temporal and logical connections between events make this a prototypical narrative, and the sequence of events can be analysed using Todorov’s theory of a transition from equilibrium to degeneration to new equilibrium (Todorov and Weinstein 1969, p. 75).

The equilibrium is the happy time spent on the farm, which begins to get disrupted when the Surgeon General’s report comes out. The event immediately following this is that they kept growing tobacco. Todorov describes how there can be a delay between the disruption and the recognition of the disruption, which is a key part of this narrative – that the disruption is only recognized in a later event, when the health impacts ‘come home’ and Nancy dies of cancer. In the final events, a new equilibrium is created when Al Gore’s father stops growing tobacco. These events form the ideational component of the scene and are linked both by time and by the logical connections between farming tobacco, taking part in economic activity that produces cigarettes, the damage cigarettes cause to health, and the death of Nancy. There is also a strong interpersonal component, through placing people in the semantic role of accompaniment (‘working with the guys’), through the relations of ‘protector’ and ‘friend’, and the kinship terms ‘sister’ and ‘father’. The images of close family members interacting with each other or looking kindly at each other also build a sense of interpersonal relationships. What is most important in this scene, which makes it so touching and memorable, is the first person emotional narrative that runs parallel to the ideational content and uses the pathos mode of persuasion. Emotional narratives are sequences of emotional events, where a character or characters are represented as feeling a particular emotion at a particular time. Linguistically, the emotional events are triggered explicitly by emotive items – words or phrases which directly state emotions such as ‘sad’ or ‘excited’. As Martin and Rose (2007, p. 30) point out, emotions can also be triggered implicitly through physical proxies (e.g., a smile, drooping shoulders, or pacing) or by actions and events that are associated with particular emotions (e.g., nurture, torture, or a birthday). Implicit triggers are often more powerful than explicit ones on the ‘show don’t tell’ principle. In this scene there is a series of events which comprise the ideational narrative, but there is also a parallel series of events which build an emotional narrative. The first emotional events occur with the explicit emotive items ‘love’ and ‘fun’ (towards working with tobacco); then the description of Nancy as ‘my protector and my friend’ with the implicit

positive emotions associated with that kind of relationship; then ‘one of the ways you don’t want to die’ (about Nancy’s death) is an understated negative expression leaving the reader to imagine the details and associated emotions; the next emotional event is the explicit ‘painful at so many levels’ (about being complicit in tobacco production), and the final is ‘wished you had connected the dots more quickly’ which implies regret. The music in the background is subtle, almost indiscernible – slow simple notes that reverberate, creating a mournful tone with a slight religious undertone that reinforces the feelings of sadness and regret. Clearly there are temporal relations between the emotional events – they occur in sequence, but there are also logical connections, which rely on our knowledge of emotion. The ideational details in this scene are an essential scaffold, but the key message is the emotional one around the pain of being complicit in a destructive practice and the regret of inaction. While the scene is literally about tobacco, it is actually an elaborate analogy for climate change action. The viewer is alerted to the analogy since they expect and presume relevance, and when faced with something seemingly irrelevant they work out ways to make it fit (Clark 2013). The only way that a tobacco narrative can fit into a climate change film is if it is taken as an analogy. There is a double analogy too, since the scene is meant to illustrate inaction in the face of known danger, which links back to the frog analogy that precedes it. Al Gore’s family did not act even after being alerted to a danger, therefore behaving in a way that was analogous to the frog, who was in turn analogous to all of us for not reacting to the threat of climate change. The culmination of the scene occurs in the expression ‘you wished you had connected the dots more quickly’, with the generic ‘you’ referring on one hand to Al Gore’s family, but with an interpersonal function that reaches out to encompass all of us. As James and Morel (2020, p. 9) describe, ‘narratives can affect the emotions, attitudes, and behaviours of readers by encouraging them to simulate the emotional states and experiences of characters and/or narrators’. It is an impassioned plea for us to join the dots now before it is too late, act, and by acting avoid the emotions of pain and regret.

Overall narrative and micronarratives The tobacco narrative described above is a micronarrative, a short but complete narrative, with start and end, that is embedded in the larger narrative arc of the film. The micronarratives contribute to the overall structure in various ways, whether as building blocks, examples, illustrations, or reinforcements. In the film, there are two main narrative structures that run from beginning to end. The first is an autobiographical narrative of Al Gore himself, detailing his emerging understanding of the science of climate change and what it portends for the world, the personal tragedies that gave him a sense of meaning and inspired him to work towards addressing climate change, the setbacks which only served to strengthen his resolve, and his journey around the world giving his talk. The second narrative structure is the scientific story of climate change, its causes, its impacts on the world, and solutions. The scientific story is presented primarily through ten scenes which show Gore presenting his PowerPoint show to an audience, and the autobiographical story consists of ten narrated segments with music and archive footage from Gore’s personal and professional life. The film makes use of the classic rhetorical technique of stimulating the audience’s emotions, changing their minds, and then calling on them to act. The emotional stimulation occurs through the personal narrative and graphic images of ecological destruction; the attempt to change minds consists of the scientific explanations, and it is in the final part of the film that the call for action occurs. The overall scientific narrative (to summarize it very briefly) begins with the famous Earthrise photograph, of which Gore states: This is the first picture of the Earth from space that any of us ever saw. It was taken on Christmas Eve 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission … that one picture exploded in the consciousness of humankind. It led to dramatic changes. Within 18 months of this picture, the modem environmental movement had begun. The picture can be seen as the Given information, the starting point of the earth as the precious container of all life alone in vacuum of space. Then the

New information begins. The realization that due to increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, more heat is being trapped, leading to heatwaves, droughts, floods, hurricanes and sea level rise in the recent past and present. Then the realization that there will be a catastrophic increase in these events in the future if greenhouse gas levels continue to rise. Following this, there is a non-event – the lack of action on a scale that could prevent this grim future. After many further explanations, examples and analysis, there is, finally, a call to action. In narrative terms, a call to action is a sequence of events that the reader can make happen in the future to achieve desirable results, in this case addressing climate change. The call is expressed as follows: The fact is that we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem. We’ve got to do a lot of things, not just one. If we use more efficient electricity appliances, we can save this much off of the global warming pollution that would otherwise be put into the atmosphere. If we use other end-use efficiency, this much. If we have higher mileage cars, this much. And all these begin to add up. Other transport efficiency, renewable technology, carbon capture and sequestration … Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each of us can make choices to change that. With the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive, we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands. In his analysis of the film, Lyons (2019) is positive about ‘the risk-aware citizen exercising self-efficacy in the face of climate change’ (p. 1156) that the film models, stating that ‘Gore makes himself, and us, part of the problem, but also part of the solution, creating a space for individual agency on the part of an informed public’ (p. 1166). However, according to my ecosophy, the call for action at the end of the film has severe limitations. It does not call for anyone, anywhere, to reduce their consumption, or for resources to be redistributed in a socially just way so that the poorest can meet their needs. The expression ‘the cars we drive’ presupposes that in the future ‘we’ will still be driving cars rather than changing our lifestyle and instead walking and cycling in cities redesigned for active travel. The call for action is voluntary personal changes that make no difference to lifestyle,

rather than the transformational changes needed of corporations, political systems, social systems and culture. Yuen concurs with this assessment, accusing the film of following ‘compelling evidence for ecological collapse with woefully inadequate injunctions to green consumption or lobbying of political representatives’ (Yuen in Truscello 2018, p. 259). The last line of the quote above frames the suggested actions as a ‘solution’ to climate change, using a problem/solution frame. However, with this frame, once a problem is solved it disappears, which is something that cannot happen with climate change since catastrophic changes are already occurring and are locked in even if greenhouse gas output levels reduce. The use of a problem/solution frame distracts attention away from preparing for the inevitable changes that climate change has and will cause. As John Michael Greer (2017) points out: Many things we’ve conceptualised as problems are actually predicaments … The difference is that a problem calls for a solution; the only question is whether one can be found and made to work, and once this is done, the problem is solved. A predicament, by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Towards the end of the film, Al Gore loops back to the Earthrise photo at the start with the following compelling, if anthropocentric, conclusion: You see that pale blue dot? That’s us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs and all the tragedies. All the wars, all the famines. All the major advances. It’s our only home. And that is what is at stake. Rosteck and Frentz (2009, p. 14) provide a useful summary of the effective aspects of the film: The ‘objective’ science documentary provides the ‘evidence’ for the crisis that initiates the environmental jeremiad. The personal narrative encourages our identification with the quest and with an attitude toward nature and the environment. The mythic structure gives universal appeal and forms the template that anchors Gore’s personal story. The

biographical suggests a solution to the apocalyptic situation by providing a model of transformation and action. Exploiting the potential of being open to simultaneous interpretations – mythic, scientific, political – this complex text provokes the possibility of understanding and action. Although the final call for action is, according to my ecosophy, disappointing in its limitation to small individual actions that do not require a reduction of consumption or social change, the film does overall demonstrate a masterful intertwining of paradigmatic and narrative forms, interpersonal and intertextual metafunctions, logos, ethos and pathos. It provides a model for effective environmental communication through narrative that could be applied to more profound calls for action that respond to the predicament of climate change.

This changes everything Naomi Klein is a journalist, professor of climate justice, activist and author of the acclaimed book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Together with director Avi Lewis, she made the 2015 climate change film This Changes Everything based on the book. Alice Walker sums the film up as ‘a film that brings our peril into focus and what we might learn from despair’ (Walker 2015). This Changes Everything has three commonalities with An Inconvenient Truth. Both are about climate change, both involve a narrator travelling around the world, and both offer some kind of solution. Aside from that, however, they could not be more different, and the differences are illuminating. Al Gore is a white, western male who is depicted travelling around the world giving PowerPoint presentations – the ultimate one-way form of communication since they are prepared in advance. This has colonial overtones and follows the banking model of education, described by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: ‘This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits’ (Freire 2000, p. 72). On the other hand, in This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein travels around the

world listening to the voices of indigenous, traditional and local people whose lives have been harmed by fossil fuels and who are resisting their oppression. Lyons (2019) describes the central motif of An Inconvenient Truth as ‘Gore is the world’, and calls the image of Gore entering the studio with a halo of light around him as ‘Gorerise’, a parallel to the ‘Earthrise’ photo that Gore then shows. Certainly, Gore appears in person almost all the way through the film. In contrast, Naomi Klein appears only as an offscreen narrator and occasionally in the background, intermingling with the people that she is listening to. For example, in one scene she appears for a few seconds holding a child, deeply embedded with a Cree family as they share a meal outdoors and listen to a member of the community speak about fossil fuel threats. Klein is not an omniscient narrator providing the objective truth as a voice-over – she is still herself, addressing the audience in the first person and referring to them conversationally in the second person. The opening words of the film are ‘Can I be honest with you? I’ve always hated films about climate change’. While Klein provides a cognitive scaffold that holds the film together, the majority of the film is in the voices of those she visits. Sometimes the voiceover narration picks up on and uses framings that the communities use. For example, Crystal Lameman from the Beaver Lake Cree Nation says ‘We believe that the land owns us. We are here just as visitors on this land’, and later Klein picks up the framing in her narration: ‘Could it be that we are not the masters after all, that we’re just guests here?’ This shows that the voices of the indigenous people have been listened to.

Narrative structure In Table 7.1, I have provided a brief summary of the narrative structure of the film. Intertwined with this overall scaffold are seven micronarratives that explore specific cases of communities affected by, and resisting, fossil fuels interests. The first case is the Beaver Lake Cree Nation in Alberta Canada, whose lands are damaged and threatened by tar sand developments. The second is a young couple whose farm in Powder River Basin, Montana, is threatened by pipelines, coalmines and shale oil projects. The third is the

Northern Cheyenne Tribe facing similar threats in Montana. The fourth is a local community in Halkidiki, Greece whose lands are threatened by a gold mine; then to Andhra Pradesh, India, where wetlands are threatened by a coal plant; then China where citizens suffer from air pollution; and finally Germany, where citizens are successful in taking local control of their energy supply.

TABLE 7.1 A summary of the narrative structure of This Changes Everything Equilibrium

Pre-fossil fuels. Prevailing story that nature is a mother; human life follows the rhythms of nature (e.g., boats go where the wind blows).

Pre-cursor to New stories arise that nature is a machine, the economy is a machine, and degeneration the goal of society is endless growth. Beginning of Fossil fuels are mined on immense scale as technology meets ideology; life degeneration no longer follows nature (e.g., boats go where diesel engines push them). Degeneration Specific areas of land (sacrifice zones) are destroyed by mining, energy production and pollution. The entire planet is threatened by climate change. Recognition Indigenous, traditional and/or local communities recognize the harm caused of by fossil fuels and discover plans for more industrialization of their lands. degeneration Action to repair the damage

Communities rise up to take direct action and legal action to prevent the destruction; they become the vanguard of a much wider movement to resist the destructive stories of capitalism/industrialization.

New equilibrium

A vision for the future. Life returns to follow the rhythms of nature (e.g., wind turbines follow the wind); communities are strong; life is lived according to alterative stories (e.g., humans are a guest on the land rather than owning the land).

These diverse micronarratives are brought together by the overall narrative of a move away from the destructive stories that NATURE IS A MACHINE and THE GOAL OF SOCIETY IS ECONOMIC GROWTH, towards new stories to live by based on respect for people and nature. This theme of stories and new stories is continually referred back to during the film in the voiceover narration, binding everything together. Table 7.2 gives examples from different points in the film where Klein critiques ‘stories’. The lefthand column shows the place Klein is in when she makes the comment,

starting with Britain, where some of the industrial and colonial stories were born. In this film Klein explicitly uses the terms ‘story’, ‘narrative’ and ‘ideology’ to refer to the cognitive structures that underpin industrial society. The use of these terms draws attention to the fact that they are not the only possible ways to understand reality. Towards the end of the film, Klein goes one step further to reduce the facticity of the story that ‘nature is our machine’ by calling it a ‘fantasy’ and points towards ‘another story taking root’ that is very different. Clearly this film is a performance of ethical leadership (see Chapter 6), as Klein reveals and questions the stories of an unsustainable civilization according to her ecosophy and works toward replacing them with new stories based around cooperation and respect for nature.

Representation of emotions There is some abstract paradigmatic content in the film. For example, David Collyer from the Canadian Association of Oil Producers Canada says to camera, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘Canada has the third largest oil reserve in the world, the vast majority of which are in the oil sands … In terms of the capital that’s projected to be invested in the oil sands development, something in the range of $150 billion to $250 billion dollars’. This is followed a bit later by a black backgrounded intertitle with white text that says ‘The tailing ponds of waste from tar sands mining cover 220 square kilometres’. A figure like 220 square kilometres abstracts away from the nature of what that land is and what it means to the people who live there and to all the life that inhabits it. This kind of abstract informative content is kept to a minimum, however, with the focus much more strongly on the more vivid narrative content, particularly during the micronarratives.

TABLE 7.2 Voiceover narration in This Changes Everything that refers to ‘stories’ Geoengineering I began to wonder, what if human nature isn’t the problem? What if even conference, greenhouse gases aren’t the problem? What if the real problem is a story, Britain one we’ve been telling ourselves for 400 years … The earth is not, as most people thought back then, a mother, to be feared and revered …

The earth is a machine and we are its engineers, its masters … We can extract from it whatever we want … This story is where the long road to global warming began. Alberta tar When I look I feel like it’s that old story reaching its crescendo. sands, Canada Greece

As I watched the struggle over a goldmine in Greece I saw that familiar pattern, nature as machine, man at the levers. But I also realized something else. In this story, the economy is supposed to be a machine, too.

China

When I first went to China I saw that the fastest growing economy in the world is literally choking on that growth. The story is failing them too.

Germany

I spent six years wandering through the wreckage caused by that 400year-old fantasy that we could treat nature as our machine. But now I see another story taking root, starting from a whole other premise.

In the micronarratives, emotions have a key role to play, not just as a way of emphasizing an already existing logically connected set of events, but as events and logical connectives in their own right. The primary role that emotional content plays is in vividly conveying the harm caused by the fossil-fuelled stories of industrial civilization, thereby calling them into question. Emotions are sometimes expressed directly in words. When Crystal Lameman from the Beaver Lake Cree Nation discovered that an oil spill had contaminated her nation’s ancestral lands, she says ‘You know when I heard about the spill I was really hurt’. Later, the young farmer in Montana who found oil on his land says, ‘the fact we’re still finding jars like this on day eight, you know, kills me’. These statements use a conventional metaphor which maps emotional suffering to injury and death. More often, though, the emotion is represented through facial expressions and gestures. After Lameman says, ‘our ancestors from Beaver Lake are buried in the Southwest part of that lake and the spill happened in the southern part of that lake’, she pauses then says ‘so’, her voice trails off, she looks down at the ground, and shrugs slightly, with a serious expression on her face. The shot then changes to her uncle, Al Lameman, who takes his hat off, looks down to the ground, and says ‘the environment. It’s suffering’. The tone of voice, physical movements and facial expressions are all subtle cues to their emotional states. When the young farmer in Montana says ‘we’re going to be a commodity colony for the rest of the country and the world’, she nods her head

solemnly while simultaneously her partner shakes his head solemnly – different gestures, but the same meaning. In the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, one of the men says ‘they’re just going to pull off the “overburden” [the soil and trees] … look at it; look at how beautiful it is here’ while a woman wipes tears away. Lameman’s voice breaks up with emotion after a community leader says ‘it’s just like barren wasteland. You know, my great grandchildren have to live with that’. This way of conveying emotion follows the maxim of ‘show don’t tell’ and is all the more powerful because when we see people who are experiencing emotion then it can trigger mirror neurons: ‘Mirror neurons respond both when perceiving an action and while executing an action. They provide a direct internal experience of another person’s actions or emotions and may be the neurological basis of empathy’ (MacGillivray 2009, p. 17). At some points in the film, emotions are conveyed through empathy without any kind of explicit reference or gestures. In China, a small child is asked ‘Have you have seen a star in the sky?’ He responds in a matter-offact way: ‘Méiyǒu’ (No). ‘What about clouds?’: ‘Méiyǒu’. The viewer is left to imagine for themself what it is like to live somewhere so polluted that children cannot even see clouds. These emotions are central to the stage of the overall narrative where the degeneration of the harmony is recognized and hits home. The next stage, repairing the damage, is approached in this film primarily through protest as well as through legal action. The protests bring a different range of emotions – defiance, anger, elation, excitement, affinity, solidarity, jubilation. These are shown by the reactions of the crowds, shouting defiantly at police in India, singing and clapping in India, cheering and jumping up and down with an arm in the air at a rousing speech by Lameman in Canada. There are many scenes of protest with a kaleidoscope of emotions, but towards the end of the film they are summed up by an unnamed commentator in a way that gives them a strong positive appraisal with the repeated word ‘incredible’: When you see communities who are thrown into the front line … you see the incredible transformation that happens. They become stronger. They stand up. And you’re like ‘isn’t this incredible?’ Isn’t this the society we want?

The final stage in the narrative is a new equilibrium, something that the world is very far away from, but the film does share a moment of victory and success in Germany. Klein describes how: First they [the people] fought against nuclear energy. When they turned the tide they fought for alternatives and in the process sparked a true power shift. Hundreds of cities and towns have taken the electricity grid back from private corporations and now run it themselves, often through democratic cooperatives. In the background, as these words are spoken, there are images of protests where people come together in solidarity and then afterwards groups cheering, arms being raised in the air, smiles and hugging as they celebrate success. One woman wipes a tear of happiness away. To summarize the emotional narrative very briefly: Fossil fuel interests cause harm, leading to negative emotions, which lead to action and emotions of defiance, anger, solidarity and then jubilation when successful in opposing them. The key question is what are the new stories to live by in This Changes Everything? These are given in various places in the film. For example: Vanessa Braided Hair from the ecoCheyenne movement which protects Cheyenne homelands for future generations dismisses capitalist extractive stories and replaces them with a story of reciprocity: You don’t take and take and take. And you don’t consume and consume and consume. You take what you need and then you put back into the land. I believe it in my heart. This has to happen. There is the story already mentioned that humans do not own the land but are visitors on the land. Another story from a member of the Anti-mining Solidarity Committee is that wealth should be thought of as created by people, not extracted from the earth: [The dominant story is of] wealth as something that you can take out of the earth, not as something that is created by the people. And then there are stories that alternative energy is in tune with the rhythms of nature; the story that people coming together have power; and the more

general story that climate change is an opportunity to build a better world. There are also stories about the importance of listening to, respecting and empowering communities that are the most directly affected by climate change. However, for Truscello (2018), there is not enough in the film to provide an alternative to the capitalist system that it so strongly criticizes. Truscello admits that ‘This Changes Everything does contain some coverage of necessary and exciting forms of resistance, from the “environmentalism of the poor” in India to the resistance of indigenous people in Canada’ (p. 269), but concludes that: By not identifying the structural source of the environmental crises, and by providing piecemeal, reform-oriented solutions, eco-opportunist documentaries such as Racing Extinction, This Changes Everything, Chasing Ice, and Chasing Coral …. understate the crises and provide insufficient solutions to such an extent that they can be something worse than unproductive; they can be counterproductive. Truscello would have liked to have seen more about ‘replacing capitalism with a less ecocidal economic system’ (p. 263). My own opinion is that Truscello (2018) is too hard on the film. Unlike the other films he mentions, This Changes Everything does identify the structural source of the environmental crises in the metanarratives of capitalism and neoliberalism. In contrast to An Inconvenient Truth’s solution of ‘woefully inadequate injunctions to green consumption or [personal] lobbying of political representatives’ (Yuen in Truscello 2018, p. 259), it calls for people to come together and act collectively to resist those metanarratives and search for new stories to live by. While that may not be sufficient to provide a ‘solution’ to ecological destruction, collective community-based responses are absolutely necessary in dealing with everything that is in store for the world in the coming times. The film also demonstrates the importance of listening rather than just charging around the world with a message to tell people. Overall, in this chapter, I have analysed two films which both contain paradigmatic and narrative modes of presentation, and in the narrative mode make use of emotional narrative and emotional reasoning to make

powerfully persuasive points. It is possible to draw some of the techniques from the films and use them in other forms of environmental communication, while carefully leaving behind negative aspects such as Gore’s one-way communication and trivial ‘solutions’.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER EIGHT

Persuading: Multimodal Genres in Food Advertising Food plays a central role in life processes and ecological systems, from health and the sustenance of all lives to the devastating impact of intensive agriculture on animal welfare, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and climate change. On one side there is an economic system that prioritizes profit above all else and corporations that increase their profit the more products they sell. On the other side, we have fragile human bodies which can only eat a finite quantity before becoming unhealthy and have biological requirements for a particular balance of food. Likewise, we have a fragile environment that can only produce a finite quantity of certain kinds of food. Michael Pollan (2008) summarizes the global state of understanding of human dietary needs in seven words: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’ (p. 1). This, luckily, is the kind of diet that the global environment is able to support: ‘The best choices for our health also happen to be the best choices for our planet’ (p. xiv). Pollan is a journalist, but his advice is confirmed by the scientific EAT-Lancet Commission which found that ‘a plant-forward diet where whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes comprise a greater proportion of foods consumed’ is optimal for humans and planet (EAT-Lancet 2019). What happens when the corporate imperative to sell meets the fragility of ecosystems and human bodies is

more than 1.9 billion adults in the world who are overweight (WHO 2021), a devastated environment (UNEP 2019), and billions of animals suffering on intensive farms. The link between corporate imperatives and consumers is advertising, which can encourage consumers to purchase things that have a detrimental impact on their health, the environment, or the lives of animals. In this chapter, I will be exploring some of the techniques of meat and dairy advertising that combine genres, narratives, modes, rhetorical features and linguistic features to persuade consumers to buy products. There are two main reasons for analysing mainstream advertising: firstly to develop awareness of manipulative techniques and promote critical reception of advertising, and secondly to repurpose the techniques in the service of counter-advertising which can be used to encourage people not to buy harmful products. The chapter then analyses econarratives in counteradvertisements to illustrate these techniques in action. As the ecological activist and journalist Ayana Young describes: [We need to see] what advertising uses: what does the dominant culture use to seduce us? And why are we not using those tools to seduce people in another direction? Can we look at what does work and actually utilize those tools with integrity, with love, with devotion for a greater good, and also be creative, make art, and have a fun time while doing it? Young 2022 The ethics and science of food, health and planetary wellbeing are, of course, highly complex. To simplify them for the purposes of this chapter, I am going to assume that campaigns that promote meat, dairy and unsustainable plant foods like palm oil are potentially harmful to humans and the planet. On the other hand, campaigns that persuade people to reduce consumption of these products and eat more sustainable plant-based alternatives are potentially beneficial. This aligns with my ecosophy (outlined in Chapter 1) in promoting wellbeing for all species within environmental limits, and evidence such as Poore and Nemecek’s (2018, p. 987) study which found that ‘most strikingly, [environmental] impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change’.

Advertising can already reach us via an ever-expanding number of channels, from billboards to TV, internet and phones. In 2014, Google stated that ‘a few years from now, we and other companies could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities’ (Google in Thakur 2014). We can already see some of this prophecy coming true. In addition to multiple channels, advertising makes use of a multitude of semiotic modes (Danielsson and Selander 2021, p. 17) including speaking, writing, sounds, music, music lyrics, images, colours, gestures, and facial expressions. Each mode has a particular affordance, which consists of the meanings it is well suited to convey in particular situations (Danielsson and Selander 2021, p. 18). Combining modes together to form multimodal texts can help to craft powerful and persuasive messages since each mode can convey the aspects of meaning it is best at. This is particularly powerful in advertising where space and time are highly limited. A short TV advertisement may contain spoken words, music, captions on screen, and visual images, all working together simultaneously to convey a message in both obvious and subtle ways. Advertising forms a multimodal genre since the content is organized according to conventional patterns. TV advertisements, for example, are standardly thirty seconds long, but can be twenty, forty or other multiples of ten seconds and appear in standard positions within TV programmes. The genre has certain constraints about what the content can be in regard to decency and whether claims are warranted, policed by advertising standards authorities. However, there is also a lot of freedom to be creative within those constraints. According to Stöckl and Molnar (2018, p. 262): a genre is a type of text characterized by a particular setting, a distinctive communicative function – which reflects in an ordered series of communicative stages – recognizable linguistic (and pictorial, intermodal) patterns and overall norms of thematic, pragmatic and stylistic organization. Genres are more than just templates for structuring text (e.g., an interview, lecture, news report or advertisement). They provide ‘ways of acting and interacting in the course of social events’ (Fairclough 2003, p. 65). In other

words, genres are part of the construction of society. The particular genre of TV advertising, where corporations get a fixed slot within programmes to persuade watchers to buy their product is both a reflection of the prevailing capitalist, consumerist society, and part of how that society is constructed, maintained and reproduced. McLuhan (2001, p. 7) famously stated ‘The medium is the message’, but we could also say ‘The genre is the message’, as genres themselves construct society. In this chapter, I will be focusing on video advertisements, and I divide this genre into four different ‘types’: the classic-type, identity-type, narrative-type and counter-type. Most advertising consists of a combination of these types. This is not the only possible classification of advertising but serves the purposes of this chapter as it highlights some of the key forms of persuasion and resistance.

Classic-type and identity-type advertising Early advertisements were primarily what I call classic-type advertisements. A classic-type advertisement describes the properties of the product being advertised, represents them in a favourable light, and ends with an explicit encouragement of the viewer to buy the product. A 1950 Coca-Cola advertisement, for example, claims ‘There’s nothing like it because Coke in the bottle is an exclusive blend … of delicious natural flavourings’ (in ED 2021). This gives information about the product alongside a positive appraisal pattern created by the adjectives exclusive, natural, and delicious. The advertisement ends with ‘You be sure to stock up with plenty of extra cartons’ – an unsubtle use of an imperative with a second-person pronoun that reaches out to the reader and exhorts them to buy. However, the blatant corporate agenda of pushing products onto readers undermines the credibility of classic-type advertisements because of what Potter (1996, p. 123) calls ‘stake’ – the company is obviously biased so why should the reader believe what they say? Classic-type advertising still persists in more recent advertising but is most often combined with something much more powerful: identity-type

advertising, where what is being sold is not just the product itself but the kind of person that the purchaser could become if they bought it. An example of this combination of classic and identity-type advertising is a thirty second Carl’s Jr television advertisement for the ‘American Thickburger’. The advertisement starts with a cheeseburger taking up the whole screen and a male off-screen narrator with a deep voice asking, ‘What’s more American than a cheeseburger?’ The shot zooms out to reveal that the burger is in the hands of an ‘all-American’ model with a US flag bikini; then zooms out further to reveal she is in a hot tub with the New York skyline in the background; then that the bathtub is in a pickup truck driven by a bull rider in a cowboy hat; and then that the pickup truck is on an aircraft carrier; and finally the aircraft carrier is revealed to be underneath the statue of liberty, with fireworks and formation fighter jets in the background. The advertisement finishes with the words on screen ‘THE MOST AMERICAN THICKBURGER’ as the orchestral music with brass instruments comes to a crescendo. Table 8.1 is a multi-modal transcription of the advertisement. The advertisement fits the classic-type in providing details about the product: that it is a cheeseburger, with a hotdog and a specific type of fried potato, kettle fries. As is typical in this genre, the final moments feature the product itself, both visually and in words (‘THE MOST AMERICAN THICKBURGER’). On the other hand, there is something else going on with the Carl’s Jr advertisement which goes beyond simply describing a product and highlighting its positive qualities. The overwhelming focus is on building and defining an identity for the product, and by association, the person purchasing the product. The identity is obviously the national identity of being an ‘American’, with the word ‘American’ repeated six times in two modes, along with a carefully selected series of cultural symbols of America. This is partly drawing on already existing symbols, but it is also selecting and reinforcing symbols in ways which actively shape a particular version of what it means to be an American. This version of national identity places emphasis on masculinity and militarism signified by the aircraft carrier, fighter planes, pickup truck, cowboy hat, bull rider, and even the brass instruments in the music which convey the feeling of a

military parade. The woman in this version is white, blonde and objectified in a bikini, and the natural world is almost entirely excluded. Above all, the ‘American’ identity is that of a proud consumer of meat, dairy, and fast-food products. Everything about this identity – the vehicles, the consumerist image of the hot tub, the militarism, the food choices, and the absence of any relationship with the natural world – is negative for both health and the environment. The Carl’s Jr advertisement, then, is partly a classic advertisement informing the reader about the product, but is primarily what I call an identity-type advertisement, selling the viewer a new or improved version of themself if they buy the product.

TABLE 8.1 Transcript of modes in Carl’s Jr American Thickburger advertisement Timing

Content

2–28

Mode: Music stirring music with brass instruments starts softly and slowly builds to a crescendo by the end of the advertisement Mode: Spoken Narration

Mode: Image

1–7

What’s more cheeseburger: extreme close-up, then close-up. American than a cheeseburger? This cheeseburger. Loaded with a hot dog and potato chips

7–10

In the hands of allAmerican model Samantha Hoopes

zoom out to reveal model with US flag bikini holding the burger

10–11

In a hot tub

zooms out to reveal model is in a hot tub with the New York skyline in background

11–13

In a pickup truck

zooms out to reveal the hot tub is on a pickup truck

13–15

Driven by an zooms out to reveal the driver in cowboy hat American bull rider

15–17

On an aircraft carrier

zooms out to reveal truck is on an aircraft carrier

17–20

Under the gaze of Lady Liberty

zooms out to show the Statue of Liberty in the foreground, fighter jets and fireworks in background

20–24

As she admires the model takes bite of burger and looks at camera most American thickburger

24–27

with a split hotdog and kettle fries.

image of burger on white background Mode: Words on screen the most american thickburger. 100% black angus beef. available in 1/3lb & 1/2lb

27–28

New from Carl’s Jr

Carl’s Jr charbroiled burgers [logo] #MostAmerican

Narrative-type advertising A powerful technique that advertisements use is to draw from the available repertoire of cinematic genres such as love stories, action films, comedies or war movies and reproduce them (as far as possible) in the form of an advertisement. This is what Fairclough (2003, p. 68) calls ‘genre disembedding’: That is, genres being, so to speak, lifted out of, ‘disembedded’ from, particular networks of social practices where they initially developed, and becoming available as a sort of ‘social technology’ which transcends both differences between networks of practices and differences of scale. An example of genre disembedding is the Meat and Livestock Australia advertisement for lamb, Operation Boomerang (MLA 2016), which draws heavily from the genre of war films and produces a hybrid war film/advertisement genre. As Fairclough (2003, p. 69) points out, ‘particular texts may be innovative in terms of genre – they may mix different genres in novel ways’. The advertisement starts with ominous music, off-screen narrated words ‘Warsaw, winter 96’ and the image of a woman on a balcony screaming because it was Australia Day and she had no lamb to eat. There is then a cut

to the present day and the same woman says ‘We’ll never let that happen to another Australian again. Commence Operation Boomerang’. The music changes to a fast action beat and there are military images of soldiers, a warship, and a helicopter. A commander briefs his soldiers ‘There are Australians stranded overseas with a snowball’s chance in hell of eating lamb on Australia Day’. Then in a series of scenes in countries across the world soldiers rescue Australians and bring them back to Australia to eat lamb. In one case, however, the soldier says, ‘In a few hours you’ll be eating lamb on the beach’, but the Australian replies ‘But I’m a vegan now’. The music changes to a dramatic beat, the commander shouts ‘Abort, get them out of there’ and the operation commander curtly snaps ‘vegans’. Then the soldier torches the vegan’s flat with a flame thrower as he cowers in the corner. The helicopter carrying back the rescued Australians lands triumphantly with cheering in the control room as the Prime Minister says ‘Are we smelling the lamb?’, to which the answer is ‘Yes, Prime Minister, the barbeque is lit’. The advertisement ends with the words-on-screen ‘You never lamb alone on Australia Day’, then ‘We love lamb’, as the helicopter flies over Sydney Opera House. The advertisement has an extremely clear narrative structure consisting of a series of logically and temporally connected events. The narrative starts with events in the past that establish the motivation and goals of the military operation. There is the operation launch, preparation, a series of parallel actions to accomplish the goals, a twist in one scene, and then the completion of the operation with success and celebration that the goals have been accomplished. I call advertisements like this which are based on a narrative structure narrative-type advertisements. The narrative structure is drawn from the genre of war film, and in its short two minutes the advertisement manages to pack in a very large number of images, scenes, words, and music that evoke the genre – from the terms ‘operation’ and ‘extraction’ to images of a warship, military helicopters, a military briefing, soldiers crashing through a ceiling commando style, and the heavy bass, fast-beat music. The subgenre is extraction film – films like Saving Private Ryan that involve soldiers rescuing comrades or civilians from hostile territories who are in grave danger. The central metaphor of the film maps overseas Australians to citizens in need of rescue; the countries they are in are mapped onto the

hostile territories, and the situation of not having lamb on Australia Day is represented as the grave danger. The use of the narrative structure of a war film is a particularly powerful way of shaping identities, since the characters in a war narrative fulfil particular roles: heroes, victims, allies, enemies, etc. Like the Carl’s Jr advertisement discussed above, this advertisement is forging a particular national identity, this time for what it means to be ‘Australian’. The country and nationality are evoked explicitly through the terms ‘Australia’ and ‘Australian’ which are repeated seven times, and implicitly through national symbols including Sydney Opera House, the words ‘kookaburra’ and ‘boomerang’, and the character of the Prime Minister. The appraisal patterns highlight the positivity of Australia and the negativity of other countries in what van Dijk (2009) calls an ‘ideological square’ (praising the ingroup while condemning the outgroup to build a strong identity). The national identity is associated with the military, violence, aggression, and masculinity in all but the opening scene. There is one active female character, the operation commander who is played by Lee Lin Chin, an Indonesian-Australian journalist. But all other activated roles are performed by white men (running, briefing, flying helicopters, abseiling, using flame throwers, and rescuing). The key aspect of identity that is promoted is, of course, being a meat eater, specifically a lamb eater. Meat is linked with the national identity through the association of lamb with ‘Australia Day’ throughout the advertisement, including the final slogan ‘You never lamb alone on Australia Day’. Sheep are non-native, having been introduced by colonists to Australia with devastating effects on the environment (BRS 2001), making this particular animal a symbol of colonialism, like Australia Day itself – as Davidson (2016) describes: Australia Day, also referred to as Invasion Day or Survival Day, routinely attracts protests against celebrating the arrival of the first fleet – the beginning of Indigenous dispossession, colonisation and massacres. In the advertisement, the juxtaposition of violence and eating meat is hardly coincidental since, as Bogueva and Phau (2016, p. 267) describe, meat carries images of strength and aggression which are valued in a competitive

world. Vegans are excluded from the identity of being Australian through the vegan character being the only one not repatriated. This character is passivated by being represented as physically cowering in the corner for the entire scene, while the (presumably meat-eating) soldier is activated through the material process of burning his flat. The advertisement is partly drawing on existing stereotypes of Australian identity, but due to the wide circulation of the advertisements it is also actively shaping the identity of what it means to be Australian. As Bogueva and Phau (2016, p. 264) point out: Marketing often contributes to both the establishing and reaffirming of myths and in so doing, encourages certain actions that become part of accepted normative thoughts and behaviours … Encouragement to perform certain actions, misinformation and myths repeated often enough become part of the accepted norm and steer certain behaviours. Overall, the entailments conveyed by the advertisement that could influence attitudes and behaviour include EATING MEAT IS A SYMBOL OF AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY, EATING MEAT IS STRONG, NOT-EATING MEAT IS WEAK AND UNACCEPTABLE, NOT HAVING MEAT IS A DANGEROUS SITUATION, and, to entrench the superiority of the national identity, OVERSEAS COUNTRIES ARE HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS. Unsurprisingly, there were complaints about the advertisement to the Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB), including one which read ‘I think all vegetarians and vegans are offended by this advertisement because it is saying that we are “unAustralian” and “lack spirit” ’ (in Calligeros 2016). However, the ASB dismissed the complaints on the following grounds: The Board noted that the overall tone and theme of the advertisement is intended to be humorous … There are exaggerated and unrealistic situations which have the look and feel of a movie. In the Board’s view these images … are fantasy and unrealistic and are not depictions of violence. This shows the power of narrative, humour, and genre disembedding to convey ideologies which would be unacceptable if stated directly.

The narrative in Operation Boomerang was explicitly about the product, lamb, which was mentioned throughout. However, there are advertisements which use narrative in more subtle ways that appear at first to be entirely unconnected with the product. An example is the Summer Love campaign from Häagen-Dazs, the American ice cream manufacturer. The campaign intended to open up a new market in Taiwan, a country where 88 per cent of the population have lactose intolerance: ‘an impaired ability to digest lactose, a sugar found in milk and other dairy products’ (ProCon 2022). The advertising agency responsible for the Summer Love campaign, Bates CHI, described it as follow: Taiwan is located in the subtropics region. The summer here is very hot, perfect for ice cream and perfect for a Häagen-Dazs promotion. As a premium imported brand, how do we get local consumers to desire and enjoy Häagen-Dazs? Love. That’s right, it’s all about love. Love is a basic necessity, everyone needs love. Bates Chi 2011 The agency created a four-minute narrative-type advertisement called ‘No. 596’ which opens with the words on screen A Häagen-Dazs Film. The use of the word ‘film’ and disembedded genre of a cinematic love story disguise the advertisement as entertainment. In the advertisement, a young attractive security guard in a bank muses philosophically about the boredom of his job, then assists an attractive woman (queue ticket number 596) who is sheltering from the heat in the bank’s air-conditioned lobby. They seem attracted to each other and arrange to meet at the end of his shift. The advertisement is understated and touching because both characters seem to have something missing in their lives. Importantly, there is no mention of the product at all in the advertisement. Aside from the brand name at the start and the image of a tub of ice cream at the end, the connection is only that heat brings the characters together and ice cream is cooling. By representing the advertisement as a film and following the cinematic conventions of a love story, the agency could exploit a new channel for marketing: the viral video. The agency reports that:

In just 37 days after releasing the advertisement on YouTube we got 421,000 views … we spread it out in all the popular websites as word-ofmouth marketing … the response was amazing … spreading virally as people passed them on to friends and posted them on Facebook … it became a hot topic and was reported on all major news channels … overall sales increased 55%. Haagen-Dazs Summer Love Campaign 2011 What the Häagen-Dazs advertisement shows is an evolution in advertising where the product is largely separated from the content of the advertisement. This disguises the goal of selling by making the intention appear to be the provision of an entertaining film. With no claims made about any particular properties of the project (e.g., that it is natural, delicious or healthy), there is nothing for the viewer to be sceptical about.

Counter-type advertising In the meat and dairy advertisements discussed so far there is an important group of characters that are missing (or erased) – the animals who are exploited or die for the product. Erasure is when something or someone important that is present in reality is missing from a text, or present in a disguised or distorted way (Stibbe 2021, p. 139). In the Operation Boomerang advertisement, sheep only appear as the mass noun ‘lamb’ referring to meat, rather than the count noun ‘lambs’ or ‘a lamb’ which refers to the animal. Visually, there are no animals, farms, farmers, or hints about the origin of the product, only the product itself – lamb meat on a barbeque. This avoids discussion of the environmental impact of meat products and avoids any risk of invoking compassion for the animals who are harmed in the production of the product. Arcari (2017) analyses the erasure of animals, and gives the following advice for animal rights campaigns: ‘Acknowledge non-human animals as living, sentient beings and avoid terms that aggregate, materialise and otherwise treat them as an inanimate resource.’ In other words, the advice is to represent animals saliently. Salience is the opposite of erasure and

consists of a vivid and prominent representation of something as important and worthy of attention (Stibbe 2021, p. 159). Making animals salient is one of the key techniques used in what I call counter-type advertisements, based on the concept of ‘counter-advertising’ (Agostinelli and Grube 2002, 2003). Counter-type advertisements use the genre of advertising to the end of encouraging the audience not to purchase particular products because of the ecological harm that they cause. De Boer et al. (2017, p. 395) describe how: Results of several experiments show that consumers are sensitive to traditional reminders of the animal origin of meat … What the experiments also demonstrate is that some of these consumers then become sensitive to an opportunity to act ethically. There are two main paths to increasing the salience of animals: The first is to show graphic images of the suffering of animals on factory farms. This is the approach that PETA’s non-narrative video Meet Your Meat takes, showing animals suffering in different kinds of setting with voice-over narration by actor Alec Baldwin describing the horrific conditions they must endure (PETA 2002). The other path uses narrative to make a connection between meat and the beauty and preciousness of the animals who die for it. An example is Extra Fresh, a TV advertisement from the international charity Vegan Friendly, broadcast in 2020 in Israel, which reached an audience of 35 per cent of the population. The founder of the charity stated ‘The Israeli audience saw on prime time, at the climactic moment of a reality show, the real source of the food it eats’ (in de Ferrer 2020). The advertisement consists of a young couple, shopping in a supermarket who ask for ‘extra fresh lamb’ from the meat counter and receive a beautiful actual living lamb. The key to the power of the advertisement is the emotional narrative with its own logic that runs parallel to the sequence of actions. The advertisement starts with light upbeat music which signifies happiness and the couple smile delightedly at each other as they put an apple in their basket – ‘perfect for my apple pie’ ( ) the woman says. This associates happy bonding with buying plant-based products. But when the man pulls out a frozen lamb’s leg from the freezer

the woman stops smiling: ‘Honey, I want it extra fresh’ ( ) she says, introducing a note of tension in their relationship. The man notices the fresh meat counter and smiles and winks – a way to resolve the tension. He asks for ‘fresh lamb’ ( ) and the woman interjects ‘extra-fresh’ ( ), in an assertive way that signifies slight distrust. Then the music stops and a butcher walks towards her in slow motion with a live lamb in his hands (Image 8.1a). All through this the butcher is smiling, indicating that this is just routine. He places the lamb in her arms and asks, ‘wrapped or chopped? ( )’. The woman pulls back, looks shocked, then sad, then loving as she hugs the lamb tenderly (Image 8.1b). The voice-over narration is ‘You are not actually surprised … Over 1 million Israelis have made the connection and stopped eating animals’ ( ). Finally the words ‘Making the connection’ ( ) appear on the screen.

FIGURE 8.1a–b Extra Fresh, by Vegan Friendly, reproduced with permission from Vegan Friendly

The emotional logic of the advertisement is as follows: an emotion of happiness when buying plant-based foods; tension over buying meat; shock, sadness and love at holding the lamb, and an entailment of avoiding negative emotions by not buying meat and experiencing positive emotions through buying plant-based food instead. The second person pronoun ‘you’ ( ) in ‘You are not actually surprised?’ ( ) reaches out to the viewers by predicting their surprised response and making it seem as if the narrator knows them. The expression ‘Over 1 million Israelis have

already made the connection’ ( ) places the viewer in an outgroup (outside the category of the one million vegetarian/vegan Israelis) and implies those outside of the group are ignorant of where their food comes from. The final words ‘Making the connection’ ( ) act as a call to action – a gerund which implicitly encourages the reader to join the ingroup of one million people and stop buying meat. A similar example that gives salience to the animal who dies for the food is Takeaway the Meat by the vegan charity Viva! (Viva! 2021). In this advertisement an attractive couple smile at each other lounging comfortably on a sofa with their dog and order pulled pork from the fictional app Just Meat. The soft jazz and low lighting indicate intimacy, and the three-way eyeline vectors between man, woman and dog show their close connection (Image 8.2a). However, the music stops when the delivery arrives and the meal turns out to be a live piglet who steps into the house (Image 8.2b). The pig is given salience by taking up the whole screen, looking up expectantly, and being the Actor of the process of stepping into the home. The delivery driver says: ‘Just Meat, delivered fresh to your door with a free gift’. A meat cleaver in his hand flashes (Image 8.2c) as he hands it over to the couple. The expressions on the faces of the man and woman convey their shock (Image 8.2d), and the dog is shown from a powerless high camera angle looking up in worry (Image 8.2e). The message ‘Animals are not Just Meat’ appears as words on screen at the end to emphasize a message that has already been vividly conveyed multi-modally through the combination of activated pig, the words of the delivery driver ‘Just Meat’, and the shocked expression of the couple.

FIGURE 8.2a–e Takeaway the Meat, by Viva!, reproduced with permission from Viva!

The message of this counter-type advertisement not only gives salience to the animal behind the meal but goes beyond that to represent the life of the dog and the life of the pig as parallel: both are represented saliently and are semantically included in the expression ‘Animals are not Just Meat’. This blurring of the boundaries between farm animals and companion animals is a common technique in animal rights campaigns (Cherry 2010). The two narratives described above are short, take place in only one location and have little time depth – all the action takes place within an hour or so. An example of a counter-type advertisement that uses a fuller narrative is A Cheesy Love Story (SumOfUs 2015), which, as the title suggests, makes use of the disembedded genre of love story. More accurately, the advertisement is a parody of the many advertisements for

unsustainable products that use the disembedded genre of love story, so could be considered a double disembedding. The advertisement was produced by the Sum of Us charity and criticizes PepsiCo, the makers of Doritos tortilla chips, for using rainforest-destroying palm oil.

FIGURE 8.3a–c A Cheesy Love Story, by SumOfUs, reproduced with permission from SumOfUs.

In the advertisement, a couple meet when they both reach for the same Doritos tortilla chip and then share it (Image 8.3a). Their eye contact and symmetry of actions suggest an immediate bond. Doritos tortilla chips then become a symbol of their love and we see the man giving the woman a bunch of chips in the shape of a bunch of flowers; eating chips on a date in the cinema; shopping together for chips; chips in bed for breakfast; a chip Christmas tree; photos of eating chips in locations around the world, and the man handing over an engagement ring made from chips (Image 8.3b). After that is their marriage with chips as confetti and chips tied to the wedding car. This follows all the steps of a typical love story, the meeting, dating, building a life together, proposal and wedding. Finally, the couple go on a honeymoon trip to the ‘Doritos Forest’ to discover ‘where it all began’. Suddenly, however, the light happy music ends and is replaced with the sound of chainsaws. The couple look out and see a devastated deforested landscape, then turn to look at each other with shock and disgust on their faces (Image 8.3c). This visually mirrors their initial meeting but with contrasting emotions. After this there are several screens of information about palm oil’s role in rainforest destruction and a call to ‘tell Doritos and PepsiCo to adopt a responsible palm oil policy and save rainforests’. What makes this counter-type advertisement particularly engaging is its humorous parody of product placement in mainstream love story advertisements. The intertextual borrowing from other advertisements leads to an expectation of a happy ending, which makes the sudden anti-climax startling, memorable, and humorous in a dark way. As in other counter-type advertisements the narrative pattern is clear: stimulating the audience’s emotions (with the love story and shock at the end), changing their minds (through information about rainforest destruction) and calling them to action (to put pressure on PepsiCo to change their practice). The most powerful counter-type advertisement that I came across in my research is There’s a Monster in My Kitchen by Greenpeace (Greenpeace 2020a). Waring (2020) describes it as highlighting ‘the devastating relationship between the global industrialised meat industry and rainforest destruction’ with ‘a rhyming storybook style that’s both enchanting and sad … Emotionally engrossing from start to finish, it delivers a heartfelt message that’s hard to ignore.’

There’s a Monster in My Kitchen is a two-minute twelve-second counteradvertisement which uses a strong narrative to raise awareness of how meat products are responsible for deforestation in South America, as forests are burned to make way for soy plantations to grow animal feed for export. The two main characters in the advertisement are an unnamed boy and Jag-wah, a jaguar. Jag-wah is a well-chosen character since most jaguars are found in the Amazon Rainforest and the species is highly vulnerable to forest fires and land clearance. Endangered mega-fauna are a common focus for environmental charities’ publicity since they attract attention and funding, but there is more to this advertisement than the plight of the jaguars. The advertisement manages to link meat with burning forests, factory farm exploitation of animals, corporate irresponsibility, intensive monocultures, the destruction of the ecosystems that life depends on, the benefits of plant-based food, and a call for environmental activism. It manages to pack all of this into two minutes and twelve seconds through the skilful use of multimodality. For example, one of the filmmakers describes how they used split screens to show a kind of violence between the natural world and the industrial world that was encroaching on it. We were able to use shape-language and colour-language to differentiate the two worlds and show in a very visceral and expressionistic way what was going on. Greenpeace 2020b Visceral aspects that appeal to the feelings of the viewer and conceptual aspects that explain the relationship between meat and deforestation are brought together and integrated through the use of narrative. As the filmmakers describe: We’ve all seen so many images of deforestation … it’s not as powerful as it once was but storytelling like this gives people a character to root for. Greenpeace 2020b The advertisement uses narrative empathy to draw the viewer into the narrative so that they can vicariously experience the emotions of the characters. Narrative empathy is the ‘sharing of feeling and perspective-

taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition’ (Keen 2013). Keen describes a great range of features that can encourage the viewer to feel similar emotions to the depicted characters, including point of view, vivid use of settings, traversing of boundaries, serial repetition, immersion or transportation of readers, interjections, foregrounding and defamiliarization. The first character that the advertisement encourages empathy for, someone for the viewer to root for, is a boy who is afraid. The fear is communicated through the music in deep drum rolls and rising tones; through facial expressions, particularly as the boy’s eyes look furtively around him and open wide in shock; through sounds like a solid thump and the knife-like jangle of claws; and the words of the boy that describe something to be afraid of: ‘monster’, ‘wicked’, ‘snake-like’ and ‘beastly’. The fear is induced by the enormous character Jag-wah (Image 8.4a) who rears up threateningly as the boy takes a meaty midnight snack from the fridge, and growls at the left-over bones of a previous meal. The empathy is enhanced when Jag-wah is shown looking directly down at the viewer with glowing eyes from the angle of the boy’s line of sight (Image 8.4a). The shot is from a low angle, making Jag-wah appear powerful as he looms over the boy. The boy is voiced by Wagner Moura, a Brazilian actor, who provides first-person character narration. The first few lines are as follows: There’s a monster in my kitchen and I don’t know what to do. It has wicked glowing eyes and a snake-like tail too. And claws so sharp and beastly they could tear a child in two. It ripped our chalkboard off the wall and knocked over our stew. And it growled at all the bones from our summer barbecue. Perhaps this beast is here to feast? But on what? Or on … who? Greenpeace 2020a These words show a regular syllable pattern (six lines of fourteen or fifteen syllables) and a regular rhyming scheme (all six lines rhyme). In fact all twenty-one lines of the poetry end with an ‘uː’ sound, aside from two rhyming couplets of ‘hear’ and ‘fear’. This simple and regular rhyming

scheme is typical of a children’s storybook, as are animal characters and the parallel structure of the first and second part of the advertisement.

FIGURE 8.4a–d There’s a Monster in My Kitchen, by Greenpeace, reproduced with permission from Greenpeace

The advertisement is clearly, therefore, a disembedding of a children’s story genre, with a subgenre of horror. However, a twist happens when Jagwah is revealed to be a vulnerable forest creature, not a monster, here to convey an important message to the boy, and via him, to the world. Jag-wah takes over the narration at this point, transformed into warmer, less frightening colours. Still voiced by Wagner Moura, Jag-wah’s words parallel those of the boy: There’s a monster in my forest and I don’t know what to do. It turned my home to ash to instead grow something new. Feed for chickens, pigs and cows to sell more meat to you. As our forests disappeared, their evil empire grew. They think they are unstoppable but we pray this isn’t true. The real cost of what they’re doing, if only the whole world knew. There’s a monster in my forest and it’s filling me with fear! It’s putting us all in danger, to warn you is why I’m here. Greenpeace 2020a

This transfers the fear generated for a boy about to be devoured by a jaguar to the less immediately imaginable domain of deforestation, habitat loss, and destruction of global ecosystems. The words ‘in my forest’ are accompanied by spectacular images of the beauty of the forest with South American-inspired pan-pipe music, a slightly mournful tone. This quickly changes to scenes of burning and devastation with the words ‘It turned my home to ash’. The word ‘feed’ is accompanied by images of monoculture plants growing and then a particularly powerful image accompanies the words ‘chickens, pigs and cows’ (Image 8.4b). The split screen image shows crowded, homogenized rows of cows at the top, pigs in the middle, and chickens at the bottom moving repetitively, with the pigs seeming to scream into the air. This image lasts only three seconds but captures the horror of factory farms in a way that would require a lot more time if it was done through words. Then there are images of bulldozers with spiky jaws that visually echo the sharp teeth and claws of Jag-wah (Image 8.4c), and combine harvesters bear down on the viewer from a low camera angle (indicating their power). The viewer has swapped from vicariously experiencing the fear of the child about to be eaten by a jaguar, to seeing the world from the point of view of jaguars about to be killed by the harvesters. The second person pronoun ‘you’ in to ‘sell more meat to you’ links the forest devastation with the boy and explains why Jag-wah was growling at the bones in the boy’s house. Again, the advertisement follows the classic rhetorical pattern of Stir the audience’s emotions. Change their minds. Call for them to act. The emotions are triggered by narrative empathy and the interpersonal metafunction (Halliday and Matthiessen 2013) as the characters interact with each other and the viewer. The changing of minds is the ideational metafunction, where information is conveyed about the connections between meat bought around the world and deforestation in South America. The call to action is modelled by the boy in the following lines: Oh Jag-wah in my kitchen, now I do know what to do. We’ll eat more plants and veggies and we’ll swap meat for bean stew – or barbecue tofu! I’ll assemble every warrior from here to Timbuktu.

Greenpeace 2020a This is expressed positively – it does not say ‘we’ll eat less meat’ or ‘no meat’ which would sound like a sacrifice, but is framed instead as eating more plant-based food. Furthermore, when the alternative foods are described they are represented attractively in the visual mode in bright images which contrast with the grisly remains of the meaty meals in the dark kitchen at the start. The expression ‘assemble every warrior’ is vague, but exactly what kind of ‘warrior’ and what they would do is filled in by the visual mode, which consists of a range of demonstrators holding placards. The call for action is then backed up by words on screen at the end of the advertisement: ‘Let’s stop corporate monsters destroying our forests’. The narrative structure of a typical children’s narrative divides the world up into heroes, villains and victims, and this set of characters is often used in environmental communication (Fløttum and Gjerstad 2017). There’s a Monster in My Kitchen starts with Jag-wah seeming to be the villain while the boy is the victim but then everything is turned around. The boy becomes the hero, assembling his warriors to protect the world, and Jag-wah, other jaguars, the environment, and potentially all of life becomes the victim. Importantly, the advertisement uses several devices to place blame for the destruction of the rainforests. This is something which scientific ecology and sustainable development discourse rarely does – pollution and destruction just ‘happen’, or the cause is identified only in the pollutants rather than those who are responsible for releasing them. Mild blame goes to the boy and the boy’s family, since Jag-wah growls at the bones of their barbeque, rips a chalkboard with a list of meats from the wall and knocks over a stew which is revealed by a bone in it to be a meat stew. However, they are not the villains overall. That role is taken by the ‘monster’ in the forest and its ‘evil empire’, which is represented visually by workers carrying out deforestation and machinery such as bulldozers and combine harvesters. The pronoun used for the villain is ‘they’, e.g., ‘Their evil empire grew’ and ‘they think they are unstoppable’, which is spoken in Jagwah’s off-screen narration as a corporate logo appears on a chemical silo behind a bulldozer. This is all subtle, until the closing words on screen make the villain completely clear: ‘Let’s stop corporate monsters destroying our forests’ (emphasis added). The initial framing of Jag-wah as

the monster is transferred to the corporations. The advertisement stops short of blaming the social structures of transnational capitalism which shape how corporations act, but perhaps that would be asking too much for a short counter-advertisement. Overall, the advertisement uses the disembedded multimodal genre of children’s narrative in a powerful way to draw connections between the purchase of meat in countries around the world and the impact of those purchases on forests in South America. The narrative empathy evoked by the fear of the boy is transferred to the fear of Jag-wah, but importantly the line ‘it’s putting us ALL in danger’ with the intonational emphasis on ‘all’ connects deforestation with wider global issues such as climate change. The narrative structure and the affordances of the different modes work together in this short two minute twelve second advertisement in a seamless way to convey far more information, in a far more persuasive way, than one mode could do alone.

Conclusion In this chapter I have described some of the techniques used by advertisers to sell products which are unnecessary, unhealthy, and/or environmentally destructive. I have done this because it demonstrates what needs to be resisted in order to encourage people to ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’ (Pollan 2008, p. 7). More positively, the techniques I have described can be subverted and used to construct counter-advertisements that aim to reduce the consumption of damaging products, and I have analysed some examples of this kind of advertisement. Recently a vegan counter-advertisement was banned by the Advertising Standard Agency because it showed a group of friends eating meat together with cuts to the horrific conditions the animals faced (Animal Aid 2022). The use of graphic images of suffering can be considered a ‘push factor’ to push people away from eating meat. De Boer and Aiking (2017, p. 238) describe how the science-based health and sustainability arguments in favour of a diet change do not sufficiently reach consumers or are too difficult for them

to comprehend. To reach consumers, therefore, it is crucial to develop bridging frames that work as push factors away from routine meat eating, or pull factors that encourage the consumption of primarily plant-based protein and special meat types. What is often missing from ecological campaigns are pull factors towards sustainable plant-based foods. It would be possible to copy the techniques of the destructive industries and create narrative-type advertisements where people bond and find love while sharing plant-based meals. It would even be possible to create identity-type advertisements which construct new forms of national identity that revolve around care and compassion for others and the natural world and are associated with eating healthy and sustainable food. Of course, it would also be possible to create counter-type advertisements which copied the hypermasculine, violent, military images of the meat industry. However, even if they proved effective in promoting sustainable foods, they are counter-productive overall since they reproduce the violent paradigm responsible for ecological destruction in the first place. The food industry has vast budgets for advertising, and invests in evermore creative advertisements, using narrative to inspire people to consume ecologically damaging and unhealthy food. Movements working towards compassion for animals and environmental protection can critique advertisements and produce parallel parody advertisements. They can also create original advertisements of their own which make strong use of narrative and disembedded genres. The budget will never be anything like the budget of the big industries, of course. However, it is not necessary to compete advertisement for advertisement with the big industries since it may be possible to reach a tipping point, as has happened already for tobacco, where the damage caused by destructive industries becomes so widely known in the public imagination that governments act to regulate advertising. A final point to make is that I described the genre of There’s a Monster in My Kitchen as a children’s story. However, there is another powerful and ancient genre that is drawn from in this advertisement. In a dark kitchen strewn with evidence of meat eating a boy eats a meaty snack, only to be confronted by a mysterious power who literally looks down at him and growls in judgement. Then there are catastrophic fires, beings screaming in

their suffering, monstrous machines and the threat that this will engulf everyone. Finally, there is a new beginning in a bright clean kitchen, with pure plant-based foods and moral righteousness. This is a recognizable pattern drawn from the genre of apocalypse, albeit with some nontraditional twists of plot. This genre can be powerfully persuasive, but also has its dangers, as discussed in the next chapter.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER NINE

Ending: Metaphor and Finding Ourselves at the End of the Road In this chapter I will be exploring the metaphoric ways that econarratives imagine the end times, apocalypse, collapse, doomsday, the end of the world, or, as I metaphorically put it in the title of the chapter, ‘the end of the road’. Apocalyptic metaphors play an important role in econarratives because they envision a collapse, unravelling or rupture of prevailing unsustainable world orders, and open up the imagination for something new. Simon Dein (2021, p. 7) describes the role of apocalyptic thinking around COVID-19, in words which apply equally to other symptoms of ecological destruction: In the time of Covid-19 it has become obvious that the current world order is becoming a thing of the past and the future is highly likely to be different. Peter Berger … described a ‘plausibility structure’ as the ‘symbolic base’ that every society ‘has to continuously construct and maintain for assuring its existence as a world’. Our current plausibility structures upon which the existence of society is dependent are threatened and we are urgently in need of alternative sociocultural contexts to provide structures of meaning.

Here what is represented as collapsing are the ‘plausibility structures’ of the current world order, which we could also call the metanarratives that underpin our unsustainable civilization. Either way, something is passing into history, ready for something new to emerge. Apocalyptic narratives are common in environmental communication, though controversial. There is a debate about whether communication in apocalyptic terms, or ‘doom and gloom’ as it is often disparagingly referred to, inspires people to take action or makes them give up in the face of inevitable destruction (Foust and O’Shannon Murphy 2009, Deaton 2020). However, it is possible to point to successful uses of apocalyptic narrative, the most well-known of which is Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.

Silent spring Garrard (2012, pp. 1–2) writes that: It is generally agreed that modern environmentalism begins with ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’ in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring … the founding text of modern environmentalism not only begins with a decidedly poetic parable, but also relies on the literary genres of pastoral and apocalypse, pre-existing ways of imagining the place of humans in nature that may be traced back to such sources as Genesis and Revelation, the first and last books of the Bible. In Silent Spring (Carson 2000), Carson rigorously describes the accumulated scientific evidence of harm that agricultural chemicals cause to humans and ecosystems. At the same time, however, she uses lyrical language, narrative and the literary genre of apocalypse to inspire the public and policymakers to care and take action. Carson’s ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’ is a brief, two-page narrative at the opening of the book. It starts with the words ‘There once was a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings’ (p. 1). It then describes the beauty of the town: ‘deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mist of the autumn mornings … even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty’ (pp. 1–2). After that,

however, a series of health and environmental problems befall the town, which are described with expressions such as: ‘a strange blight which crept over the area’; ‘Some evil spell had settled on the community’; ‘mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens’; ‘Everywhere was a shadow of death’ and ‘The few birds seen anywhere were moribund … It was a spring without voices’ (pp. 2–3). Several features of this narrative are distinctive of the genre of apocalyptic literature. Firstly, it is a fable ‘for tomorrow’, so is a vision of the future rather than describing something that already exists, despite being written in the past tense. Secondly, the community is represented as existing ‘in harmony’, a state of equilibrium that acts as a contrast to what is to come. Most distinctive is the way that multiple calamities befall the same people in the same place at the same time, or at least consecutively. In fact, everything that Carson described had already happened in different places in the US to different communities at different times; but bringing them together into one fictional fable reframes them from disparate ‘environmental issues’ to a total apocalyptic collapse. The lexical set of illness and death (the expressions blight, malady, illness, death, stricken, moribund, and die) in the fable heightens the sense of calamity. Another lexical set suggests a supernatural cause: evil, spell, mysterious, and shadow. However, the final sentence of the fable explicitly dispels the idea of the supernatural: ‘No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves’ (p. 3). A prototypical apocalyptic narrative contains various roles that characters fall into. Usually the people take the role of wrongdoers who receive a devastating punishment from a higher power for their sin. In Carson’s fable, however, the people unwittingly take the role of higher power in addition to being the recipients of the punishment, and, by implication, the wrongdoers. The sin is left implicit but could map onto the environmentally destructive behaviour. However, in the fable the wrongdoing and sin are not emphasized, instead the focus is on the suffering of the victims. The apocalyptic fable, and the book as a whole, proved highly successful in capturing people’s imaginations, giving them knowledge, and most importantly encouraging them to care. This in turn led to concrete outcomes:

Carson’s foreboding book led to the launch of governmental investigations; it armed communities with knowledge that gave rise to grassroots environmental movements across the United States; it ushered in regulations and conservation efforts that not only banned myriad pesticides, including DDT, but led to the restoration of populations of osprey, bald eagles, and many other bird species. It ignited much of the environmental movement that we know today… Steinauer-Scudder 2020 The power of Carson’s Silent Spring lies in how she presents a scientific and secular argument that appeals to reason, while using the vivid supernatural language of apocalypse in the introductory fable. The fable is, using Dein’s (2021, p. 10) term, a form of ‘secular apocalypticism’: Unlike religious apocalypticism where the future is determined by divine intervention, in secular apocalypticism natural events such as the current Covid-19 pandemic are the cause of the impending doomsday. Descriptions of climate change and ecological destruction can, like Carson’s fable, make extensive use of powerful religious symbolism and narrative features while remaining secular and scientific, so long as the religious aspects are presented as metaphors for conceptualization rather than literal descriptions of divine intervention.

Before the flood Before the Flood (DiCaprio and Stevens 2016) is an example of a secular documentary film which nonetheless draws on the religious imagery of apocalypse. Its title refers to the antediluvian times in Genesis after the fall of the human and before God takes vengeance by bringing the great flood. It starts with a personal narrative, spoken in first person off-screen narration by Leonardo DiCaprio, the actor and environmental activist, who features throughout the film. The opening words are ‘My first visual memories are of this framed poster above my crib. I would stare at it every night before I went to bed’. As these words are spoken, details of an unusual painting

appear on the screen: strange scenes of naked people frolicking together with animals and fantastical statues. The painting is The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (Image 9.1a), which was painted in around 1500 and is in the form of a triptych with three panels conventionally read from left to right. The left panel is the Garden of Eden, the central panel is the Garden of Earthly Delights, and the right panel is a grim scene of hell. After a brief discussion of his father, an underground comic distributor, DiCaprio continues his description of the painting:

FIGURE 9.1a The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch c. 1500, public domain.

If you look at these panels long enough, they start to tell a story. In the first panel you have Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Birds flying off into the distance, elephants and giraffe and a lot of religious iconography. The second panel is where it starts to become more interesting. The deadly sins start to infuse their way into the painting. There’s overpopulation, there’s debauchery and excess. And the last panel, which is the most nightmarish one, especially from a young child’s perspective, is this twisted, decayed, burnt landscape. A paradise that has been degraded and destroyed.

There is then a dissolve transition between a portion of the right panel of the painting that shows burning cities and a video of billowing clouds of smoke. This is followed in fast succession by shots of gas flaring, modern cities, cars emitting fumes and chimneys spewing out smoke, representing the causes of climate change. Then there are images of a hot sun, melting ice sheets, floods, wildfires, burning buildings and devastated landscapes which represent the impacts of climate change. Over these visuals there are multiple voice-overs from different commentators who make statements about climate change, including ‘the burning of coal, oil and wood is releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere’ and ‘the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now’. The final comment is ‘it is these activities that drove mankind out of the Garden of Eden’. What this opening scene of Before the Flood illustrates is the cultural role that apocalyptic biblical imagery can play in conceptualizing contemporary issues such as climate change. The basic narrative structure is one of harmonious existence, followed by wicked behaviour, and then destruction as punishment. This narrative traces back to biblical texts in a genre chain. Genre chains occur when content in one genre is reworked into another genre, e.g., a scientific article is reported in a health magazine (Fairclough 2003, p. 31). In this case, what starts as a written narrative in the genre of religious texts is transformed by the artist, Hieronymus Bosch, into a visual narrative in the genre of Early Netherlandish painting, which is then interpreted and rendered as a spoken narrative in a documentary film genre. The next move is the crucial one, and that is the use of visual and textual triggers to overlay the narrative onto climate change. The application of the religious narrative onto climate change is a metaphor because the film overall is secular and scientific – there are no hints that climate change is literally a punishment from God for sin. Usually, metaphors are described as consisting of a source domain, which is mapped onto a target domain (Lakoff 1993, Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 2003). The source domain is something concretely imaginable, like a journey, a football game, or an explosion, and it lends its structure to help conceptualize a more abstract target domain like love, ideas or anger (e.g., his anger exploded). However, it is possible to be more precise and talk of a source frame when the source domain is a discrete package of general knowledge about the world, and a source narrative when a whole narrative

structure is being applied from one area to another. In the case of the documentary Before the Flood, the apocalyptic source narrative of harmonious existence, followed by wicked behaviour, and then destruction as punishment is mapped onto the target domain of climate change. The mapping takes place by individual elements of the source narrative mapping across to elements of the target domain. In this case the images of cities, cars and power stations belching out smoke map the wicked behaviour onto fossil fuel use, and the destruction is mapped onto the wildfires, floods and raging seas. The title ‘Before the Flood’ indicates where we currently are in the narrative – the moment after the wicked behaviour (fossil fuel use) has occurred, but before the worst of the destruction. Along with the metaphor are metaphorical entailments – aspects of the source narrative which can be carried over to the target domain. An example would be the entailment that ‘fossil fuel use is immoral and so should be curtailed’. Another entailment along the lines of ‘floods, droughts and other natural disasters are a punishment’ could also be drawn out. This is a deeply problematic entailment, however, since natural disasters arising from climate change initially have the most devastating effects on exactly those populations which contributed least to emissions and are most deserving of justice rather than punishment. A study by Althor et al. (2016) describes how: We find an enormous global inequality where 20 of the 36 highest emitting countries are among the least vulnerable to negative impacts of future climate change … conversely those most vulnerable to climate change were the least responsible for its genesis. That is not to say that punishment framing has no place in environmental communication – indeed, commentators like Ray Anderson, mentioned in Chapter 6, use it to emphasize corporate responsibility. Anderson writes about his experience of discovering the company he ran, Interface, was environmentally destructive as follows: One day early in this journey it dawned on me that the way I’d been running Interface was the way of the plunderer. Plundering something

that’s not mine. Something that belongs to every creature on earth. [I realised that] someday people like me will end up in jail. Anderson 2005

FIGURE 9.1b The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of a small part of the central panel, public domain.

The difference is that Anderson is using a crime frame, where a judicial process can apportion responsibility and punishment to the guilty, as opposed to ecological destruction where punishment bears no connection to wrongdoing. DiCaprio describes the centre panel of the painting with the words ‘the deadly sins start to infuse their way into the painting. There’s overpopulation, there’s debauchery and excess’. However, a close look at the panel reveals that the people appear to be enjoying themselves immensely, but not in a harmful way. They appear to have no possessions, not even clothes, aside from a few people who are holding giant fruits or fish. The scene is set in nature, with lakes, grass, bushes, fruit trees, rolling hills and woods, and many animals including horses, camels, pigs, birds, monkeys and a mouse. The people interact with the animals and nature in various peaceful ways, for instance a deer seems to nuzzle a man lying on the ground. In many of the images people are in small groups, looking into each other’s eyes with peaceful expressions on their faces, suggesting bonding with each other, and in some of the images people are enjoying what seems to be consensual intimacy (see Image 9.1b which is the detail of only a small part of the centre panel). A problematic entailment that can be drawn from DiCaprio’s description of this is that environmentalist behaviour is a form of puritanical self-sacrifice and that having fun is sinful. An alternative entailment that could be drawn from the centre panel of the painting is that in an ideal sustainable society needs are met from close interaction with others and from nature, rather than through shopping, consumerism and material accumulation. Certainly the people in the picture appear to have their needs amply met in non-accumulative ways. In other words, it could align with the framework of Sustainable Hedonism, ‘a thriving life that does not cost the Earth’ (Lelkes 2021) or Alternative Hedonism (Soper 2012), where consumers realize that over-consumption brings unpleasant side effects and strive to find wellbeing from simpler, more ecological, pleasures. According to Maroto (2017), DiCaprio’s reading is in line with the historical evidence: Bosch was a conservative Christian and was depicting debauchery and its punishment. Even if historically accurate, however, DiCaprio’s use of the painting as a metaphor for climate change, and his

choice to pull out an entailment of sin from the centre panel, has potential disadvantages for climate change communication. Exactly which metaphorical entailments a viewer extracts from a metaphor depends on the viewer, although it is possible for texts to explicitly draw out entitlements and give them prominence that way. The choice of metaphor and which entailments to emphasize ultimately plays a vital role in environmental communication. Nerlich and Jaspal (2012) express this using apocalyptic language themselves in their article Metaphors We Die By, which claims that choosing the wrong metaphor ‘may arguably contribute to the extermination of our species’.

The book of revelation To explore metaphor in apocalyptic narratives in more detail, it is useful to examine the most pervasive apocalyptic narrative of all, one which is drawn on frequently in environmental communication. The word ‘apocalypse’ has come to mean (since the late nineteenth century) a violent event which results in widespread destruction, but actually derives from the Greek apokalypsis which means ‘uncovering’ or ‘revealing’. Aldrovandi defines the word as follows: Apokalypsis in the original, etymological understanding of the word: a sudden breaking point in human destiny unveiling an ultimate truth (aleitheia) that has always been present, but remains most of the time hidden, denied or forgotten. in Dein 2021, p. 7 The connection between the two meanings is the final book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, which is titled ‘Apokalypsis’ in the earliest Koine Greek version. Under this title, the book conveys vivid images of destruction by plagues, hail, monsters, beasts and fire. The Bible is a text that is distributed across the world in many translations and versions, and the underlying narrative and symbols find their way into a great number of genres from picture books to films, as well as being alluded to in countless ways, either consciously or unconsciously.

It is possible, therefore, for the narrative and metaphors in Revelation to play a role far beyond religion and to shape culture more widely. This is particularly true of this book of the Bible both because of its powerful imagery and because it has the double end focus of being the final book of the Bible and being about the end times. Dein (2021) describes how apocalyptic narratives inspired by Revelation exert ‘a great influence over the contemporary American mainstream’ (p. 7) and Gorringe (2011) writes that ‘Symbols run deeper than words and the symbols from this particular book have done much to shape the Western imagination’. The Book of Revelation is twenty-two chapters long, has a first-person narrator who calls himself ‘John’, and describes a vision that he receives of the future. This is an extremely complicated book full of metaphors and symbols, some of which can be understood by text-internal clues, while many are exophoric (external) references that are heavily debated by biblical scholars (Beale 2006, Biguzzi 2006, Hylen 2011). Biguzzi, for example, discusses whether Babylon in Revelation is a subtle reference to Rome or Jerusalem, but I will focus on metaphors where the target domain is explicitly mentioned in the text. And to further simplify the analysis, I will look at one particular metaphor, that of the two cities, in one version of the Bible, the King James Version. Of interest from an econarrative perspective are the forms of destruction that are represented, their resemblance to the effects of climate change, and how blame and responsibility are attributed. The metaphor in question begins in Revelation 17 when John sees a vision of a woman sitting on a beast: So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. Rev. 17.3–5

Beale (2006, p. 55) approaches Revelation from the perspective of ‘interpret symbolically unless you are forced to interpret literally’, since it is primarily a symbolic text. The colours purple and gold in this extract may symbolize luxury, and scarlet, carnal passion. The exact association of the colours depends on the reader, but the luxury reading is backed up by reference to precious stones and pearls. The scarlet colour is the colour of blood and is shared by the beast, so may indicate animalistic desires. The woman is appraised negatively through a set of negative appraisal items: abomination, harlot, and the word filthiness, which alliterates with the equally negative word fornication. The woman is not, however, simply a female character in the narrative, but is the source frame of a metaphor which is spelled out a little later:

•

And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth. (Rev. 17.18)

•

And he [an angel] cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. (Rev. 18.2)

The expression ‘the woman … is that great city’ directly invokes the metaphor CITY IS A WOMAN (using Lakoff and Johnson’s 2003 notation where metaphors are represented in small caps in the form ‘TARGET DOMAIN’ IS A ‘SOURCE FRAME’). The city is then clarified as Babylon, making a metaphor of BABYLON IS A WOMAN. The use of the metaphor carries over the negative characteristics of the woman to the city of Babylon, and then these are added to with the negative appraisal items ‘devils’, ‘foul spirit’, ‘unclean’, and ‘hateful’. The text then goes on to describe the next event in the narrative structure of apocalypse: destruction.

•

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. (Rev. 18.3)

•

How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her … Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. (Rev. 18.7–8)

The pronoun use, ‘her’, aligns with the metaphor of BABYLON IS A WOMAN, and the city is further personified by being the Actor of the processes ‘glorified’ and ‘lived’, and the Recipient of ‘give’. The elements here are the woman/city as the wrongdoer and recipient of the punishment, God as the higher power, and fire, plagues, famine as the punishment. The sin is ‘fornication’, ‘self-glorification’, ‘living deliciously’ and a hint towards overconsumption of luxury products in ‘the abundance of her delicacies’. The overconsumption theme is continued in the next two verses: And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble. Rev. 18.11–12 The purple, scarlet, gold, precious stones and pearls echo the description of the woman in 17.4, vividly associating the woman and the city. This representation of wealth and luxury as a sin which leads to the destruction of the earth in fire, plague and famine opens Revelation up as a source narrative to be used in climate change and environmental communication of all kinds. An example is the following from an article in a New York State local newspaper: In Revelation 12–13 there’s a beast who everyone worships even though it’s a false god. There are false gods that we cling to, including the false god of the fossil fuel economy, which happens to also have the consequences of sulphur, smoke, and fire … Revelation details how desperately clutching a toxic, corrupt economy ends in global ruin even

for the coddled rich … It happens so suddenly, it feels abrupt, but all along there were warnings, including idolatry of false gods of wealth. Flack 2021 This systematically maps elements from Revelation onto elements from climate change. False gods are mapped to both the fossil fuel economy and to wealth; the woman/city with all her luxury is mapped to the coddled rich, and the destruction to the sulphur, smoke and fire associated with fossil fuel pollution. Another similar example is from a book chapter Visions of the End? Revelation and Climate Change by Tim Gorringe (2011): ‘We share with the original readers or hearers a sense of helplessness in the face of Babylon the Great, which in our day is the whole Market system, an idolatrous economy’. In this case the mapping is between the city of Babylon and the market system, which powerfully encourages critical reflection on the economic factors behind ecological destruction. Later, Gorringe claims that apocalyptic literature is not actually about the end of everything: Apocalypse does not mean catastrophe and disaster, as we tend to use the word. It means disclosing, exposing, making manifest, holding up this world to the judgement of God. It has nothing to do with ‘the end of the world’ or its ‘extermination’. As Moltmann puts it: ‘What Jewish and Christian apocalyptic intends is not to evoke horror in the face of the end, but to encourage endurance in resistance to the powers of this world’. Revelation does not end with destroyed and barren landscape, but instead with a new city:

•

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Rev. 21.2)

•

Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife. (Rev. 21.9)

•

And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of

heaven from God. (Rev. 21.10)

•

And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. (Rev. 21.23)

This new city, the New Jerusalem, is also represented metaphorically as a woman, this time as the bride of ‘the Lamb’ (a common way of referring to Jesus Christ). The metaphoric mapping is achieved firstly by the simile ‘as a bride’, which could just point towards similarities in appearance, but more directly as a metaphor in 21.9 and 21.10 where ‘that great city’ and ‘the Lamb’s wife’ are both the object of the verb ‘shew’. The exact clothing of the bride of the Lamb is described in an earlier chapter: ‘The marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready … arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints’ (19.7 and 19.8). The virginal white contrasts strongly with the purple and scarlet of the woman/city of Babylon. The white and the ‘light’ are associated with cleanliness and saintliness, in opposition to the ‘filthiness’ of Babylon. The New Jerusalem is represented as a paradise in which those without sin can live: ‘there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain’ (21.4). Flack (2021) maps the triumphant ending of Revelation to climate change by describing how the earth can be saved by all things being made anew. Likewise, Wood (2008, p. 64) describes how the images of Revelation: demonstrate an unusually sophisticated insight into the organic connection that exists among biological and geological systems and also the consequences of wantonly disrupting this balance through human greed, oppression, and malice. Finally, the compensating divine response to ecocatastrophe ends not in ultimate punishment, but the renewal of the cosmos and the healing of the nations. Revelation is a message of hope as well as warning. Certainly, one way that Revelation could be applied to climate change is that the sin of wealth and material luxury in Babylon leads to ruin and

ecological destruction, whereas the spiritual purity and material simplicity of the New Jerusalem leads to an idyllic life where the earth continues to be able to support life. However, there are problems with drawing on some of the imagery in Revelation in climate change communication. The first is that the two metaphors of the CITY IS A WOMAN associate all manner of evil with an image of sex-positive femininity, and associate righteousness and saintliness with virginal femininity. This is called the Madonna-Whore dichotomy in psychology, which ‘denotes polarized perceptions of women as either good and chaste or as bad and promiscuous’ (Kahalon et al. 2019, p. 348), and has been described as one of the factors underpinning misogyny. The second issue is described by Deaton (2020): However, end-of-the-world stories often mark a new beginning. In the Hindu tradition, the Earth is destroyed and remade every 4,320,000 years. In the Norse tradition, Ragnarok concludes with the last remaining god, Alfadur creating the world anew. The Book of Revelations ends with a new heaven on Earth … This is a hopeful feature of apocalyptic narratives, but to the extent that people believe the gods will redeem us in the end, it is also a dangerous one. One entailment that could be drawn from various apocalyptic stories is that all that is necessary for personal salvation is to lead a righteous life rather than act specifically to protect the ecosystems that all life depends on. The final issue of using apocalyptic images and metaphors that are identifiably drawn from religious materials is that they can reinforce the common story that climate change deniers use that CLIMATE CHANGE IS A RELIGION. The Sky News host Peta Credlin, for example, described what she called ‘the religion of climate change’ which involves ‘slavish adherence to the doctrine of global warming’ (Sky 2019). Through this she reduces the facticity of the climate change movement by representing it as based on inflexible doctrine rather than evidence-based conclusions. The right-wing Newspaper The Daily Telegraph published an article by climate sceptic MP Jacob Rees-Mogg (2021) which is similar:

Climate change alarmism caused our high energy prices. People will die this winter because of the environmentalist obsession with the end of the world … Clearly expectations of a final disaster are part of man’s psychology and the doomsayers of the quasi-religious Green movement fit the bill. Perhaps one day the world will end, giving the last group to predict it the satisfaction of being right – but as many have been wrong so far it does not seem wise to make public policy on the back of these fears. Here the phrases ‘alarmism’, ‘obsession’, ‘doomsayers’ and ‘quasireligious’ are used to reduce the facticity of environmentalist arguments, and blaming environmentalists for high energy prices and people’s death turns them into villains. In pointing out some of the issues or risks of using religiously based apocalyptic images or metaphors, I am not suggesting that they have no place in environmental communication. Indeed, the rhetoric of religion can be extremely powerful if used in skilful ways that avoid some of the unhelpful entailments of literal divine punishment for sin. It is possible, however, to describe a secular apocalypse in language which is, itself, primarily secular. An example of this that I will explore is The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

The dark mountain manifesto The Dark Mountain Project is a cultural movement which started in 2009 with the publication of The Dark Mountain Manifesto by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine (Kingsnorth and Hine 2009). The manifesto laid out a radical vision of industrial civilization on a path towards inevitable collapse based firstly on the trajectory of overconsumption and consequent ecological destruction, and secondly on the lack of meaningful response on the behalf of governments and environmentalists. The manifesto sparked wide-ranging creative responses from writers, poets and artists, some of which are gathered together into a series of anthologies (twenty-one of them as of 2022, totalling around 5,000 pages). There are also festivals, courses, music and events that reflect on what it means to face collapse in the future.

A review in The Journal of Wild Culture described it as ‘a radical project, and a brilliant one, capable of opening your eyes in the encircling twilight’ (Jeffreys 2012). The ‘twilight’ here is, of course, a metaphor for the end times. The Dark Mountain Manifesto gets to the point very quickly by opening with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation.’ This encapsulates the whole of the Manifesto, which uses a series of metaphors to describe how industrial civilization has placed human civilization on a path towards inevitable collapse. The first of the key metaphors appears near the start of the Manifesto: The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives. What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it. Within this extract there is a strong metaphor, or rather a series of metaphors, based around the source frame of fabric. This frame is triggered by the words pattern, fabric, tear, unravel, unravelling, frays and pulls at (i.e., pulls at a thread). It is the use of so many words from the source frame that gives this metaphor such high activation (Stibbe 2021), making it vivid in the minds of readers and therefore potentially persuasive. The target domain is initially expressed as ‘ordinary life’, making a metaphor of

ORDINARY LIFE IS A FABRIC.

The expression ‘the fragility of its fabric’ then presupposes that the fabric is fragile. This carries over to the target domain as a metaphorical entailment, conveying how the taken-for-granted realities of ordinary life can suddenly be disrupted, as we saw with COVID-19. This is emphasized by ‘tear’ a little later, which hints towards endings, at least the end of life as people know it. The power of the metaphor is that the ‘pattern of ordinary life’ is hard to imagine, but a fragile fabric tearing conveys a powerful and vivid image.

FIGURE 9.2 Cover of Walking on Lava, one of the many anthologies that have emerged from the Dark Mountain Project, designed by Melissa Jacobson, reproduced with permission from Chelsea Green Publishing.

What is interesting, and unusual, about this metaphor is that the target domain then changes from ‘ordinary life’ to become ECONOMIES ARE A FABRIC in the expression ‘the financial and commercial fabric of our economies’. The idea that these can unravel parallels the tearing of the

fabric of ordinary life. Then the target domain shifts again to form a THE MATERIAL BASIS OF LIFE IS A FABRIC metaphor, and this fabric is represented fraying. Finally the target domain shifts to ecological systems, which are represented as threads of the same fabric (‘unchecked industrial exploitation … pulls at the ecological systems’). All these metaphors form a coherent whole – the threads of ecological systems are pulled, fraying the material basis of life, which unravels the economy and tears the fabric of ordinary life. It is a concise and vivid way of representing the interdependence of ordinary life and the social, economic and ecological systems that it depends on for its continued existence, and how they could disintegrate at any moment. A little later in the Manifesto the fragility is again expressed, but using a different source frame and target domain: Human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future. Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning. The target domain is ‘human civilisation’, which is different from ‘ordinary life’ but cognate to it, since the patterns of ordinary life could be seen as arising from the larger civilization. The source frame is buildings, with multiple trigger words: construction, built, crumble, collapse, fall, debris, foundation, and city walls. Taking ‘city walls’ to be a kind of building, this is a metaphor of HUMAN CIVILIZATION IS A BUILDING. Usually buildings are strong, but the image of strength is undermined by the word ‘fragile’, being built only on ‘belief’ and then the words ‘crumbling’ and ‘collapse’. Importantly, the collapse is represented as inevitable, using a strong analogy of the ‘law of history’ being analogous to the ‘law of gravity’ in its certainty. The use of ‘gravity’ in the analogy entrenches the image of buildings falling and collapsing. The fabric metaphor opened up the

possibility of tearing and unravelling, the building metaphor turns this into a certainty of collapse. Both are ways of metaphorically constructing something which is hard to represent literally: the end times. A little later in the Manifesto the metaphor changes again: This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy … Now, its failure and fallibility exposed, the world’s elites are scrabbling frantically to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion. The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them … Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress. This metaphor here is the ECONOMY IS A MACHINE, but like the unravelling fabric and the collapsing building this is a machine in trouble, stuttering and threatening to explode. There are many trigger words which combine together to highly activate the metaphor: machine, stuttering, engineers, cogs, wheels, engine and driving. The reversal of Actor and Affected participants in ‘they are controlling it’ or ‘it is controlling them’ is a powerfully concise and vivid way of depicting something that would otherwise be abstract: how actions which create immense harm are taken to fulfil economic priorities which have been removed from any original beneficial purpose. This gives the economy more agency than the civilization or pattern of everyday life which are just represented as tearing or collapsing – it is something which is actively destroying us. Metaphors in a narrative cannot be analysed in insolation. As Fuchs et al. (2018, p. 100) describe (coincidently also using a fabric metaphor): Narrative organises image schemes, metaphoric projections, and conceptual and linguistic metaphors in terms of a network representing a sort of connective fabric. For this reason, the cognitive power of one

metaphor depends on the way it is interconnected with the others and in how the thread is interwoven in the plot of the narrative. The series of metaphors in these extracts from the Manifesto (see Table 9.1) work together in a network to vividly convey the likely collapse of the patterns of ordinary life, the economy and ecosystems. The key insight of the Manifesto is that ordinary life, society and civilization are based on beliefs, on stories, and physical collapse is intertwined with the collapse of those stories (the ‘crumbling empires of the mind’ in the quote below). Climate change, for example, has destroyed the myth of progress, the idea that technology will always make the lives of future generations better than preceding ones. Likewise, the myth that humans are separate from nature has been palpably demolished by the disasters already unleashed by climate change and biodiversity loss. As societies, civilizations and metanarratives collapse, new stories to live by are needed, and the manifesto calls out to artists of all kinds to use their art to discover and create new stories to structure society in the wake of inevitable collapse:

TABLE 9.1 Manifesto

Metaphors in extracts from The Dark Mountain

Metaphor (‘TARGET DOMAIN’ IS A ‘SOURCE FRAME’)

trigger expressions from source frame

the pattern of ordinary life is a fabric

fabric, tear

economies are a fabric

fabric, unravelling

material basis of life is a fabric

frays

ecological systems are threads

pulls at

human civilization is a building

construction, built, crumble, collapse, fall, debris, foundation, and city walls

the economy is a machine

machine, stuttering, engineers, cogs, wheels, engine and driving

We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

This response we call Uncivilised art … The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation … is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge for writing – for art – to meet. This is what we are here for. This is a highly original response because it vividly describes the collapse of human civilization but then turns not to alternative energy or ‘sustainable development’ as a ‘solution’. Instead it demands an artistic response to a predicament that cannot be ‘solved’ and requires an entire reimagination of who we are as people and the unmaking of ecocidal civilizations. The Manifesto started with civilization as the cause of the demise of humanity, explored its basis, and finished with the artistic project of Uncivilization, the ushering in of something new. The Manifesto itself is a powerful econarrative that, within its few pages, conveys a narrative of the origins of our ecological predicament, finding them in the structures of society. But more important than that, it is a strong and powerful call for writers and artists to create new econarratives themselves, one that has been taken up by many, both in the large number of Dark Mountain publications and beyond. Whether as a direct result of the Manifesto or not, the award-winning writer Ben Okri (2021) has described how he will commit himself to what he calls ‘existential creativity’: Faced with the state of the world and the depth of denial, faced with the data that keeps falling on us, faced with the sense that we are on a ship heading towards an abyss while the party on board gets louder and louder, I have found it necessary to develop an attitude and a mode of writing that I refer to as existential creativity. This is the creativity at the end of time.

Looking down, or up Some environmental communicators have a taboo about communication they call ‘defeatism’ or ‘doomism’ because they argue that it may stop people from taking action. Henwood (2012, p. xv), for example, writes:

Mobilising arguments about inevitable fates or cul-de-sacs without exit can demoralise more than they can rouse to action … wouldn’t it be better to spin narratives of how humans are marvellously resourceful creatures who can do a lot better with the intellectual, social, and material resources we have? However, if accurate images of the state of the world and the current trajectory of industrial civilization are conveyed, it may stop people from carrying out unnecessary actions and encourage debate about what other actions are actually necessary given the state of the world. There are always actions which can make the world a better place, whatever state it is in, and ‘doing better with the intellectual, social and material resources we have’ is something that is possible in any scenario. Kingsnorth and Hine in the Dark Mountain Manifesto use the metaphor of ‘looking down’ to mean facing the precarious state of the world as it is: And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down … Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us? We believe it is time to look down. Kingsnorth and Hine 2009 A recent film starring Leonardo DiCaprio also uses a verticality metaphor to encourage people to face oncoming calamity, but with the opposite orientation. In the film Don’t Look Up, a comet is hurtling towards Earth on a collision course and scientists try in vain to get people to notice the danger and act. Instead, deniers declare it a hoax, the media is more interested in celebrity gossip, and even when the comet is visible in the sky conspiracy theorists encourage people to exercise their patriotic duty by not looking up. The narrative of the film is an elaborate metaphor for climate change, and some of the scenes are extremely close to real discussions in which climate change is trivialized (Doyle 2022, Monbiot 2022a). It is not a perfect metaphor, however: unlike climate change, the comet is not caused by human action; only science can understand and address the issue, with

no role for traditional knowledge systems; and social justice issues of who caused the problem and who is suffering most from it cannot easily be explored (Doyle 2022, p. 6). That is not to say that a single metaphor or film alone has to do everything to address climate change, just that we need additional metaphors to fit into the jigsaw puzzle of environmental communication. If we do ‘look down’ or ‘look up’ and discover that industrial civilization is on a path towards collapse and there is little chance of blocking that path, then the question is, what do we do? The Dark Mountain Manifesto encourages bold creative writing that does not shy away from the truth but instead opens up new pathways to rethinking what it means to be human at this moment in history. Another possibility is to search religious, traditional and indigenous literature from around the world to discover stories and ways of using language which, though coming from long ago, can speak to our times. As James and Morel (2020, p. 2) describe, ‘changing human interactions with the environment requires not only new stories but also a better understanding of the ones that have long been in circulation’. The final chapter of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (Carson 2000) begins with a journey metaphor: We stand now where two roads diverge … The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road … offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. Looking at the history of sixty years since she wrote this, some might conclude that we have taken the wrong road, and with current predictions from climate science we are not far off its end. Ben Okri expresses a similar idea – we have taken the wrong turn and are now at the brink of disaster: Somehow civilisation has taken a wrong turn and we collectively need to alter our destination, our journey. We can’t drive ourselves to the brink of extinction a second time. If we survive this brink, if we pull ourselves back from this apocalypse that’s awaiting, then we have to find a global

direction that is one of sustenance and justice and beauty for the whole Earth, and for all the peoples of the Earth. Okri does hold open the possibility of ‘pulling back’ – the metaphorical car has a reverse gear, but the conditional ‘if’ expresses uncertainty of whether we will use it. The title of this chapter included the vague and ambiguous phrase ‘finding ourselves at the end of the road’. This expression could be literal in the sense of walking down a dead-end street and reaching the end. It could be metaphorical where ‘the end of the road’ symbolizes the imminent collapse of industrial civilization, the passing into history of a way of life, or the last moments before human extinction. The expression ‘finding ourselves’ could similarly be literal, discovering that we are in a particular location, or it could be metaphorical, discovering our true nature. I will end this chapter just by saying that if the evidence becomes overwhelming that we are coming to the end of the road of our current civilization, our way of life, or of our species, then I believe it is better to be open about it, to ‘look up’ (or ‘down’) and use the opportunity to think deeply about who we are as humans, and, if we can, to find ourselves before it is too late.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

CHAPTER TEN

Conclusion In the introduction to this book I asked what econarratives are and gave a fairly simple answer of narratives that include not only humans but other species and the physical environment in their characters and locations, and portray interactions among them. I then asked where econarratives are and the answer was more complicated: they are in particular texts, but their basic structures also remain in the minds of people who have been exposed to those texts. And the structures of common econarratives are embedded in cultures, across the minds of multiple people, forming narratives we live by. So narratives are in texts, minds and cultures. In the chapters that proceeded from there I discussed and analysed a diverse range of econarratives from different areas of life. What emerged was not just what econarratives are, or where they are, but what econarratives do. To express this in two words, they ‘build worlds’, or more precisely, they ‘build storyworlds’. James and Morel (2020, p. 11) describe how: Importantly for consideration of narrative environments, the concept of ‘storyworld’ calls attention to the worldmaking power of narrative, or its potential to immerse or transport readers into virtual environments that differ from the physical environments in which they read. Storyworlds are particularly important for explorations of econarrative because:

they not only ask readers to inhabit the storyworld of a text, but they necessarily serve as a point of comparison between the textual world and the everyday one that the reader inhabits. Within the difference between these two worlds emerges the narrative’s power to reshape readers’ thinking. Donly 2017, p. 5 Storyworlds, therefore, are ‘world-creating’ and catalyse ‘an imaginative relocation of readers to a new, often unfamiliar world and experience’ (James 2015, p. 11). However, what these three characterisations miss is that the familiar, everyday world we inhabit is also already partly a storyworld, influenced by the countless narratives that we have read or heard directly or been indirectly exposed to through our culture. In this chapter, I will bring together some of the key ideas covered in the book with a specific example: storyworlds that construct conceptions of wolves. As well as their intrinsic magnificence as beings, wolves play an extremely important role in ecosystems, yet their reintroduction is often hampered by a great reluctance that comes, ultimately, from narratives. Mike Phillips, the executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, describes how: Grey wolves are actually really easy to coexist with. The only thing that’s ever gotten in the way of wolf recovery, the only thing that stands as an obstacle to coexisting with grey wolves, is the mythical wolf. People have this sense that grey wolves have an almost supernatural ability to exercise their predatory will on a whim. And by doing so they create a wake of death and desolation and destruction everywhere they go. In so many fairy stories read to children in industrial countries, wolves are the archetypal evil character. To give just one example, the 1810 English version of Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH 1810) describes the wolf as powerful and dangerous with the adjectives ravenous, artful and strong, in contrast to the innocent Little Red Riding Hood who is represented as a powerless victim through the adjective ‘poor’ in ‘poor Biddy’ (Image 10.1a). The wolf is activated by being the Actor of the process of killing the Grandmother, ‘He eat Grandmamma’ (Image 10.1b), and Sayer of the threat

of killing Little Red Riding Hood ‘and to eat you I wot’ (Image 10.1c). The image of the wolf with huge teeth bared towering over the girl at the end is a visible representation of quite literal ‘power over’ and suggests that the threat was indeed carried out.

FIGURE 10.1a–c Little Red Riding Hood, 1810, author unnamed, from the British Library (public domain).

In the Grimms’ version of Little Red Riding Hood, which appeared two years later, the wolf is cast into the role of villain through the expressions ‘wicked animal’ (Pullman 2012, p. 137) and a ‘sinner’ (p. 140). This version has an additional ‘happy ending’ where a huntsman cuts open the belly of the wolf, pulls out Red Riding Hood and the Grandmother, and leaves rocks in the Wolf’s stomach so he dies. In this storyworld, the wolf is a symbol of deceitful and seductive men, the moral being not to trust smooth-talking strangers. But despite the anthropomorphism the negative portrayal can carry over to paint the actual animal, wolves, in a negative light and promote violence towards them. Zipes (2013) reminds us that the storyworlds western fairy tales conjure up are complicit in the process of ‘civilising’, a process which has seen the eradication of wolves across vast swathes of their range as well as a whole catalogue of other social and ecological horrors: Despite the continual efforts of women to make their voices heard in the formation and diffusion of the western fairy tale, the canon of fairy tales was, indeed, largely determined by men and played (and continues to play) a key role in the civilising process of Europe and North America … This civilising process, though constituted by conflicting force fields of production, was and is still largely predicated on male values, social codes, literary standards, and needs, consistent with the development of capitalism and its processes and operations. Econarratives have the potential to resist the mythical storyworlds of the evil wolf and provide new representations that can convey empathy and compassion for wolves. An example of a powerful econarrative about forests and wolves is the narrative essay Wildwood by the writer and rewilding facilitator Kara Moses (Moses 2022). Wildwood describes Moses’s deep experiences of exploring Białowieża, a rare ancient woodland in Europe. The narrative contains a combination of scientific information about the ecological importance of wolves in a paradigmatic style of presentation, as well as more evocative presentation in narrative style (see Chapter 7). An example of the paradigmatic style is the following:

Białowieża also retains key agents of regeneration, such as wolves, whose presence has profound effects that echo throughout the ecosystem, known as trophic cascades. As they prowl the forests, they keep their prey on the move, creating a ‘landscape of fear’ that prevents any one area being overgrazed. Grazers like deer can prevent forest regeneration if they stay in any one area for too long, feeding relentlessly on young trees that struggle to become established. If the wolves are exterminated, as they have been across much of their range, the number of grazing animals increases, and their relative safety causes them to move around less. This can ultimately mean the loss of huge areas of forest, the effects of which are far-reaching: widening circles of species loss; soil erosion; flooding. In this extract there are technical terms from ecological science such as regeneration, ecosystem, trophic cascades, and range. There are nominalizations like species loss and soil erosion, and descriptions of the roles of wolves and grazing animals in general rather than specific details of interactions with actual wolves. These features combine to raise the facticity and the authority of the text, while providing essential information in a concise way. On its own, however, this form of abstract writing is not enough to bring readers into a vicarious relationship of respect and compassion with wolves. To do this, Moses uses a narrative presentation style: A pack of wolves are on the prowl. There are just three: two females and one male. Unhurriedly, they trot along in that distinctive wolfish manner, shoulders swinging, head low. They follow the human trails and forest roads … I trail the wolves for hours through the snow … The moon, full to bursting, sings her silver velvet song to the earth, while a blaze of dazzling stars dance across the night sky. The wolves sound in the far distance, the howling cry of wilderness echoing down through the ages, as if to remind us of who we once were; who we could be again. Calling us back into the family. Moses 2022

In this quotation there is high activation (see Chapter 2), where the wolves are Actors of the material processes prowl, trot, and follow and Sayers of the verbal process sound (‘the wolves sound in the far distance’ gives higher activation than ‘the sound of the wolves in the far distance). There is personification and metaphor (Chapter 9) of the moon ‘singing’ and stars ‘dancing’. There are also devices which convey enchantment (Chapter 5): the synaesthesia of the ‘silver velvet song’, the sense image of ‘sound’ and the synecdochical sense image of the ‘echoing cry of the wilderness’. Also, there is the kinship framing of ‘family’ that invokes an ecocultural identity (Chapter 3) by placing humans and non-humans as members of the same group. Although set in the present moment through the use of present tense, the narrative structure also reaches into the past in the expression ‘down through the ages’ and the past tense of ‘were’ in ‘remind us of who we once were’. The exact meaning of ‘who we once were’ is left for the reader to fill in, but the mention of the sound of the wolves implies a life lived in connection with wolves, and the word ‘wilderness’ extends this to a connection with all of nature. The narrative then flashes into the future with the modal verb ‘could’ representing a desired state of affairs – ‘who we could be again’. Finally, ‘Calling us back into the family’ presupposes that we once treated nature as kin in the past, and floats the enticing possibility that we may regain that perspective in the future. Econarratives like this can play a role in challenging the storyworlds at the heart of unsustainable cultures. They can then use vivid and evocative language to build new storyworlds that reimagine not just culture, but, at an even deeper level, what it means to be human. That is what econarratives can do at their best, but what about the study of econarrative? What can that do? The first point to make is that I do not see the study of econarratives just as something to be done by academics for publication in specialist journals that few people read. That is the reason why I try not to make my writing overly technical, convoluted and full of jargon, and quickly move to concrete examples before explanations become too abstract. That also helps stop the writing from spiralling around self-referential abstractions that have lost all connection with the world. My vision is that an awareness of econarratives and an ability to recognize, evaluate and produce them should become a basic competence for leaders of all kinds – those leading their

lives, their families, their communities, their businesses or their countries (Chapter 6). The question is, how can leaders use knowledge of econarrative in their communication practices? The first step is to reflect on their values and develop and articulate an ecosophy. The next step is to use linguistic analysis to reveal the underlying metanarratives that structure the unsustainable and unequal society that they are part of, and judge those metanarratives according to their ecosophy (Stibbe 2021). Where metanarratives oppose the ecosophy and are seen as harming other people and the natural world then the next step is to search for alternative ways of conceptualizing the world. This is where econarratives come in. Leaders can search for inspirational econarratives from indigenous and traditional cultures around the world or from contemporary social or political movements, or create new narratives that speak to the changing conditions of the world (Nanson 2021). The search is for econarratives that align with their ecosophy. The next step is to promote those econarratives as useful ways of rethinking about the world. What I have tried to do in this book is show how econarratives are constructed: the linguistic, narratological and rhetorical features which combine together to convey powerful and inspiring messages. The final step is to put these features into practice in communication – weaving them into political speeches, business speeches, poems, stories, novels, textbooks, children’s books, media texts and social media, to convey new narratives to live by. A concrete example of weaving inspirational linguistic features into narrative is the children’s picture book, Little Red Hat, created by Bridget Irving (2021a). Irving came across the book Animals Erased (Stibbe 2012) and the free online course The Stories We Live By (Stibbe 2022). These materials describe ways that animals are often marginalized or represented as distorted versions of themselves in the texts that surround us in everyday life. They also explore econarratives, showing how, for example, Japanese haiku and animation films use various techniques to represent animals saliently, as beings that are worthy of consideration and care. The materials inspired Irving to create a picture book, Little Red Hat, to provide a radically new version of Little Red Riding Hood. In an article describing the creative process behind Little Red Hat, Irving wrote:

Many elements from Animals Erased and ecolinguistics have shaped this book and the illustrations within it … I was motivated by the discovery of an award-winning contemporary ‘feminist’ version of Red Riding Hood where Red kills the wolf herself, without the need to be rescued by a man. The book ends with the illustrated scene of a triumphant Red wearing a wolf fur coat, and the forest is devoid of animal life. I do not believe anyone involved in the making and publishing of that book, and others like it, really see the wolf, the mocking of real violence toward real animals, or the destruction of nature; all are erased. To combat erasure I gave the wolf a family and a perspective; they have a voice … I was mindful to show closeness, similarity with humans, to include other animals, and illustrate wolves living wolf lives without human interference. Irving 2021b Little Red Hat follows a narrative structure that starts with harmony. The young girl in the title role reads and draws, then her mother gazes into her eyes as she goes to bed. The next image is a visual parallel, where a mother wolf gazes into the eyes of her cub in a cosy den in the woods. The following images show the wolves in the woods living their own lives for their own purposes (Image 10.2a and 10.2b). Eyeline vectors from the mother wolf to her cub (10.2a), and from the cub to the mother (10.2b) show a loving relationship between them (Image 10.2b). The wolves are activated by being Actors of material processes – the cub is depicted chasing a butterfly and the parent playing with the cub. They are also shown as beings with mental lives, relaxing happily and comfortably in the safety of the deep woods (Image 10.2a). The wolves are given salience by being in the foreground, taking up a large amount of the frame, and in some pictures (e.g., 10.2b) looking out at the viewer to establish a relationship (a demand picture). In the next stage of the narrative, the equilibrium is shattered by the arrival of bulldozers, which are depicted as monsters with huge ‘teeth’ (Image 10.2c), in a very similar visual design to There’s a Monster in My Kitchen (discussed in Chapter 8). An important inversion occurs, with the words ‘What big eyes they have, what big teeth they have’ next to the bulldozers. These words are intertextual allusions to the original story but

cast the bulldozers in the role of villain, which was previously given to the wolf. The wolves are depicted from a high angle (looking down at them) to show powerlessness, with eyeline vectors looking across to the bulldozers and an expression of fear on their faces. Later in the narrative, the forest is shown as destroyed and replaced with grazing land, and the wolves and other animals are depicted on the right-hand side fleeing (Image 10.2d), which completes the degeneration of the harmony. The narrative then returns to the girl, who is held by her mother and then depicted painting pictures in a large book. A caption above her reads ‘Let’s make a new story together’, with the first-person plural pronoun including the reader and calling them to action. The final illustration of the book shows the wolves walking away from the viewer and another call to action with the caption: ‘Don’t let this be the end’, and links to websites to ‘Learn more about wolves and ways to help them’. The return to a new equilibrium at the end of the narrative is therefore made dependent on the actions of the reader.

FIGURE 10.2a–d Selected illustrations from Little Red Hat by Bridget Irving, reproduced with permission from Bridget Irving.

My hope is that econarratives like Bridget Irving’s Little Red Hat, Kara Moses’s Wildwood, George Monbiot’s (2022b) short film How Wolves Change Rivers (which describes the incredible ecological restoration that occurs when wolves are reintroduced), or Blakeslee’s (2017) American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West, can contribute to a movement that resists the storyworld of the ‘mythical wolf’ and constructs new, empathic stories of who wolves are. And that as a result of this, there will be stronger support for reintroduction efforts, the wolves will keep the grazers moving, and forests will be regenerated, with everything that means for wildlife, biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions and flood prevention.

However, as wonderful as rewilding efforts would be, there is a problem of scale. The largest number of grazers are protected from introduced predators because they are livestock – primarily sheep and cows. For example, 55 per cent of the continent of Australia is used for livestock farming (AuBARES 2022) with more than 100 million sheep and cattle (MLA 2022a, 2022b). The WWF (2021) describes how ‘development of livestock pasture is the chief driver of forest loss in Eastern Australia, accounting for 75%’, and livestock are also a major contributor to climate change. There is a ray of hope, however, since the primary greenhouse gas that livestock produce is methane which is short-lived in the atmosphere. This means that a massive reduction in livestock would have a relatively fast impact in mitigating climate change, so long as the meat was replaced by more sustainable alternatives or a reduction in overeating and foodwaste. And woody biomass growing on the former forests freed up from sheep and cattle could sink significant amounts of CO2 and provide homes for wildlife. The problem is that advertising appears to be working directly against that goal. My reason for focusing on Australia is not because it is the most ecologically destructive example of livestock production (there are worse), but because it makes the most powerful use of narrative in its advertising (as discussed in Chapter 8). The industry organization behind the advertising, Meat & Livestock Australia, boasts that: Meat & Livestock Australia’s (MLA) Summer Lamb Campaigns continue to uphold a legacy of creating famous, distinctive campaigns with the latest ‘Make Lamb Not Walls’ advertisement winning ‘TV Ad of the year’ and ‘Ad Campaign of the Year’ at The Mumbrella Awards last night. The advertisement mentioned here is a cinematic narrative which evokes a future dystopia in 2031 where the country is divided by the ‘The Great State Wall’. All the sheep are on the Queensland side of the wall. But one day, an old man is passed a lamb chop through a hole in the wall, takes a bite with huge pleasure on his face, and then the inhabitants storm the wall, destroying it so that they can all eat lamb. The wall is shown dramatically falling, in an allusion to the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the end, a girl says,

‘we did it, the United States of Australia’, but the old man corrects her ‘No, it’s just Australia’. This advertisement is another one like ‘Operation Boomerang’ (discussed in Chapter 8), which uses narrative to associate meat with national identity, this time meat as what holds the entire country together. In Chapter 8 I also discussed the role of counter-advertising in encouraging people to reduce meat consumption, and how counteradvertising could borrow some of the narrative techniques of the industry to associate sustainable food with ethics, love, attractive lifestyles, national identity and even national unity. There is a deeper level than this though that resistance to the destructive narratives of advertising can focus on, and that is at the level of economic theory. The economic system in industrial countries is based on neoclassical economics, which has at its heart a key assumption: that people are rational and so use their money in ways that provide ‘utility’ (i.e., usefulness, wellbeing or an improvement in their lives of some kind). Consumers are seen as insatiable – that the more they spend the more ‘utility’ they gain. The problem is that the whole point of advertising is to wildly exaggerate the utility that consumers will gain from purchase of the product, which brings the fictional insatiable consumer into being (Daly and Cobb 1994, Stibbe 2020). Through buying lamb, consumers will not just get a meal but will unite their great country; if they buy ice cream then they are gaining love; buying trainers is a symbol of overcoming barriers of discrimination; high-sugar drinks offer a lifestyle of friendship, connection, and health; fast food brings masculinity, toughness and national identity, and with the many greenwash advertisements buying the product comes with the beneficial side effect of healing the planet. None of these ‘extras’ are stated explicitly because advertising standards authorities will ban advertisements which make explicit false claims. Instead advertisements use multi-modal images and narrative to convey implications rather than make statements. Consumers do not have to ‘believe’ the implications – a remembered flash of images and feelings when considering whether to buy a product could be enough to influence them. This subtle influence only happens in some cases – consumers are able to be critical about advertisements they have seen and reject them. However, the influence happens often enough to make it worthwhile for

industries to spend billions of dollars on advertising and for the resultant overconsumption to damage the ecosystems that life depends on. Of course, consumers do not actually get all the ‘extras’ subtly promised by the advertisements, so are not actually using money in ways that maximize their utility. In this way, advertising undermines the theory of neoclassical economics in its own terms, and undermines the whole society that is built on this theory. I started this chapter with conflicting narratives around wolves but then went on to mention producing counter-type advertisements to oppose the destructive narratives of meat advertising. Finally, I ended up calling for change at the level of the deep metanarratives which give advertising its social legitimacy in the first place. I wanted to present this wide span here in the concluding chapter because the social and ecological situation that we are in is so severe that everything needs to change. Naomi Klein puts it as follows in her book This Changes Everything: There are ways of preventing this grim future. But the catch is that they also involve changing everything … how we live, how our economies function, even the stories we tell about our place on earth. The good news is that many of these are distinctly un-catastrophic. Many are downright exciting. Klein 2014, p. 4 Changing the ‘stories we tell about our place on earth’, the stories we tell about ‘how we live’ and the stories we tell about ‘how our economies function’ will require the creation and invention of new econarratives as well as the rediscovery of ancient ones that speak to our times. Some will argue (not unreasonably) that the metanarratives of neoclassical economics, consumerism, transnational capitalism and neoliberalism are so entrenched that it is impossible to resist or replace them at the speed necessary to prevent ecological collapse: ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ (Fisher 2009). If this is true then it does not obviate the need for new econarratives – instead it makes them even more vital for the future. Collapse or the ‘end of the world’ does not happen everywhere all at once but is an unravelling that happens in different places at different times,

is already happening, and will no doubt continue to happen at an accelerating pace in the future given the trajectory of environmental damage. Econarratives about the end times (Chapter 9) can help us to prepare by imagining the future. Perhaps apocalyptic econarratives could encourage people to act in ways which prevent the grim predicted future. However, econarratives can also play other roles. Econarratives which help us find purpose and meaning in connection with other people and nature can improve life in the immediate present, as well as providing resilience for troubled times ahead. Most importantly, ecological collapse is unlikely to mean human extinction in the short term – humans are extremely adaptable and have found ways to survive in extreme conditions like the last ice age. Those that survive the end of industrial civilization will need to build new civilizations and will need econarratives to build them along more compassionate, equal and sustainable lines. I want to end on a more personal note. I have always believed that the best research has a transformative effect on the researcher, because in the course of the research they are discovering something new about the interconnected world they are part of, and therefore about themself. I started the research that resulted in this book as an ecolinguist, hoping to extend the theory of ecolinguistics to better incorporate narrative, which I see as one of the most important and powerful ways that texts build worlds. There are many elements of ecolinguistics in this book, for example the analysis of transitivity in creation myths, and I believe it has been a useful lens. However, ecolinguistics has its roots in linguistics, which in turn is part of the artificial disciplinary division of the world. The world itself refuses to divide itself up, and what we call ‘language’ is actually an intrinsic part of the interaction of embodied and emplaced beings who exist as part of wider ecosystems. I therefore found myself including ecolinguistics but expanding beyond to a wider ecological humanities viewpoint. But even ‘humanities’ has its baggage, since it was traditionally based on a celebration of what makes humans separate from animals (language, religion, culture, a sense of history, or art) rather than celebrating what we share in common with animals (social bonds, emotions, embodiment, and dependence on ecosystems for our continued existence). Ecological humanities are an attempt to transcend this legacy but still draw from approaches developed within the more anthropocentric frame. Then there is science, which also

plays an essential role in the study of econarrative as the evidence-base that ecosophies are founded on. An understanding of science is also necessary in critiquing the (positive and negative) narratives woven by scientific communities. And on top of all this is the role of activism: clearly everything I write about is intended to contribute to practical change. Given the situation the world is in, how can we not dedicate ourselves to making a difference? Ben Okri (2021) expresses this well for his profession as an author: I want to propose an existential creativity. How do I define it? It is the creativity wherein nothing should be wasted. As a writer, it means everything I write should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species. It means that the writing must have no frills. It should speak only truth. In it, the truth must be also beauty. It calls for the highest economy. It means that everything I do must have a singular purpose. Econarrative, then, is too big to be studied by linguistics, ecolinguistics, or ecological humanities. It requires a transdisciplinary approach that involves different ways of knowing, that include the scientific, analytic, empathic, experiential, embodied, creative and practical. It needs ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ (Roland 1958), but also ‘knowing why’ and an embrace of the inevitable ‘not knowing’ or mystery. In industrial societies, the education system tends to emphasize only a narrow range of types of knowing, primarily ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ applied predominantly to technical and business pursuits. Studying econarrative has demanded that I cultivate other ways of knowing, which has been both transformational as well as humbling. The process of research has not left me with great optimism, since almost every indicator I have found (scientific and political) points towards the planet becoming increasingly inhospitable for human life and the life of many other species. But there are always ways of making the future as good as it can be within the constraints of what is possible. Rethinking the dominant story of wolves, reintroducing them, watching the trophic cascades regenerate forests, and reflecting on who we are as humans are a few of the steps which are possible and make the world a better place

whatever happens in the future. And we need to challenge all the stories that underpin unsustainable industrial civilizations because, by definition, an unsustainable civilization cannot last, and we need to search for new narratives, econarratives, to base emerging civilizations on.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

APPENDIX A

How the World was Made A Cherokee creation myth recorded by James Mooney (1888) The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again. The Indians are afraid of this. When all was water, the animals were above in Gӑlûñ′lӑtĭ, beyond the arch; but it was very much crowded, and they were wanting more room. They wondered what was below the water, and at last Dâyuni′sĭ, ‘Beaver’s Grandchild,’ the little Water-beetle, offered to go and see if it could learn. It darted in every direction over the surface of the water, but could find no firm place to rest. Then it dived to the bottom and came up with some soft mud, which began to grow and spread on every side until it became the island which we call the earth. It was afterward fastened to the sky with four cords, but no one remembers who did this. At first the earth was flat and very soft and wet. The animals were anxious to get down, and sent out different birds to see if it was yet dry, but they found no place to alight and came back again to Gӑlûñ′lӑtĭ. At last it seemed to be time, and they sent out the Buzzard and told him to go and make ready for them. This was the Great Buzzard, the father of all the buzzards we see now. He flew all over the earth, low down near the ground, and it was still soft. When he reached the Cherokee country, he was very

tired, and his wings began to flap and strike the ground, and wherever they struck the earth there was a valley, and where they turned up again there was a mountain. When the animals above saw this, they were afraid that the whole world would be mountains, so they called him back, but the Cherokee country remains full of mountains to this day. When the earth was dry and the animals came down, it was still dark, so they got the sun and set it in a track to go every day across the island from east to west, just overhead. It was too hot this way, and Tsiska′gĭlĭ′, the Red Crawfish, had his shell scorched a bright red, so that his meat was spoiled; and the Cherokee do not eat it. The conjurers put the sun another handbreadth higher in the air, but it was still too hot. They raised it another time, and another, until it was seven handbreadths high and just under the sky arch. Then it was right, and they left it so. This is why the conjurers call the highest place Gûlkwâ′gine Di′gӑlûñ′lӑtiyûñ′, ‘the seventh height,’ because it is seven hand-breadths above the earth. Every day the sun goes along under this arch, and returns at night on the upper side to the starting place. There is another world under this, and it is like ours in everything – animals, plants, and people – save that the seasons are different. The streams that come down from the mountains are the trails by which we reach this underworld, and the springs at their heads are the doorways by which we enter it, but to do this one must fast and go to water and have one of the underground people for a guide. We know that the seasons in the underworld are different from ours, because the water in the springs is always warmer in winter and cooler in summer than the outer air. When the animals and plants were first made – we do not know by whom – they were told to watch and keep awake for seven nights, just as young men now fast and keep awake when they pray to their medicine. They tried to do this, and nearly all were awake through the first night, but the next night several dropped off to sleep, and the third night others were asleep, and then others, until, on the seventh night, of all the animals only the owl, the panther, and one or two more were still awake. To these were given the power to see and to go about in the dark, and to make prey of the birds and animals which must sleep at night. Of the trees only the cedar, the pine, the spruce, the holly, and the laurel were awake to the end, and to them it was given to be always green and to be greatest for medicine, but to the others it

was said: ‘Because you have not endured to the end you shall lose your hair every winter.’ Men came after the animals and plants. At first there were only a brother and sister until he struck her with a fish and told her to multiply, and so it was. In seven days a child was born to her, and thereafter every seven days another, and they increased very fast until there was danger that the world could not keep them. Then it was made that a woman should have only one child in a year, and it has been so ever since.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

APPENDIX B

Credits and Permissions The following authors, artists, poets and publishers have kindly given permission to include extracts from their work in this book. Table B.1 crossreferences the citations that appear in the book with the individuals and organizations that have given permission. Image credits appear directly under the images.

TABLE B.1 Credits cross-referenced to citations Reference

With gratitude for the permission of

(Barlow in Barlow and Paul 2008) (Barlow in Burns 2013)

John Barlow and Snapshot Press

(Greenpeace 2020a)

Greenpeace

(Irving 2021a)

Bridget Irving

(Kingsnorth and Hine 2009)

Dark Mountain Project

(Lanoue 2022)

David Lanoue

(Lyles in Barlow and Gilli 2022) (Lyles in Burns 2013)

Robert Lyles on behalf of Peggy Willis Lyles, and Snapshot Press

(McCarthy 2020)

Emergence Magazine

(North 2009)

Carolyn North and ICRL Press

(Olson in Burns 2013)

Ed Barth on behalf of Marian Olson, and Snapshot Press

(Osorio 2022a)

For The Wild and Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio

(Spiess in Burns 2013)

Lee Gurga on behalf of Robert Spiess, and Snapshot Press

(Swist 2016) (Swist in Burns 2013)

Wally Swist and Snapshot Press

(Virgil in Burns 2013)

Grace Marcus on behalf of Anita Virgil, and Snapshot Press

(White 2019)

Emergence Magazine

(White 2022b)

Finding Our Way

(White in Rokicka 2022)

Gosia Rokicka

(Yarrow in Burns 2013)

Ruth Yarrow and Snapshot Press

(Yates 2012)

Reprinted with permission from HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © (2014) Chris Yates

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

GLOSSARY This glossary provides short descriptions of technical terms to show how they are used in this book. The descriptions are not intended to be comprehensive definitions as many of these terms are used in different ways by different theorists and require more explanation than is possible in a sentence. Some items in the glossary are drawn from or adapted from Stibbe (2021, pp. 221–229). Activation: Participants are activated when they are represented as doing, thinking, feeling and saying things. Actor: A participant in a clause who is doing something active. Affected: A participant in a clause who is having something done to them. Affordance of a semiotic mode such as music or visual images: the set of meanings that the mode is well suited to convey in particular situations. Ambivalent narrative: A narrative which only partially accords with the ecosophy of the analyst (e.g., it is seen as having mixed benefits and drawbacks in encouraging people to protect the ecosystems that life depends on). Appraisal pattern: A cluster of linguistic features which come together to represent an area of life as good or bad. Appraising item: A word or expression which is used to shed a positive or negative light on someone or something. Beneficial narrative: A narrative which accords with the ecosophy of the analyst (e.g., it is seen as encouraging people to protect the ecosystems that life depends on). Camera angle: A high camera angle in a photograph is one where the camera is high up, looking down on the subject, whereas a low angle looks up at the subject. The camera angle can represent the subject as powerful (low angle) or powerless (high angle). Categorical imperative: An ethical requirement which must be honoured in all circumstances. The most well-known is Kant’s ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’.

Classic-type advertisement: An advertisement which describes the properties of the product being advertised, represents the product in a favourable light, and ends with explicit encouragement of the viewer to buy the product. Community: A group where members interact with each other in ways which support the common good of the group, or at least where there is interaction and an expectation that members contribute. Connotation: The associations that a word brings to mind in addition to its direct meaning, e.g., champagne connotes luxury. Counter-type advertisement: An advertisement which encourages the viewer not to buy a particular product on the grounds of the harm it causes. Demand picture: A visual image where a participant is looking out at the viewer, as if demanding a relationship with them. Deontology: An ethical framework where actions are considered right if they follow rules, principles and duties. Destructive narrative: A narrative which opposes or contradicts the ecosophy of the analyst (e.g., it is seen as encouraging people to destroy the ecosystems that life depends on). Discourse: The characteristic way that a particular group in society uses language, images, and other forms of representation (e.g., the discourse of neoclassical economists, environmentalists, or New Nature writers). Disembedded genre: A genre which has been appropriated and used outside of its normal setting (e.g., the use of a war genre in an advertisement). Disenchantment: A view of the world as consisting of material objects which interact with each other as the result of predictable (or potentially predictable) mechanical laws that govern matter, energy, space and time. Divine command: An ethical framework where actions are considered right if they are in accordance with the commands of God, usually as written in holy scriptures. Ecocultural identity: Belonging to a community that consists not only of human members but also members from the more-than-human world. Ecolinguistics: The study of the role of language in the life-sustaining interactions of humans, other species and the physical environment. Econarrative: A narrative that involves not only humans but also other species and the physical environment in interaction with each other. Ecosophy: An ecological philosophy, i.e., a set of values concerning the ideal relationship of humans with each other, other species and the physical environment. Emotional narrative: A sequence of logically connected emotional events (e.g., anger at an injustice, followed by determination to restore justice, and joy when the injustice is finally

overturned). Enchantment: A feeling, experience or realization that another being or place is magnificent, divine, sacred, ethereal, exquisite, magical, or sublime. End-focus: The extra importance given to an item through its location at the end of a clause or narrative. Entailment: A statement X entails another statement Y if Y is necessarily true when X is true (e.g., The birds arrived entails that The birds had travelled on a journey.) Erasure: A linguistic representation of an area of life as irrelevant, marginal or unimportant through its systematic absence or distortion in text. Ethical leadership: A process where one person attempts to frame or define the reality of others in ways that align with their ecosophy. Ethics of care: An ethical framework where caring relationships are the foundation of morality. The framework emphasizes emotions, the caring motivation, the particularities of the context and embodiment in ethical deliberation. Extrinsic value: Where value is placed on goals such as profit, status, fame, winning competitions or other self-serving goals which, in themselves, make no contribution to the common good. Facticity: The degree to which a description is presented as a certain and established truth (e.g., through the use of high modality, calls to authority, or the repertoire of empiricism). Facticity pattern: A cluster of linguistic devices which come together to represent descriptions as certain or true, or to undermine descriptions as uncertain or false. Frame: A packet of knowledge about an area of life. Frames are brought to mind through trigger words (e.g., the word ‘trowel’ can bring to mind the frame of gardening). Framing: The use of a package of knowledge about one area (a frame) to structure how another area of life is conceptualized (e.g., CLIMATE CHANGE IS A PROBLEM). Genre: Conventions that shape a particular type of text or linguistic interaction (e.g., a job interview, a love story or a horror film). Given / new: An information structure where certain information is presented as if already known to the reader (‘given’), while other information is presented as conveying something previously unknown (‘new’). In English, ‘given’ information is typically presented first in a sentence followed by ‘new’ information. Head: The main word in a phrase (e.g., the noun in a noun phrase or the adjective in an adjectival phrase). Homogenization: The representation of individual entities as indistinguishable parts of a larger group, crowd or mass. Ideational metafunction: The role of clauses in representing how the world is, or how storyworlds are, including descriptions, ideas and facts.

Identity: Belonging to a particular group where members have, or are seen to have, commonalities in appearance, character, behaviour, values or beliefs. Identity-type advertisement: An advertisement which represents the purchase of a product as a step towards becoming a different (and better) kind of person. Ideology: A belief system about how the world was, is, will be, or should be which is shared by members of a group. Immanent enchantment:Enchantment based on direct experience with other humans, other species, the physical landscape or human artifacts. Any sense of sacredness or divinity lies within the beings or objects themselves rather than in a separate plane. (see enchantment) Individualization: The representation of an entity as a single, unique individual. Ingroup and outgroup: An ‘ingroup’ is a group that individuals identify as being a member of, while an outgroup is one they do not see themselves as belonging to. Interpersonal metafunction: The role of clauses in representing relationships within the social world, including relationships between the speaker/writer and hearer/listener. Intertextuality: When texts draw from previous texts, either borrowing extracts directly or using similar phrasing and patterns of language. Intrinsic values: Where value is placed on goals such as alleviating poverty, contributing to the wellbeing of others, protecting the environment, or other altruistic goals which, in themselves, contribute to the common good. Kinship: The recognition that certain beings belong to the same family, often in an extended or metaphorical sense. Lexical set: A set of words which are all drawn from the same semantic domain (e.g., embrace, love, bond, connect and nurture are all part of a lexical set of ‘relationships’). Logos: A form of persuasion through appeals to logic, proof, reason, facts and figures. Mapping in metaphors and framings: the correspondence between elements of a source frame (or source narrative) and elements of a target domain. For example, in a metaphor of SOCIETY IS A FABRIC,

a ‘tear in the fabric’ maps onto ‘social disruption’.

Material process: An active process of doing something physical in the world. Mental process: A process of thinking, feeling or sensing. Metanarrative a general way of viewing the world that is held across the minds of multiple people within a culture (e.g., the metanarrative ECONOMIC GROWTH IS THE KEY GOAL OF SOCIETY). Metaphor: The use of a frame from a specific, concrete and imaginable area of life to structure how a clearly distinct area of life is conceptualized (e.g., CLIMATE CHANGE IS A ROLLERCOASTER). Metaphorical entailment: A statement about the target domain that arises from knowledge of the source domain. X metaphorically entails Y if, when a particular metaphor is applied, Y is necessarily true when X is true (e.g., if a SEEDS ARE TEACHERS metaphor is applied then ‘teachers

share knowledge’ in the source frame of teaching metaphorically entails that ‘seeds share knowledge’ in the target domain of seeds). Micronarrative: A complete narrative that is embedded within a larger text (e.g., the telling of a brief story within an environmental documentary). Modality: The level of certainty expressed by the speaker about the truth of a statement, typically through the use of modal auxiliaries (can, could, may, might, must, ought, shall, should, will, or would) or adverbs (probably, arguably). Mode: A medium of expression such as language, visual images, music, or film. Modifier: A grammatically optional element in a phrase which influences the meaning of the head of the phrase (e.g., in the sound of geese, the expression ‘of geese’ is the modifier and adds further information about ‘the sound’). Multimodal: The combination of different modes (e.g., language, music and visual images) within a single text. Narrative entailments: Messages or morals which can be drawn out of a narrative and applied to real life. Texts can explicitly encourage the reader to draw entailments (e.g., ‘The moral of this story is X’), can subtly hint at entailments, or the reader can selectively draw them out for themselves. Narrative leadership: The conscious use of narratives to frame or define the reality of others. Narrative presentation: The vivid presentation of particular characters, locations, events, actions, emotions, intentions or relationships. Narrative structure: A cognitive structure consisting of a sequence of logically connected events involving characters and locations. Narrative text: A linguistic or visual text which describes a sequence of logically connected events involving characters and locations. Narrative: A cognitive structure or text which involves a sequence of logically connected events involving characters and locations. Narrative-type advertisement: An advertisement which contains within it a sequence of logically connected events. Nominalization: A noun phrase which can be thought of as derived from an underlying process (e.g., the creation derives from X creates Y). Paradigmatic presentation: An abstract presentation of general causes, effects and logical connections, along with and empirical arguments about veracity. Participants: The living beings, physical objects, or abstract entities that appear in a clause or image. Passivation: Participants are passivated when they are represented as having something done to them, being spoken to, or being sensed by someone else.

Passive voice: A grammatical form where the subject undergoes the action of the verb (e.g., ‘Y is destroyed by X’ as opposed to the active voice ‘X destroys Y’). Pathos: A form of persuasion by influencing the audience’s frame of mind, primarily by eliciting an emotional response. Phenomenon: Tthe participant that is seen, heard, felt or otherwise perceived as part of a mental process (e.g., in I saw the owl, ‘the owl’ is the Phenomenon). Photorealism: A photorealistic image is one which looks as it normally would if an observer was viewing the phenomenon in real life. Images with low photorealism may encourage the viewer to search for a symbolic meaning behind the image. Placefulness: An intense focus on being in a particular place, where ‘place’ includes the embodied self, other beings, physical objects and all other phenomena within reach of the senses. Presupposition: The representation of a proposition as an obvious, taken for granted, background fact about the world. Process: A part of a clause which represents the activities or relationships that participants are involved in, such as being, doing, having, sensing, behaving, or saying. Usually the process corresponds to the verb (e.g., in ‘X creates Y’, the process is creating), but can be wrapped up into a noun (e.g., creation). Prosody: Semantic prosody is the positivity or negativity that words take on due to other words they are typically used with (e.g., the expression ‘linger’ has negative prosody because usually bad things like a cough or a suspicious person are said to linger). Reframing: The act of framing a concept in a way that is different from its typical framing in a culture. Repertoire of empiricism: Ways of writing which increase facticity by representing conclusions as being derived directly and impartially from data (e.g., ‘Measurements indicate that X’). Salience: The representation of an area of life as important and worthy of attention through concrete, specific and vivid depictions. Sayer: The participant who is speaking or sending out a message as part of a verbal process. Senser: A participant in a clause who is thinking, feeling or sensing something. Shot size: In visual images, shot size is the size of a subject compared to the size of the frame. Close-up shots, where the subject is large, can indicate close relationships between the viewer and the subject, while long shots can indicate both physical and emotional distance. Social cognition: Shared values, belief systems or stories in the minds of multiple individuals across a society. Source domain: The general area from which a source frame is drawn (e.g., the source frames of ‘wolf’ and ‘dragonfly’ both belong to the source domain of ‘animals’).

Source frame: The area of life which is being drawn from to provide words and structures in a metaphor or framing (e.g., in CIVILIZATION IS A FABRIC the source frame is ‘a fabric’). Source narrative: A narrative which is used to structure a target domain (e.g., a biblical narrative used to structure the concept of climate change). Stake: When a participant has an interest in a particular outcome occurring (e.g., a product manufacturer has an interest in representing their product favourably in order to drive sales). Story: A general term which can refer to narratives or metanarratives of all kinds. Storyworld: The world constructed by a narrative that the characters live and act within. Both fictional and non-fiction narratives construct storyworlds. Synonymy: A semantic relationship where two expressions have very similar meanings, or are used in a text as if their meanings were very similar. Target domain: The area of life that is being structured in a framing or metaphor (e.g., in CIVILIZATION IS A BUILDING

the target domain is ‘civilization’).

Theme: In functional grammar terms, the theme is the entity that is first mentioned in a clause and is seen as the ‘point of departure’, i.e., the main thing that the clause is about. The rest of clause is the rheme, which provides more information about the theme. Timelessness: An unbounded focus on the present moment without consciousness of the past or future. Transcendent enchantment: Enchantment based on gods, fairies, spirits or other supernatural phenomena which are seen as existing on a separate plane from the ordinary reality of the world. (see enchantment) Transitivity: The arrangement of participants and processes in a clause. Utilitarianism: An ethical framework where actions are considered right if they provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of beings. Vector: In visual analysis, a vector is an arrow or line within an image which implies action or changes from one state to another. Where eyes are depicted, an ‘eyeline vector’ follows the line of gaze. Verbal process: A process which involves speaking, writing or communicating. Virtue theory: An ethical framework where morality rests in being a particular kind of person, one whose character traits include certain virtues (e.g., wisdom, prudence, justice or courage).

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

REFERENCES Abbott, H.P., 2008. The Cambridge introduction to narrative. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. Abram, D., 1996. The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Pantheon. Adams, C. and Gruen, L., 2014. Ecofeminism: feminist intersections with other animals and the earth. London: Bloomsbury. Agostinelli, G. and Grube, J.W., 2002. Alcohol counter-advertising and the media. Alcohol Research & Health, 26 (1), 15–21. Agostinelli, G. and Grube, J.W., 2003. Tobacco counter-advertising: a review of the literature and a conceptual model for understanding effects. Journal of Health Communication, 8 (2), 107–127. Ailles, J.L., 2013. Ecocritical Heywood and The Play of the Weather. Early Theatre, 16 (2), 185. Akomolafe, B., 2022. On coming alive to other senses [online]. For The Wild. Available from: https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/dr-bayo-akomolafe-on-coming-alive-to-other-senses300. Althor, G., Watson, J.E.M., and Fuller, R.A., 2016. Global mismatch between greenhouse gas emissions and the burden of climate change. Scientific Reports, 6 (1), 20281. Anderson, R., 2005. Interview in the documentary film ‘The Corporation’. New York: Big Picture Media. Animal Aid, 2022. Vegan advert banned by ASA for showing the truth [online]. Animal Aid. Available from: www.animalaid.org.uk/vegan-advert-banned-by-asa-for-showing-the-truth. Arcari, P., 2017. Normalised, human-centric discourses of meat and animals in climate change, sustainability and food security literature. Agriculture and Human Values, 34 (1), 69–86. ATT, 2022. Can changing the narrative change society? [online]. Plant Based News. Available from: http://plantbasednews.org/opinion/can-changing-the-narrative-change-society. AuBARES, 2022. Snapshot of Australian agriculture 2022 [online]. Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences. Available from: www.agriculture.gov.au/ abares/products/insights/snapshot-of-australian-agriculture-2022.

Bal, M., 2017. Narratology: introduction to the theory of narrative. Fourth edition. University of Toronto Press. Bal, M., 2021. Narratology in practice. University of Toronto Press. Barlow, J. and Gilli, F., eds., 2022. Where rain would stay: the haiku poetry of Peggy Willis Lyles. Ormskirk: Snapshot Press. Barlow, J. and Paul, M., 2008. Wing beats: British birds in haiku. Liverpool: Snapshot Press. Barnhill, D., 2007. Moments, seasons, and mysticism: the complexity of time in Japanese haiku [online]. ASLE conference presentation. Available from: www.uwosh.edu/facstaff/barnhill/es-244basho/moments.pdf. Barthes, R., 1972. Mythologies. Rev. Vintage ed. London: Vintage Classics. Bashō, 2005. The narrow road to the deep north and other travel sketches. London: Penguin Classics. Bastida, X., 2020. How are young people making the choice to fight climate change? [online]. NPR. Available from: www.npr.org/2020/05/22/860168455/xiye-bastida-how-are-young-people-makingthe-choice-to-fight-climate-change. Bate, J., 2000. The song of the earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bates CHI, 2011. Haagen-Dazs summer love campaign [online]. Available from: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CBA7VBRedLE. BBC, 2022. Sir Keir Starmer: UK needs growth, growth, growth [online]. BBC News. Available from: www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-62292281. Beale, G.K., 2006. The purpose of symbolism in the Book of Revelation. CTJ, 41, 53–66. Becker, H., 1995. Moral entrepreneurs: the creation and enforcement of deviant categories. In: N.J. Herman, ed. Deviance: a symbolic interactionist approach. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Bell, A. and Ryan, M., eds., 2019. Possible worlds theory and contemporary narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Benwell, B. and Stokoe, E., 2006. Discourse and identity. Edinburgh University Press. Berman, M., 1981. The reenchantment of the world. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Biguzzi, G., 2006. Is the Babylon of Revelation Rome or Jerusalem? Biblica, 87 (3), 371–386. Blackmore, E. and Holmes, T., eds., 2013. Common cause for nature: values and frames in conservation. Machynlleth: Public Interest Research Centre. Bladow, K. and Ladino, J., eds., 2018. Affective ecocriticism: emotion, embodiment, environment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Blakeslee, N., 2017. American wolf: a true story of survival and obsession in the west. New York: Crown Pub. Blyton, E., 1968. Tales at bedtime. London: Collins.

BNC, 13 Banbury Road, 2007. British National Corpus [online]. The British National Corpus. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/2554. de Boer, J. and Aiking, H., 2017. Pursuing a low meat diet to improve both health and sustainability: how can we use the frames that shape our meals? Ecological Economics, 142, 238–248. de Boer, J., Schösler, H., and Aiking, H., 2017. Towards a reduced meat diet: mindset and motivation of young vegetarians, low, medium and high meat-eaters. Appetite, 113, 387–397. Bogueva, D. and Phau, I., 2016. Meat myths and marketing. In: T. Raphaely and D. Marinova, eds. Impact of meat consumption on health and environmental sustainability. Hershey: IGI Global, 264–276. Bookchin, M., 1995. Re-enchanting humanity: a defense of the human spirit against antihumanism, misanthropy, mysticism and primitivism. London: Cassell. Boyd, J.W. and Nishimura, T., 2004. Shinto perspectives in Miyazaki’s anime film ‘Spirited Away’. Journal of Religion and Film, 8(3). Briggs, R., 2013. Big Bang to civilization: ten amazing origin events [online]. livescience.com. Available from: www.livescience.com/41923-top-ten-origin-events.html. Brooks, L., 2021. Scotland’s new Makar Kathleen Jamie: ‘Poetry is at the heart of our culture’ [online]. The Guardian. Available from: www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/24/scotland-newmakar-kathleen-jamie-poetry-is-at-the-heart-of-our-culture. Brown, M.E., Treviño, L.K., and Harrison, D.A., 2005. Ethical leadership: a social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97 (2), 117–134. BRS, 2001. Environmental factors affecting Australia’s livestock industries [online]. Bureau of Rural Sciences. Available from: www.mla.com.au/globalassets/mla-corporate/generic/about-mla/enviroissues-for-livestock-ind-_brs-repro-2001.pdf. Bruner, J., 2010. Narrative, culture and mind. In: D. Schiffrin, A.D. Fina, and A. Nylund, eds. Telling stories: language, narrative, and social life. Georgetown University Press, 45–50. Bruner, J.S., 1986. Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burns, A., ed., 2013. Where the river goes: the nature tradition in English-language haiku. Ormskirk: Snapshot Press. Calligeros, M., 2016. Operation Boomerang: anti-vegan Australia day lamb ad featuring Lee Lin Chin gets the all-clear. The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 Jan. Camosy, C., 2017. Why all Christians should go vegan [online]. Washington Post. Available from: www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/05/why-all-christians-should-go-vegan. Campbell, J., 1949. The hero with a thousand faces. San Francisco: New World Library. Carlin, C., 2020. Navigating ecocultural Indigenous identity affinity and appropriation. In: T. Milstein and J. Castro-Sotomayor, eds. Routledge Handbook of ecocultural identity. London:

Routledge, 208–221. Carlyle, A., 2021. ‘And I listened to the whistlings and patterings outside’ hearing the wild spaces as sound. In: J. Grant, J. Matthias, and D. Prior, eds. The Oxford Handbook of sound art. Oxford University Press. Carroll, C., 2022. Stewarding homeland [online]. For The Wild. Available from: https://forthewild.world/listen/dr-clint-carroll-on-stewarding-homeland-299. Carson, R., 1965. The sense of wonder. New York: Harper & Row. Carson, R., 2000. Silent spring. London: Penguin. Cascardi, A., 1992. The ‘disenchantment’ of the world. In: A.J. Cascardi, ed. The subject of modernity. Cambridge University Press, 16–71. Chao, S., 2022. Writing nature in the active voice [online]. Environmental History Now. Available from: https://envhistnow.com/2022/07/08/writing-nature-in-the-active-voice. Cherry, E., 2010. Shifting symbolic boundaries: cultural strategies of the animal rights movement. Sociological Forum, 25 (3), 450–475. Clark, B., 2013. Relevance theory. Cambridge University Press. Clark, T., 2015. Ecocriticism on the edge: the anthropocene as a threshold concept. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Cohan, S. and Shires, L.M., 1988. Telling stories: a theoretical analysis of narrative fiction. New York: Routledge. Costanza, R., Kubiszewski, I., Giovannini, E., Lovins, H., McGlade, J., Pickett, K., Ragnarsdóttir, K.V., Roberts, D., De Vogli, R., and Wilkinson, R., 2014. Development: time to leave GDP behind. Nature, 505 (7483), 283–285. Crerar, P., Syal, R., and Adu, A., 2022. Embattled Braverman insists she is not at fault for Manston crisis. The Guardian, 31 Oct. Crompton, T. and Kasser, T., 2009. Meeting environmental challenges: the role of human identity. Godalming: WWF-UK. Crown, S., 2012. Kathleen Jamie: a life in writing. The Guardian, 6 Apr. Curry, P., 2019. Enchantment: wonder in modern life. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Curry, P., 2021. The experience of enchantment and the sense of wonder. Green Letters, 25 (2), 115– 129. Dahlstrom, M.F., 2014. Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert audiences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111 (Supplement 4), 13614–13620. Daly, H. and Cobb, J., 1994. For the common good: redirecting the economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future. 2nd edition. Boston: Beacon Press. Danielsson, K. and Selander, S., 2021. Semiotic modes and representations of knowledge. In: K. Danielsson and S. Selander, eds. Multimodal Texts in Disciplinary Education: A Comprehensive

Framework. New York: Springer International Publishing, 17–23. Davidson, H., 2016. ‘Operation Boomerang’ lamb ad insults Indigenous people, say critics. The Guardian, 11 Jan. Davis, N., 1993. Contemporary deontology. In: P. Singer, ed. A Companion to ethics. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 205–219. Deaton, J., 2020. These apocalyptic myths are coming true thanks to climate change [online]. Nexus Media News. Available from: https://nexusmedianews.com/end-of-the-world-myths-are-comingtrue-thanks-to-climate-change-a2b9cd7ecbaa. Dein, S., 2021. Covid-19 and the apocalypse: religious and secular perspectives. Journal of Religion and Health, 60 (1), 5–15. Diaz, A., 2019. Greta Thunberg tells off UN: ‘people are dying … and all you can talk about is money’. Los Angeles Times, 23 Sep. DiCaprio, L. and Stevens, F., 2016. Before the flood. National Geographic and Ratpac Documentary Films. van Dijk, T., 2009. Society and discourse: how social contexts influence text and talk. Cambridge University Press. Dik, S.C., 1997. The theory of functional grammar: the structure of the clause. Walter de Gruyter. Donly, C., 2017. Toward the eco-narrative: rethinking the role of conflict in storytelling. Humanities, 6 (2), 17. Doyle, J., 2022. Communicating climate change in ‘Don’t Look Up’. Journal of Science Communication, 21 (5), C02. Drath, W. and Palus, C., 1994. Making common sense: leadership as meaning-making in a community of practice. Greensboro: Center for Creative Leadership. EAT-Lancet, 2019. The planetary health diet [online]. EAT. Available from: https://eatforum.org/eatlancet-commission/the-planetary-health-diet-and-you. Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, 2011. Communities of practice: where language, gender and power all live. In: J. Coates, ed. Language and gender: a reader. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 573–582. ED, 2021. History of Coca-Cola ads in color (1930–2021) [online]. Evolution Daily. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nts5z8No6Q8. Eisenstein, C., 2011. Sacred economics: money, gift, and society in the age of transition. Berkeley: Evolver Editions. Eisenstein, C., 2013. The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Estrin, S., 2012. Microeconomics. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Evers, L.J. and Turner, F.W., 1975. Review of ‘Literature of the American Indian’. College Composition and Communication, 26 (1), 86–89.

Fairclough, N., 2003. Analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. de Ferrer, M. de, 2020. Live lamb used in provocative new vegan commercial in Israel [online]. euronews. Available from: www.euronews.com/green/2020/09/15/live-lamb-used-in-provocativenew-vegan-commercial-in-israel. Fisher, M., 2009. Capitalist realism: is there no alternative? Winchester: John Hunt Publishing. Flack, J., 2021. Commentary; dragons, angels, fiery lakes; Book of Revelation is climate change warning [online]. Times Union. Available from: www.timesunion.com/news/article/CommentaryBook-of-Revelation-s-prophecy-is-16186247.php. Fløttum, K. and Gjerstad, Ø., 2017. Narratives in climate change discourse. WIREs Climate Change, 8 (1). Foust, C. and O’Shannon Murphy, W., 2009. Revealing and reframing apocalyptic tragedy in global warming discourse. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 3 (2), 151– 167. Freire, P., 2000. Pedagogy of the oppressed. 30th anniversary edition. New York: Continuum. Fryer, M., 2014. Ethics theory and business practice. London: Sage. Fuchs, H.U., Contini, A., Dumont, E., Landini, A., and Corni, F., 2018. How metaphor and narrative interact in stories of forces of nature. In: M. Hanne and Kaal, eds. Narrative and Metaphor in Education. London: Routledge, 91–104. Garrard, G., 2012. Ecocriticism. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Garrard, G., ed., 2014. The Oxford Handbook of ecocriticism. Oxford University Press. Giddens, A., 1991. Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. Stanford University Press. Gilderhus, N., 1994. The art of storytelling in Leslie Silko’s ‘Ceremony’. The English Journal, 83 (2), 70–72. Gilligan, C., 2011. Interview with Carol Gilligan [online]. Ethics of care. Available from: https://ethicsofcare.org/carol-gilligan. Gilligan, C., 2012. In a different voice: women’s conceptions of self and of morality. Harvard Educational Review, 47 (4), 481–517. Gilmour, G., Batty, E., Holmes, W., Wally, S., and Inugai-Dixon, C., 2022. The role of the International Baccalaureate, Middle Years Programme, Interdisciplinary Unit as a cohesive, collaborative and synergistic practice to increase student language awareness for agency: JARIBE. Giovanelli, M. and Harrison, C., 2018. Cognitive grammar in stylistics: a practical guide. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Goodall, J., 2003. What separates us from chimpanzees? [online]. TED. Available from: www.ted.com/talks/jane_goodall_what_separates_us_from_chimpanzees.

Goodman, A., 2019. ‘Young people have had enough’: global climate strike youth activists on why they are marching today [online]. Democracy Now! Available from: www.democracynow.org/ 2019/9/20/global_climate_strike_new_york_minnesota. Gorringe, T., 2011. Visions of the end? Revelation and climate change. In: S. Kim, ed. Christianity and the renewal of nature: creation, climate change and sustainable living. London: SPCK, 14–21. Greenpeace, 2020a. There’s a monster in my kitchen [online]. Available from: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8rIjVDo_u8c. Greenpeace, 2020b. The making of ‘There’s a Monster in My Kitchen’ [online]. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HveZ3X7Vvck. Greer, J., 2017. Problems and predicaments [online]. Archdruid Report. Available from: http://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/problems-and-predicaments.html. Griffiths, J., 2000. Pip pip: a sideways look at time. London: Flamingo. Grimm, B., 2011. The complete ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Guggenheim, D. and Gore, A., 2006. An inconvenient truth. Paramount Vantage. Halliday, M., 2001. New ways of meaning: the challenge to applied linguistics. In: A. Fill and P. Mühlhäusler, eds. The ecolinguistics reader: language, ecology, and environment. London: Continuum, 175–202. Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C., 2013. Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar. 4th edition. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Hamilton, V., 1988. In the beginning: creation stories from around the world. Illustrated by Barry Moser. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Hansen, A. and Machin, D., eds., 2014. Visual environmental communication. Routledge. Harari, Y.N., 2022. To change our future, we should change how we teach history to children. The Guardian, 18 Oct. Heise, U., 2010. Eco-narratives. In: D. Herman, M. Jahn, and M. Ryan, eds. Routledge encyclopedia of narrative theory. London: Routledge, 129–130. Held, V., 2007. The ethics of care: personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press. Henwood, D., 2012. Dystopia is for losers. In: S. Lilley, D. McNally, E. Yuen, and J. Davis, eds. Catastrophism: the apocalyptic politics of collapse and rebirth. Oakland: PM Press, ix–xv. Herman, D., 2000. Narratology as a cognitive science. Image and Narrative, 1. Herman, D., ed., 2003. Narrative theory and the cognitive sciences. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Herman, D., 2009. Basic elements of narrative. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Hogg, M.A., 2016. Social identity theory. In: Understanding peace and conflict through social identity theory. Springer, Cham, 3–17.

Hylen, S.E., 2011. Metaphor matters: violence and ethics in Revelation. The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 73 (4), 777–796. IPBES, 2019. Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services [online]. Available from: https://ipbes.net/node/35274. IPBES-IPCC, 2022. Summary for policymakers of the methodological assessment regarding the diverse conceptualization of multiple values of nature and its benefits, including biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services [online]. Available from: https://zenodo.org/record/4782538. IPCC, 2022a. Climate change 2022: mitigation of climate change [online]. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Available from: www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3. IPCC, 2022b. Climate change 2022: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability [online]. Available from: www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf. Irving, B., 2021a. Little Red Hat. Coalport: Bridget Irving Art and Illustration. Irving, B., 2021b. Little Red Hat (introduction to book) [online]. Language and Ecology. Available from: www.ecoling.net. ITF, 2021. ITF transport outlook 2021 [online]. International Transport Forum. Available from: www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/transport-outlook-executive-summary-2021-english.pdf. Jacobs, G.M., 2001. Linking language and the environment: greening the ESL classroom. Toronto: Pippin Pub. James, E., 2015. The storyworld accord: econarratology and postcolonial narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. James, E. and Morel, E., eds., 2020. Environment and narrative: new directions in econarratology. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Jeffreys, T., 2012. Review: dark mountain, issue 3 [online]. The Journal of Wild Culture. Available from: www.wildculture.com/article/review-dark-mountain-issue-3/934. Kacian, J., 2009. Haiku as anti-story [online]. Speech given at the International Haiku North America Conference 2009. Available from: www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/items/show/593. Kahalon, R., Bareket, O., Vial, A.C., Sassenhagen, N., Becker, J.C., and Shnabel, N., 2019. The madonna-whore dichotomy is associated with patriarchy endorsement: evidence from Israel, the United States, and Germany. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 43 (3), 348–367. Kaptein, M., 2019. The moral entrepreneur: a new component of ethical leadership. Journal of Business Ethics, 156 (4), 1135–1150. Karolis, V.R., Corbetta, M., and Thiebaut de Schotten, M., 2019. The architecture of functional lateralisation and its relationship to callosal connectivity in the human brain. Nature Communications, 10 (1), 1417. Keen, S., 2013. Narrative empathy [online]. The living handbook of narratology. Available from: www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de.

Kimmerer, R.W., 2013. Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Kingsnorth, P. and Hine, D., 2009. The Dark Mountain manifesto [online]. Available from: http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto. Klein, N., 2014. This changes everything: capitalism vs. the climate. New York: Simon & Schuster. Klein, N., 2016. Let them drown: the violence of othering in a warming world. London Review of Books, 38 (11). Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. van, 2021. Reading images: the grammar of visual design. 3rd edition. London: Routledge. Lakoff, G., 1993. The contemporary theory of metaphor. In: A. Ortony, ed. Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge University Press, 202–251. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., 2003. Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press. Langhorne, J., 2018. Placefulness [online]. Into the Mountain. Available from: www.intothemountain.co.uk/placefulness. Lanham, D., 2021. A convergent imagining [online]. Emergence Magazine. Available from: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/a-convergent-imagining. Lanoue, D., 2022. The haiku of Kobayashi Issa [online]. Available from: http://haikuguy.com/issa/. Leeming, D.A., 2021. Tales of the earth: Native North American creation mythology. London: Reaktion Books. van Leeuwen, T., 2008. Discourse and practice. Oxford University Press. Lelkes, O., 2021. Sustainable hedonism. Bristol University Press. Leopold, A., 1979. A sand county almanac and sketches here and there. Oxford University Press. LeVasseur, T. and Peterson, A., eds., 2017. Religion and ecological crisis: the ‘Lynn White thesis’ at fifty. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Lilley, D., 2017. New British nature writing [online]. Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford University Press. Available from: www.academia.edu/44363994/New_British_Nature_Writing. LRRH, 1810. Little Red Riding Hood (author unknown). Moorfields: J. Aldis. Lyons, J., 2019. ‘Gore is the world’: embodying environmental risk in An Inconvenient Truth. Journal of Risk Research, 22 (9), 1156–1170. Lyotard, J.-F., 1984. The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. University of Minnesota Press. MacGillivray, L., 2009. I feel your pain: mirror neurons and empathy. Health Psychology, 6 (1), 5. Machin, D. and Mayr, A., 2012. How to do critical discourse analysis: a multimodal introduction. London: Sage.

MacKenzie, D., 2022. False narratives about Covid left us with millions of deaths – will we challenge them now? The Guardian, 23 Mar. Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J., 1998. Contested natures. London: Sage. Macy, J. and Johnstone, C., 2012. Active hope: how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy. Novato, CA: New World Library. Magnason, A., 2022. Giantstone [online]. Emergence Magazine. Available from: https://emergencemagazine.org/fiction/giantstone. Maroto, P.S., 2017. Bosch: the 5th centenary exhibition. 1st edition. New York: Thames and Hudson Ltd. Martin, J.R. and Rose, D., 2007. Working with discourse: meaning beyond the clause. 2nd edition. London; New York: Continuum. McCarthy, M., 2020. The coronavirus pandemic and the invisibility of nature [online]. Emergence Magazine. Available from: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-consolation-of-nature. McGilchrist, I., 2021. The matter with things: our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. London: Perspectiva Press. McIntosh, A., 2008. Hell and high water: climate change, hope and the human condition. Edinburgh: Birlinn. McLuhan, M., 2001. Understanding media: the extension of man. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. MEA, 2005. Ecosystems and human well-being: synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press. Mead, G., 2014. Telling the story: the heart and soul of successful leadership. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. Merchant, C., 2014. Earthcare: women and the environment. London: Routledge. Merida, K., 1999. After six years in suspended animation and with an election right around the corner, Al Gore shows no sign of stirring from the big sleepy. Washington Post, 7 Jun. Merskin, D., 2022. She, he, not it: language, personal pronouns, and animal advocacy. Journal of World Languages, 8 (2), 391–408. Midgley, M., 2011. The myths we live by. New York: Routledge. Mies, M. and Shiva, V., 2014. Ecofeminism. 2nd edition. London: Zed Books Ltd. Milstein, T., 2020. Ecocultural identity boundary control and trangression. In: T. Milstein and J. Castro-Sotomayor, eds. Routledge Handbook of ecocultural identity. London: Routledge, 26–52. Milstein, T. and Castro-Sotomayor, J., 2020. Routledge Handbook of ecocultural identity. London: Routledge. Mishima, K., 2020. The ‘disenchantment of the world’ or why we can no longer use the formula as Max Weber might have intended. In: L. Hanke and S. Whimster, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber. Oxford University Press.

MLA, 2016. Operation Boomerang [online]. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch? v=MFj5btBluNc. MLA, 2022a. Sheep projections [online]. Meat & Livestock Australia. Available from: www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/Trends-analysis/sheep-projections. MLA, 2022b. Cattle projections [online]. Meat & Livestock Australia. Available from: www.mla.com.au/prices-markets/Trends-analysis/cattle-projections. Monbiot, G., 2022a. Watching ‘Don’t Look Up’ made me see my whole life of campaigning flash before me. The Guardian, 4 Jan. Monbiot, G., 2022b. How wolves change rivers [online]. YouTube. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=W88Sact1kws. Mooney, J., 1888. Myths of the Cherokee. Cambridge: Riverside Publications. Moses, K., 2022. Wildwood [online]. Emergence Magazine. Available from: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/wildwood. Næss, A., 1989. Ecology, community, and lifestyle: outline of an ecosophy. Cambridge University Press. Næss, A., 1995. The shallow and the long range, deep ecology movement. In: A. Drengson and Y. Inoue, eds. The deep ecology movement: an introductory anthology. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 3–10. Nanson, A., 2011. Words of re-enchantment: writings on storytelling, myth, and ecological desire. Stroud: Awen Publications. Nanson, A., 2021. Storytelling and ecology: empathy, enchantment and emergence in the use of oral narratives. 1st edition. London: Bloomsbury. NEA, 2011. UK National Ecosystem Assessment [online]. Available from: http://uknea.unepwcmc.org/. Nerlich, B. and Jaspal, R., 2012. Metaphors we die by? Geoengineering, metaphors, and the argument from catastrophe. Metaphor and Symbol, 27 (2), 131–147. North, C., 2009. In the beginning: creation myths from around the world. Artwork by Adrienne Robinson. Princeton: ICRL Press. Ocasio-Cortez, A., 2020a. Coates and AOC MLK Now [online]. Available from: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2yOcUqe01So. Ocasio-Cortez, A., 2020b. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech at the DNC [online]. Newsweek. Available from: www.newsweek.com/full-transcript-alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-60-second-speechdnc-1526025. Ocasio-Cortez, A., 2020c. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez responds to Rep. Yoho’s remarks [online]. Archives of Women’s Political Communication. Available from: https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2020/07/30/ ocasio-cortez-responds-to-rep-yohos-remarks-july-23-2020.

Okri, B., 1996. Birds of heaven. London: Phoenix. Okri, B., 2021. Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days. The Guardian, 12 Nov. Ōoka, M., 1997. The poetry and poetics of ancient Japan. Santa Fe: Katydid Books. Osorio, J., 2022a. Reclaiming Aloha [online]. For The Wild. Available from: https://forthewild.world/ podcast-transcripts/dr-jamaica-heolimeleikalani-osorio-on-reclaiming-aloha-297. Osorio, J., 2022b. Jamaica Osorio staff page [online]. Department of Political Science, UH Mānoa. Available from: https://politicalscience.manoa.hawaii.edu/jamaica-osorio. Pence, G., 1993. Virtue theory. In: P. Singer, ed. A Companion to ethics. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 364–376. PETA, 2002. Meet your meat [online]. Available from: www.peta.org/videos/meet-your-meat. Phelan, J., 2014. Narrative ethics [online]. Living handbook of narratology. Available from: www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de). Plumwood, V., 2008. Shadow places and the politics of dwelling. Australian Humanities Review, 44. Plumwood, V., 2010. Writing nature in the active voice. In: R. Irwin, ed. Climate change and philosophy: transformational possibilities. London: Continuum. Pollan, M., 2008. In defence of food: the myth of nutrition and the pleasures of eating. London: Penguin. Poole, R., 2022. Corpus-assisted ecolinguistics. London: Bloomsbury. Poore, J. and Nemecek, T., 2018. Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science, 360 (6392), 987–992. Pope Francis, 2015. Encyclical letter Laudato Si’: on care for our common home. Vatican City: Vatican. Pope Francis, 2019. Pope Francis at the Climate Action Summit [online]. YouTube. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJffdtfWIDg. Pope Francis, 2020. Our moral imperative to act on climate change [online]. TED. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHuwaKrHuR0. Popova, M., 2015. How naming confers dignity upon life and gives meaning to existence [online]. The Marginalian. Available from: www.themarginalian.org/2015/07/23/robin-wall-kimmerergathering-moss-naming. Potter, J., 1996. Representing reality: discourse, rhetoric and social construction. London: Sage. ProCon, 2022. Lactose intolerance by country [online]. ProCon. Available from: https://milk.procon.org/lactose-intolerance-by-country. Pullman, P., ed., 2012. Grimm tales: for young and old. London: Penguin. Rauf, O., 2019. Author masterclass [online]. YouTube. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch? v=Gz-3pFGxtxk.

Reese, D., 2007. Proceed with caution: using Native American folktales in the classroom. Language Arts, 84 (3), 12. Rees-Mogg, J., 2021. Climate change alarmism caused our high energy prices. The Daily Telegraph. Reinsborough, P. and Canning, D., 2017. Re:Imagining change: how to use story-based strategy to win campaigns, build movements, and change the world. 2nd edition. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Richter, D., 2016. The crisis of environmental narrative in the anthropocene. In: R. Emmett and T. Lekan, eds. Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses. Munich: RCC Perspectives, 97–100.

Rigby, K. in Rigby, C.E., 2004. Earth, world, text: on the (im)possibility of ecopoiesis. New Literary History, 35 (3), 427–442. Rigby, K., 2001. What are poets for? Heidegger’s gift to ecocriticism. Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Monash University. Rokicka, G., 2022. Decolonizing seeds and the feminine side of things. Permaculture Women Magazine. Roland, J., 1958. On ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’. The Philosophical Review, 67 (3), 379–388. Rosteck, T. and Frentz, T.S., 2009. Myth and multiple readings in environmental rhetoric: the case of An Inconvenient Truth. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 95 (1), 1–19. Ryan, M.-L., 2010. Narrative. In: D. Herman, M. Jahn, and M.-L. Ryan, eds. Routledge encyclopedia of narrative theory. London: Routledge, 344–348. Said, E.W., 1978. Orientalism. 1st edition. London: Penguin Books. Sampson, G. and Churchill, R.C., 1970. The concise Cambridge history of English literature. Cambridge University Press. Sanz, C.M. and Morgan, D.B., 2007. Chimpanzee tool technology in the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo. Journal of Human Evolution, 52 (4), 420–433. Saunt, C., 2006. Telling stories: the political uses of myth and history in the Cherokee and Creek nations. Journal of American History, 93 (3), 673–697. Scott, C., 2010. Ecological identity through dialogue. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 15. Shiva, V., 2021a. Vandana Shiva on why the food we eat matters [online]. BBC. Available from: www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210127-vandana-shiva-on-why-the-food-we-eat-matters. Shiva, V., 2021b. Interview with Vandana Shiva [online]. YouTube. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_8owv2dtP0. Shoptaw, J., 2016. Why ecopoetry? [online]. Poetry Magazine. Available from: www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70299/why-ecopoetry.

Sky, 2019. Climate change is ‘a religion’ that comes with a cost [online]. Available from: www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/climate-change-is-a-religion-that-comes-with-a-cost/video/ f8fcedaab5063e81bacc6414b30671fe. Sloman, J. and Jones, E., 2011. Economics and the business environment. New York: Prentice Hall. Slote, M., 2007. The ethics of care and empathy. London: Routledge. Smircich, L. and Morgan, G., 1982. Leadership: the management of meaning. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 18 (3), 257–273. Smith, D. and Imbuldeniya, S., 2020. You clap for me now: the coronavirus poem on racism and immigration in Britain – video. the Guardian, 15 Apr. Smyth, R., 2022. Nature does not care [online]. Aeon. Available from: https://aeon.co/essays/naturewriting-should-strive-for-clarity-not-sentimentality. Soloshenko, A., 2015. Language, cognition and culture in eco-narratives. European Political Science Review, May, 148–150. Soper, K., 2012. Beyond the scarcities of affluence: an ‘alternative hedonist’ approach. Architectural Design, 82 (4), 100–101. Spahr, J., 2011. Well then there now. Boston: Black Sparrow Books. Statham, S., 2021. Critical discourse analysis: a practical introduction to power in language. 1st edition. London: Routledge. Steinauer-Scudder, C., 2020. The Lord God bird: apocalyptic prophecy and the vanishing of avifauna [online]. Emergence Magazine. Available from: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-lordgod-bird. Stibbe, A., 2012. Animals erased: discourse, ecology, and reconnection with the natural world. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Stibbe, A., 2014. Ecolinguistics and erasure: restoring the natural world to consciousness. In: C. Hart and P. Cap, eds. Contemporary critical discourse studies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 583– 602. Stibbe, A., 2020. Ecolinguistics and economics: the power of language to build worlds [online]. World Economics Association. Available from: www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/ newsletterarticles/ecolinguistics. Stibbe, A., 2021. Ecolinguistics: language, ecology and the stories we live by, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Stibbe, A., 2022. Inspirationbase a collection of ethical leadership speeches for research and teaching [online]. Langugage & Ecology. Available from: www.ecoling.net/inspirationbase. Stibbe, A., 2022. The stories we live by [online]. Online Course. Available from: www.storiesweliveby.org.uk.

Stöckl, H. and Molnar, S., 2018. Eco-advertising: the linguistics and semiotics of green(-washed) persuasion. In: A. Fill and H. Penz, eds. The Routledge Handbook of ecolinguistics. London: Routledge, 261–276. Stryk, L., 1985. On love and barley: the haiku of Basho. London: Penguin Classics. Stubbs, B., 2019. The night writer: The emergence of nocturnal travel writing. TEXT, 23 (Special 56). SumOfUs, 2015. A cheesy love story [online]. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch? v=M4sda0fwwHQ. Suzuki, D., 1970. Zen and Japanese culture. Princeton University Press. Swist, W., 2016. The windbreak pine: new and uncollected haiku 1985–2015. Liverpool: Snapshot Press. Taylor, R., 2022. Instead of relying on old narratives, it’s time to build power for new ones [online]. Common Cause Foundation. Available from: https://commoncausefoundation.org/instead-ofrelying-on-old-narratives-its-time-to-build-power-for-new-ones/. Thakur, M., 2014. Google wants to feature ads on your smart refrigerator [online]. Homecrux. Available from: www.homecrux.com/google-wants-feature-ads-smart-refrigerator/14967. Thunberg, G., 2019a. You’re acting like spoiled irresponsible children [online]. European Economic and Social Committee. Available from: www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/videos/youre-actingspoiled-irresponsible-children-speech-greta-thunberg-climate-activist. Thunberg, G., 2019b. Greta Thunberg’s World Economic Forum special address [online]. Open Transcripts. Available from: http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/greta-thunberg-world-economicforum-2019. Todorov, T. and Weinstein, A., 1969. Structural analysis of narrative. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 3 (1), 70–76. Toolan, M.J., 2001. Narrative: a critical linguistic introduction. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Truscello, M., 2018. Catastrophism and its critics: on the new genre of environmentalist documentary film. In: J. Jagodzinski, ed. Interrogating the anthropocene: ecology, aesthetics, pedagogy, and the future in question. Springer Verlag, 257–275. UK Govt, 2022. First migrants set for Rwanda to be given final notice [online]. GOV.UK. Available from: www.gov.uk/government/news/first-migrants-set-for-rwanda-to-be-given-final-notice. UNEP, 2019. Global Environment Outlook 6 [online]. UN Environment Programme. Available from: www.unep.org/resources/global-environment-outlook-6. Virgil, A., 1997. When is a haiku. In: J. Bostok and J. Kacian, eds. The red moon anthology. Winchester, VA: Red Moon Press. Visser, W. and Courtice, P., 2011. Sustainability leadership: linking theory and practice. SSRN Electronic Journal.

Viva!, 2021. Takeaway the meat [online]. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch? v=OdknF59dh1c. Walker, A., 2015. This changes everything [online]. The Official Website for American Novelist & Poet. Available from: https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2015/10/this-changes-everything. Waring, L., 2020. Meet Jag-Wah [online]. The Ecologist. Available from: https://theecologist.org/ 2020/dec/02/meet-jag-wah. Warren, E., 2019. Climate change is real and we must act now [online]. YouTube. Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQqlyKCEo84. Weber, M., 1918. The vocation lectures. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Westen, D., 2011. What happened to Obama? The New York Times, 6 Aug. White, L., 1967. The historical roots of our ecologic crisis. Science, New Series, 155 (3767), 1203– 1207. White, R., 2019. Reseeding the food system: interview by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. [online]. Emergence Magazine. Available from: https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/reseeding-thefood-system. White, R., 2022a. Rowen’s story [online]. Sierra Seeds. Available from: https://sierraseeds.org/ rowens-story. White, R., 2022b. Finding our way with Rowen White [online]. Finding Our Way. Available from: www.findingourwaypodcast.com/individual-episodes/s2e6. WHO, 2021. Obesity and overweight [online]. World Health Organization. Available from: www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight. Willmott, G., 2018. Reading for wonder: ecology, ethics, enchantment. New York: Springer. Woods, R., 2008. Seven bowls of wrath: the ecological relevance of Revelation. Biblical Theology Bulletin, 38 (2), 64–76. WWF, 2021. Deforestation fronts [online]. Available from: https://wwfint.awsassets.panda.org/ downloads/deforestation_fronts_factsheet___eastern_australia.pdf. Yates, C., 2012. Nightwalk: a journey to the heart of nature. London: Collins. Young, A., 2022. Brontë Velez on the necessity of beauty, Part 2 [online]. For The Wild. Available from: https://forthewild.world/listen/bronte-velez-on-the-necessity-of-beauty-part-2-encore-274. Zipes, J., 2013. Relentless progress: the reconfiguration of children’s literature, fairy tales, and storytelling. London: Routledge.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

INDEX abstraction here, here, here A Cheesy Love Story here activation here A Dream of Dreaming here advertising here classic-type here counter-type here identity-type here narrative-type here affected here, here, here, here affordance here, here Akomolafe, Bayo here, here aloha here ambivalent narrative here, here, here An Inconvenient Truth here Anderson, Ray here, here Animal Think Tank here apocalypse here appraisal pattern here, here, here, here appraising item here, here, here architecture here Australia here, here, here Barlow, John here, here, here, here, here, here Bastida, Xiye here Before the Flood here beneficial narrative here, here Bosch, Hieronymus here

camera angle here, here Canada here, here Carroll, Clint here Carson, Rachel here, here, here, here categorical imperative here Chao, Sophie here Cherokee Nation here, here, here Cheyenne Nations here, here chimpanzees here China here climate change here, here, here, here, here community here, here, here, here connotation here, here, here, here consciousness here, here, here COVID-19 here creation narratives here, here Cree Nation here, here, here Curry, Patrick here, here, here Dark Mountain Project here deer here, here, here degeneration here, here, here, here demand picture here deontology here destructive narrative here, here, here, here DiCaprio, Leonardo here, here discourse here, here, here disembedded genre here, here, here, here disenchantment here, here divine command here Don’t Look Up here dogs here Dreaming the World into Being here ecocultural identity here, here, here ecolinguistics here

econarrative here, here, here, here, here, here, here economics here, here, here, here, here ecosophy here, here, here ecosystem assessment reports here Eisenstein, Charles here emotional narrative here, here enchantment here, here end-focus here, here, here entailment here, here, here, here, here equilibrium here, here, here, here erasure here, here, here ethical leadership here, here ethics here, here, here of care here, here Extra Fresh here extrinsic goals here eye contact here, here, here facticity here, here, here, here framing here, here, here, here, here, here, here From Big Bang to Civilisation here Genesis here, here genre here, here, here, here Giantstone here Giddens, Anthony here, here given and new here, here, here Goodall, Jane here Gore, Al here Great Spirit here Greenpeace here Häagen-Dazs here haiku here harmony here, here, here, here Haudenosaunee Nations here, here, here, here (see also Mohawk Nation)

Hawaiʻi here Herman, David here, here, here, here hero’s journey here homogenization here How The World Was Made here, here, here ideational metafunction here, here identity here, here, here, here, here ideology here, here, here, here immigration here India here, here individualization here, here ingroup and outgroup here, here, here interpersonal metafunction here, here, here, here intertextuality here, here intimacy here, here, here, here, here intrinsic values here, here, here, here IPCC here, here, here Irving, Bridget here Issa here, here, here jaguars here Japan here, here, here, here, here Kimmerer, Robin Wall here, here kinship here, here, here, here, here Klein, Naomi here leadership here lexical set here, here, here Little Red Hat here Little Red Riding Hood here love story here, here Lyles, Peggy Willis here, here, here, here McIntosh, Alastair here

magic and the supernatural here, here, here, here Maheo here mapping here, here, here material process here, here, here, here, here, here Mead, Geoff here, here, here mental process here, here, here, here metanarratives here EATING MEAT IS A SYMBOL OF NATIONAL IDENTITY ECONOMIC GROWTH IS THE GOAL OF SOCIETY IMMIGRATION IS HARMFUL TO SOCIETY

here

THE GOAL OF A CORPORATION IS PROFIT

here

metaphorical entailment here metaphors CLIMATE CHANGE IS A RELIGION ECONOMIES ARE A FABRIC

here, here

here

HUMAN CIVILISATION IS A BUILDING

here

NATURE IS A MACHINE

ORDINARY LIFE IS A FABRIC SEEDS ARE TEACHERS

here

here

here

THE ECONOMY IS A MACHINE

here, here

micronarrative here, here, here Milstein, Tema here, here modality here mode here, here, here, here modifier here, here Mohawk Nation here, here, here, here moral entrepreneur here Moses, Kara here multimodality here My Neighbour Totoro here Næss, Arne here Nanson, Anthony here, here, here narrative here empathy here, here, here entailments here

here, here

here, here

leadership here presentation here, here structure here, here, here, here, here, here, here text here, here, here narratives we live by here nature writing here Nightwalk here nominalization here, here Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria here ‘ohana here Okri, Ben here, here, here, here Olson, Marian here, here, here Operation Boomerang here Osorio, Jamaica here paradigmatic presentation here passivation here, here passive voice here, here, here pathos here, here, here P’han Ku (Pan Gu) here photorealism here, here pigs here placefulness here Plumwood, Val here, here Praying Mantis here presupposition here pronoun use here, here, here, here, here, here prosody (semantic) here reframing here, here repertoire of empiricism here Revelation here, here Rigby, Kate here, here salience here, here, here, here, here, here

seasonality here, here, here, here seed sovereignty here sense image here, here, here Shiva, Vandana here, here, here sheep here, here, here show don’t tell here, here, here Silent Spring here, here, here Skywoman here, here social cognition here soundscape here source domain here frame here, here, here narrative here, here space here, here Spiess, Robert here, here stake here story about the self here, here storyworld here, here, here, here, here Swist, Wally here, here, here, here synonymy here Taiwan here Takeaway the Meat here target domain here, here, here tense here, here, here, here, here The Feathered Serpent here The Garden of Earthly Delights here The Pea-Pod Man here theme here, here, here, here There’s A Monster in My Kitchen here This Changes Everything here Thunberg, Greta here, here timelessness here, here Todorov, Tzvetan here, here Tom the Scout-Cub here

transitivity here, here trophic cascade here, here utilitarianism here value priority announcement here vector (eyeline) here, here, here verbal process here, here, here, here, here Virgil, Anita here, here virtue theory here Weber, Max here White, Lynn here, here White, Rowen here, here Wildwood here wolves here, here Yarrow, Ruth here, here Yates, Chris here ‘You Clap for Me Now’ here Zipes, Jack here

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Arran Stibbe, 2024 Arran Stibbe has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Appendix B on pp. 241–2 constitutes an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Elena Durey Cover image © Subbotina Anna/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3502-6312-3 978-1-3502-6311-6 978-1-3502-6314-7 978-1-3502-6313-0

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This ebook belongs to erica lippert ([email protected]), purchased on 18/01/2024