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Questioning the “exploitation of natural resources”

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Text translated by Louise Nicolas-Sourdot Texte traduit par Louise Nicolas-Sourdot A few weeks ago, I started working on an analysis of French secondary school textbooks and how they portray the relationship between humans and nature. Particularly, I examined an Earth and Life Sciences textbook for 6 th grade, and I obtained rather surprising results that I'm sharing with you in this post. In this textbook, the relationships between humans and nature are a rather secondary subject. Nonetheless, when these relationships are addressed, it is through the idea of the “exploitation of natural resources”. Apparently, one of the main learning objectives for the Earth and Life Sciences program in French secondary school is the understanding of the “impacts of the exploitation of natural resources”. What I would like to illustrate in this text is that this notion is far from being neutral, it symbolizes a strictly utilitarian and objectifying vision of nature, that i...
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On Ecolinguistics

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  By Rodrigo Cáceres Ecolinguistics is currently one of the most productive fields of inquiry about language, since it allows us to take a broader, more encompassing perspective on language, enabling us to see how discourses that prevail in different cultures lead people to think and treat differently animals, plants and the land they live on. Ecolinguistics enable us to see for example how arbitrary it is that our western culture separates and opposes nature from culture, thus permanently banishing animals and plants from what is considered "Society" or the "community". It also renders visible how Western culture is filled with destructive discourses that shape the kinds of things westerners do: mass consumerism, global corporatism, destruction of ecosystems, climate catastrophe, and so on, that are leading to the 6th mass extinction and the consequent human self-destruction within decades. I claim that one of the most groundbreaking works that allow...
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What is ecolinguistics?

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Each culture has its own unique view of nature, its own interpretation of what the world is made of. In the Comanche community in the United States, for example, there is a kinship link that connects humans to all that exists, to animals, plants and even to the very matter of which stars are made, since we all have a common origin. In our industrial societies, in contrast, nature is understood mainly by its utility: for us nature is not quite nature but it is above all a set of "natural resources". Similarly, ecosystems are not quite ecosystems, but they are above all a set of “ecosystem services” that we benefit from. What is nature? Is it our kin or is it a resource? Undoubtedly, the answers given to this question shape the ways in which nature is treated and how each society feels connected to it or tries to separate from it.  Language plays a fundamental role in this, because it is through words that we will provide a specific answer to this question. In other words, i...
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