By Rodrigo Cáceres, economist and M.A in environmental ethics In recent years, ecolinguistic research has produced very detailed analyses of the linguistic features of neoclassical economic theory and its implicit beliefs, which have been shown to ultimately lead to malign and destructive consequences for humans and for nature. From these I will now mention a few: Firstly, the belief or assumption that human beings are purely self-interested beings that can only achieve well-being through purchase of material products, belief which encourages distrust between people and destruction of caring relationships among people, which in turn eliminates a sense of community belonging and encourages a sense of alienation.  Secondly, the belief or assumption that the environment is a storehouse of resources that exists only to satisfy the desires of human beings, which in linguistic terms implies a full depersonalization of nature: nature is no longer trees, mushrooms, birds, ...

Ideology by  Nick Youngson   CC BY-SA 3.0   ImageCreator In this article I would like to address a quite simple, but deeply philosophical question: Where are ideologies located? I claim that the manner in which we answer this question will have important consequences for ecolinguistic research and practice. In order to answer this question, I will need to make a brief description about how ideologies, from now on understood as linguistic (and symbolic) structures, emerge in the history of our lineage Hominidae.  Michael Tomasello (2014), in a vast series of experiments, has found that what distinguishes humans from other big apes is the presence (at a very early age) of dispositions towards coordinating actions with others: children are spontaneously drawing other people's attention to look at objects; children care about where the gaze of grown-ups is directed and they spontaneously follow it. Great apes do not have these kinds of dispositions. T...

Illustration by Liana Buszka Text by Slavoj Zizek We should not simply oppose a principal life - dedicated to duty and enjoying our small pleasures.  Let's take today's capitalism. We have, on the one hand, the demands of the circulation of the capital which push us towards profit making - expansion, exploitation and destruction of nature and, on the other hand, ecological demands: let's think about our posterity and about our own survival, - let's take care of nature and so on.  In this opposition between ruthless pursuit of capitalist expansion and ecological awareness - duty, a strange perverted duty of course - duty is on the side of capitalism, as many perspicuous analysts noted. Capitalism has a strange religious structure. It is propelled by this absolute demand: capital has to circulate, to reproduce itself, to expand - to multiply itself. And for this goal, anything can be sacrificed, up to our lives, up to nature and so on. Here we have ...