Ecolinguistics with Professor Arran Stibbe

In this episode, Professor Aaron Stibbe discusses ecolinguistics, including how his approach emerged from his experience of Japanese ecological wisdom and dissatisfaction with environmental textbooks. We hear how his current work on eco-poetry searches for inspirational language that can help people break from industrial “stories to live by,” and how ecolinguistics can be used to analyse influential discourses in economics, media reporting of growth, and the pork industry’s framing of animals. Importantly, we discuss ecolinguistics’ relationship to sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, arguing that ecolinguistics entails understanding how society is embedded in the ecological. We also explore selecting impactful data, the need for positive discourse alternatives, critiques of Western “light” environmentalism, and Stibbe’s use of an explicit ecosophy to evaluate discourses as beneficial or destructive.   The subscriber version has an extra 15 minutes of discussion including advice per people starting a project in ecolinguistics and more on Arran’s work on eco-poetry.   Ecopoetikon The Stories We Live By The Search for New Stories to Live By Discourse Academy