Framing for care and engagement (Part I): Defending life on Earth

A lilac-breasted roller (Coracias caudatus). Photo by Sander Wehkamp on Unsplash

By Rodrigo Cáceres

In the previous part of this post, we examined the word biodiversity as a highly abstract new word that we can quite hardly relate to our subjective and collective experiences of nature. Instead, the more intimate and inclusive words of "life" and "life on Earth" show every sign of being profoundly adequate to trigger a deep engagement and care for life on Earth and a willingness to defend it from current destruction. For this reason, we will try to examine them a bit more deeply in this post.

Before we start, for the purposes of this post I will assume that nature, biodiversity and life on Earth are completely equivalent and interchangeable terms, since all three refer to the very same thing. I agree that there are some conceptual differences between the three terms because of their history (for example, that in modern cultures nature is usually seen as separate from the human world). Nevertheless, in terms of content they do refer to the same reality.

So, to try and keep things very applied to current events happening in the world, let's take a look again (as we did in a previous post) at the IPBES Summary for policymakers. 

We will first take a look at IPBES's definition of nature:

" [Nature] refers to the natural world with an emphasis on its living components. Within the context of western science, it includes categories such as biodiversity, ecosystems (both structure and functioning), evolution, the biosphere, humankind’s shared evolutionary heritage, and biocultural diversity [...]"

This definition from the IPBES confirms that nature, biodiversity and life on Earth refer to exactly the same thing: this is, the totality of living organisms, their diversity, their assemblages and their history.

So let's analyse (with our tools from ecolinguistics) the section C of the IPBES report, where can find the following main statement:

Goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors.

If we take an excerpt from this lengthy sentence, we can detect the following affirmation:

(1) "Goals for conserving [...] nature [...] cannot be met by current trajectories".

For those of you who are not familiar with intergovernmental texts like this one, this affirmation is quite powerful and unprecedented. It basically means that International governments and expert scientists got to an agreement that there is an incompatibility between "current trajectories" and "conserving nature". When two things are incompatible, it means that they are not reconcilable, that they are incapable of coexisting in harmony. In other words, this means that "current trajectories" are in opposition to "conserving nature".

(This already suggests a loving and life-affirming narrative of "Reconciling with nature" that you might identify with and make yours to employ in language. Re-concile comes from the Latin re- "again" and conciliare, which means "to bring together, unite in feelings, make friendly".)

Going back to our analysis, you might have noticed that affirmation (1) is in a passivized form, the agent being expressed in the predicate. Thus, if we mirror affirmation (1), we get the following equivalent affirmation: 

(2) "Current trajectories cannot meet goals for conserving [...] nature.

Since we assumed that nature and life on Earth refer to the very same thing, we can rephrase the affirmation (2) as follows:

(3) " Current trajectories cannot meet goals for conserving [...] life on Earth ".

We can readily notice a striking difference of salience between affirmations (2) and (3), even though they refer to the very same thing. Again, we can interpret the statement as saying that "current trajectories" are incapable of coexisting in harmony with life on Earth.
If you agree with me that speaking about life on Earth is clearly more salient and affecting, then this seems to be an adequate language for engaging people towards the transformative changes that IPBES calls for.

(In the case of affirmation (3), our narrative of reconciling becomes "Reconciling with life on Earth" or, in short, "Reconciling with life".)

We'll keep discussing these topics in Part II of this post. Thanks a lot for staying with me so far!