Negotiating Environmental Relationships: Why Language Matters to Environmental Philosophy

• Main Author: Martin, Vernon J.
• Other Authors: Hargrove, Eugene C., 1944-
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Texas 2003
• Subjects: Ecology > Philosophy.; Human ecology > Philosophy.; Semiotics.; Semiotics; linguistic; environment; policy; NEPA; nature; meaning
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4409/

The medium of language is important to environmental philosophy, and more specifically, to the establishment and understanding of environmental relationships. The differences between animal and human language point to our unique semantic range, which results from our neuro-linguistic process of signification. An examination of the linguistic implications of the problem of nature and the tenets of semiotics challenges the idea of a clean word to world fit. Because signs are the medium in which meaning is constructed, questions about nature must in part be questions of language. Environmental discourse itself is bound up in sociolinguistic productions and we must attend not only to what language says, but to what it does. NEPA functions as a speech act that systematically invokes an ethical framework by which it colonizes the domain of valuation and fails to provide a genuine opportunity for non-commodity values to be expressed.