Development Narratives and the Mechanisms of the Ecological Conflict : How the Environmental Discourses in IPCC and WWF Report Summaries Maintain the Foundation of the Crisis

Abstract

In an era marked by an increased flow of information and acknowledgment of environmental problems, our understandings of the crisis are increasingly shaped by the discourses employed to communicate these issues. This thesis explores how the assumptions and comprehensions of development, including growth and universality as a rule of history, are present in the conversation surrounding the ecological crisis, and to what extent the mainstream environmental discourse is an extension of the naturalized ideologies that can be argued to have produced human existence on the destruction of the environment for centuries. The data consists of two summaries in total, one from the International Panel on Climate Change and the other one from the World Wildlife Fund. These re analyzed following the theoretical framework of ecolinguistics and the methodological conventions of critical discourse analysis. The results uncover the ways language is employed to erase traces of history, agency and processes, conveying an abstract reality in which the harmful preconceptions are embedded. The role of capital accumulation, unequal power relations and alienated conceptions of nature that structure ways of being and thinking in the world, on multiple levels, are not challenged as the underlying forces behind the environmental crisis. Thus, the environmental discourse retains silences that echo the ideas of development, perpetuating the crisis. By highlighting these dynamics, this thesis aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the crisis and the importance of discourse in making visible and challenging the conventional thinking patterns to create more viable and holistic solutions in the face of the environmental degradation.