Book Review: Discourses of the environment, Greenspeak: a study of environmental discourse

Abstract

Two books about environmental discourse and two such different approaches. The volume edited by Darier presents various ‘applications’ of a Foucauldian approach, while Harré et al. draw on and work outwards from a linguistic approach. Each of these books, in their own way, provides a stimulating read, a path through post-structuralist terrain. But reading them together highlights a number of key tensions in the field of environmental discourse analysis: the conception of discourse being deployed; the diversity of environmental discourses; the addressing of audiences both inside and outside environmentalism; and the combination of critique and recommendation. First, then, the understanding of discourse being used. All environmental discourse work is based on a belief in and a desire to promote some version of the social constructivist paradigm. From this perspective, understanding social action requires an understanding of discourse. But there are significant differences in terms of the relative priority to be given to language as compared to other dimensions of social life. Some argue that the discursive dimension is the most important one, that social action can only be understood discursively. Harré et al. come close to this at times: their volume begins with a motto from the anthropologist Pitt-Rivers: ‘Language is our only key to the correct and complete understanding of the life and thought of a people’ (emphasis added). While no one interested in environmental discourse would deny that language is important, an alternative position is that such discourse needs to be understood alongside the other dimensions of structure and agency in our society; the central analytic issue is then the relative handling of all these dimensions, including the discursive. The Foucauldian approach may seem preferable here, as it remains concerned at all times to see the discursive in the broader social context. Foucault’s methodologies and work offer the prospect of an understanding of how discourses are implicated in the structures of society, of how they embody relations of power and shape our actions in a broader institutional context. His work provides a window onto the ‘third face of power’ that Lukes