Abstract
In the first half of 2023 alone, extreme weather events – such as severe cold snaps in North America (February), heavy rainstorms in Brazil (February) and Italy (May), record-breaking heat in North America and Eurasia (June) – have had a devastating environmental, economic and social impact on life on earth. The climate crisis has become an existential threat to mankind, and solutions call for governance at an international level, as well as personal awareness at the individual level. At the time of writing, the book under review is the latest book-length treatment of climate crisis from a discourse analysis perspective. Augé seeks to unpack the complexity of environmental discussions (including solutions) among stakeholders with different ideological stances. She uses the toolkit of metaphorical narratives (Bamberg, 2004; Musolff, 2019) to elucidate how a similar metaphorical description is exploited by different stakeholders to promote opposite arguments on an environmentally-related theme.
Augé’s monograph comprises 10 chapters. Chapter 1 presents a literature review, and sets out the theoretical framework and layout of the research. The book opens by introducing the metaphorical notion of ‘green recovery’ (the environment as a body that is suffering). Following this, it argues why metaphors are important in communicating about climate change, and puts forward research questions that guide the analysis in chapters 5–9.
Chapters 2 and 3 both deal with how metaphors can be used to promote (counter)arguments. Chapter 2 focuses on conceptual metaphors used for the personification of the environment (the environment as a body, nature as a mother), and assesses their argumentative strength in foregrounding or backgrounding particular characteristics. Chapter 3 hones in on the use of metaphors in the climate change speeches delivered by Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump. Arguably, conventional metaphors that are drawn on in these speeches, such as ‘building’, ‘war’ and the use of religious references, can facilitate audiences’ understanding of the arguments made. Further, selections of different metaphorical narratives (e.g. Trump’s reference to ‘Notre Dame on fire’ serving to foreground the failures in all areas before his term, and Thunberg’s ‘building on fire’ as a threat to ordinary people’s survival) help build opposite arguments.
The methodology of the book is delved into in Chapter 4, where the construction of the corpus is discussed. The data set includes media reports, scientific literature, NGO communications, political speeches and social media messages. The chapter presents a list of conceptual metaphors (e.g. climate crisis as a crime, climate change as a journey) that were observed in the corpus, setting out a quantified perspective for the subsequent studies.
Chapters 5 and 6 deal, respectively, with optimistic and pessimistic argumentation regarding the climate crisis. Chapter 5 discusses the role of metaphors in promoting optimism in stakeholders’ (i.e. leading politicians, large enterprises) arguments regarding solutions to the climate crisis. However, we are warned against overly optimistic views as these tend to be countered by ‘existing scientific observations’ (p. 79). Chapter 6 demonstrates how environmental pessimism is metaphorically represented by different categories of stakeholders (e.g. activists vs journalists). It is argued that climate activists use metaphors to convey threatening images of the planet’s future. On the other hand, activists’ arguments are significantly caricatured and criticised by sceptical journalists, who deliberately turn the source domains of the metaphors into absurd and even more controversial declarations (coal producers as Nazis and climate change as the Holocaust).
The metaphorical expression ‘climate justice’ is aimed at promoting global solidarity and recognition of shared responsibilities, yet it remains a generalised and vague idea, much like a grand vision rather than a concrete roadmap to solutions. In Chapter 7, Augé emphasises different aspects of global climate (in)justice, ranging from the uneven impact that certain threats will have, the unequal spread of resources to combat these threats, and demands for identical environmental responsibilities in the face of different emission rates among countries.
Chapter 8 considers how metaphorical statements regarding ‘climate justice’ are promoted in discourses produced by local stakeholders among the most affected communities (e.g. Ecuador, Uganda, French Guiana), during Conferences of the Parties (better known as COP meetings). The concrete images conveyed through the culturally- or traditionally-grounded metaphors in indigenous activists’ speeches fulfil major argumentative functions: they inform audiences of the worsening situations in far-off places, while also urging listeners to take political action to avert the climate crisis at an international level.
In Chapter 9, Augé shifts her attention from environmental concerns to social issues such as women’s rights, environmental racism and climate migration. Here, she demonstrates how climate injustice can produce additional crises if not appropriately dealt with. Such crises may include gender discrimination, the unethical exploitations of land, the climate migrants’ lack of social status and political representations. The final chapter readdresses the research questions introduced in Chapter 1, and proposes multimodality in environmental discourse to be a focus in future studies.
Being a timely publication about the deteriorating climate issue, Augé’s monograph fulfils fourfold contributions. First, metaphorical discourses on climate crisis in this volume are observed and analysed in their (inter)national political, cultural and social contexts. This, on the one hand, reconfirms the wide existence of conceptual metaphors, and on the other hand demonstrates the significant roles played by language and discourse in public communication about the climate issue. Second, the corpus of research data from five different sources (see Chapter 4) is diverse and large, which makes the study’s findings generalisable. Third, the volume exhibits the multi-faceted nature of conceptual metaphors in promoting (counter)arguments by stakeholders with what can be very different views. And finally, the volume puts forward the notion of ‘climate justice’ in the hope of speaking up for those considered most vulnerable (the MAPA or Most Affected People and Areas), through metaphorical discourse analysis.
As for the limitation, if there must be one, I would suggest putting the metaphorical expression(s) in each example in bold so as to help new researchers identify metaphors easily. Beyond this, I fully recommend this book for the fields of discourse study and metaphor research due to it providing a metaphorical and discursive practice, abundant research data, multi-dimensional perspective and down-to-earth goals, which provide valuable references for researchers interested in discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics and environmental communication.