10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15506
This paper explores connections between Ecolinguistics and Positive Discourse Analysis, focusing on an eco-friendly farm in Norfolk which features in a long-running BBC programme, ‘the Countryside Hour’. Both ecolinguistics and positive discourse analysis, as relatively new disciplines, stand in some need of definition, especially regarding their relationship with the more consolidated paradigm of CDA which, of course, is itself not characterised by general agreement on methodological matters (Flowerdew 2008, Stibbe 2017). This study applies some of the notions found in the practical toolkit of CDA such as framing, presupposition, metaphor analysis, pragmatics and relevance theory and explores their functioning as heuristic methods in data that is regarded as ecologically ‘positive’. Unlike traditional critical studies of harmful environmental practices which expose deviant discursive practices, the starting point is discourse that concords with current mediated notions of environmental sustainability. The aim is not simply to give such contexts, and such discourse, publicity, and nor is it to seek solace in ‘discourse that inspires, encourages, heartens, discourse we like, that cheers us along’ (Martin 1999, pp. 51–52). Rather, it is to shed light on underlying processes at the level of ideologies (in the sense of Fairclough 2003: 9); to make manifest thoughts, feelings and discourses which are felt to be ‘positive’, in a mirror image of what occurs in CDA studies.
application/pdf
1974-4382
15506
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Douglas Mark Ponton
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
mediAzioni
High Ash Farm
Ecolinguistics and Positive Discourse Analysis: Convergent Pathways
Text.Serial.Journal
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34
Articles
2022-09-22
2022-09-12
2022-09-22
2022-09-22
A36-A54
M
Douglas Mark Ponton
2022/09/22
10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15506
A36
Università degli Studi di Catania
1974-4382
High Ash Farm
en
A54
Ecolinguistics and Positive Discourse Analysis: Convergent Pathways
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34
Updating Discourse/s on Method/s                                        mediAzioni 34 (2022)
                                                                              ISSN   1974-4382


   ECOLINGUISTICS AND POSITIVE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS:
               CONVERGENT PATHWAYS
                             DOUGLAS MARK PONTON
        DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF CATANIA

dmponton@gmail.com



Citation: Ponton, Douglas Mark (2022) “Ecolinguistics and Positive Discourse Analysis:
Convergent pathways”, in Lucia Abbamonte and Flavia Cavaliere (eds.) Updating
Discourse/s on Method/s, mediAzioni 34: A36-A54, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-
4382/15506, ISSN 1974-4382.



Abstract: This paper explores connections between Ecolinguistics and Positive
Discourse Analysis, focusing on an eco-friendly farm in Norfolk which features in a long-
running BBC programme, ‘the Countryside Hour’. Both ecolinguistics and positive
discourse analysis, as relatively new disciplines, stand in some need of definition,
especially regarding their relationship with the more consolidated paradigm of CDA
which, of course, is itself not characterised by general agreement on methodological
matters (Flowerdew 2008, Stibbe 2017). This study applies some of the notions found
in the practical toolkit of CDA such as framing, presupposition, metaphor analysis,
pragmatics and relevance theory and explores their functioning as heuristic methods in
data that is regarded as ecologically ‘positive’. Unlike traditional critical studies of
harmful environmental practices which expose deviant discursive practices, the starting
point is discourse that concords with current mediated notions of environmental
sustainability. The aim is not simply to give such contexts, and such discourse, publicity,
and nor is it to seek solace in ‘discourse that inspires, encourages, heartens, discourse
we like, that cheers us along’ (Martin 1999, pp. 51–52). Rather, it is to shed light on
underlying processes at the level of ideologies (in the sense of Fairclough 2003: 9); to
make manifest thoughts, feelings and discourses which are felt to be ‘positive’, in a
mirror image of what occurs in CDA studies.

Keywords: positive discourse analysis; ecolinguistics; ecological farming; ideology;
implicature; High Ash Farm.




Copyright © 2022
The text in this work is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.                                        A36
A37                                                                             PONTON


1. Introduction

Ecolinguistics as a field of discourse studies can be dated back to a 1990 paper
by M.A.K. Halliday (included in Halliday and Webster 2010) and, as Law and
Matthiessen (2019) say, has since become established as a field of research and
activity. However, thirty years is a fairly short time as such things go, and
newcomers to ecolinguistics may still question what underlying theories of
language and society are involved, what are the analytical tools, and so on.
     One straightforward answer to such questions is to view ecolinguistics simply
as the application of methodologies in the better-known field of Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) to ecological topics. It is not hard to find studies which
tend to confirm this idea (Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001; Vasta 2005; Stibbe 2012,
2015; Fill and Penz 2018). In his 2015 work Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology
and the Stories we live by, for example, Arran Stibbe adopts – among other CDA
techniques deployed elsewhere in the book – the critical notion of erasure,
familiar to linguists through the work of Van Leeuwen (1996) on social actors,
focusing, in other words, on “participants which are [..] suppressed,
backgrounded, excluded or erased from texts” (Stibbe 2015: 145). When these
representational strategies are applied to animals involved in human-centred
processes such as experimentation with drugs or the production of meat – to take
examples from the book – we lose sight of the animals, and process the message
as if the human perspective were all that mattered. When Stibbe explains that
erasure may be carried out linguistically through devices such as “passives,
metonymy, nominalisations and hyponyms”, he draws on a consolidated body of
work in CDA that deals precisely with these features (Billig 2008; Van Leeuwen
2009).
     If ecolinguistics were no more than this, it would still merit attention because
of the intrinsic pull of such studies, which underscore some of the most crucial
issues of our time; however, it would perhaps lose its claim to represent a
separate field, and could be subsumed within CDA alongside other topics of
social concern. In fact, ecolinguistics offers a broader perspective: across a range
of studies, it is seen to embrace insights from ecology, ecosophy, anthropology,
eco-criticism, religion, literature, the arts, primitive cultures and emerging eco-
related sciences, to explore perspectives on the role of language in shaping and
governing what Stibbe (2015: 181) describes as “the life-sustaining relationships
of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment.”
     The perspectives it offers have the potential to challenge traditional patterns
of western, anthropocentric thought (Crist and Kopnina 2014): it is necessary,
indeed, to revise categories of knowledge that have become “naturalised”, in the
sense outlined by Roland Barthes (Barthes 2006), and to open a discursive space
for the discussion of radical ideas. As Capra (1995: 20), summarising the eco-
philosophy of Arne Naess, puts it:

      Shallow ecology is anthropocentric. It views humans as above or outside of
      nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or use
      value to nature. Deep ecology does not separate humans from the natural
      environment, nor does it separate anything else from it. It does not see the

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      world as a collection of isolated objects but rather as a network of
      phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent.
      Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic values of all living beings and views
      humans as just one particular strand in the web of life.

Here, a “shallow ecology” is critiqued, but the words also apply to our typical
way of treating the natural world. The ongoing ecological disaster tends to be
viewed primarily as a human tragedy; it is awful because it will mean the end of
our way of life, and of all the things that we routinely take for granted. Opposed
to this is a perspective that would view the loss of habitats for animals as equally
tragic. In this perspective the non-human world is animate, its denizens recover
the agency they lose in an “instrumental”, human-centric version of existence.
     It must be stressed that this is not a hippy, extremist, or escapist vision;
rather, it represents an eco-philosophy that is still found in some primitive
cultures (Mead 1932; Bird‐David 1999; Stringer 1999; Praet 2014) and is even
present in British culture, for example in poetry from the Romantic period (Piper
2013; Goatly 2017). Goatly points out, in the last-mentioned study, the
grammatical means for construing agency, and how poets frequently afford it to
animals, birds and other non-human objects. In Wordsworth’s famous sonnet “On
Westminster Bridge”, for example, we find the line “The river glideth at its own
sweet will”, and evidence of an animistic vision1 shared by many Romantics. In
our own time, industrialisation and other exploitative practices of unchained
capitalism respond to different philsophical currents, which have led the world
to the brink of disaster (Sweezy 2004; Newell 2013).
     This study is a tentative exploration of these issues; the aim is to focus not
on negative perspectives of environmental disaster, but rather on discourse that
is environmentally sound, that embodies aspects of a deep ecological perspective,
and hence offers alternative models of thought and socio-linguistic practise,
currently so urgently required. The aim is to suggest pathways towards a
convergence between two fairly new fields, ecolinguistics and Positive Discourse
Analysis (PDA), about which more will be said below.


2. Context

The last few years have seen many significant socio-political moments, such as
Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN in 2019, that have collectively marked out
environmentalism as one of the dominant counter-cultural ideologies of today
(Eder 1990; Peterson Del Mar 2014, Forte 2020). There has been an increment
in cases of wildfires, droughts, tornadoes, and flooding; and the melting of
icecaps and glaciers, the ongoing destruction of the Brazilian rainforest, have all
gathered pace. Moreover, as Eckstein et al. (2021: 5) report, “developing
countries are particularly affected by the impact of climate change”.
1
  (Piper 1959) describes Coleridge’s thinking about nature in his early work: “In these poems
Coleridge saw the natural world as consisting not of inert matter, but of purposive and intelligent
natural forces, which he called Monads, using the word in its eighteenth-century sense of an
atom of matter (or rather, here, of force). These Monads were themselves part of a larger
organism, the Infinite Mind, and were engaged in working out its purpose.”
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A39                                                                                 PONTON


     This paper focuses on issues related to agriculture and the husbandry of rural
land, another area pivotally involved in an overall picture of environmental
devastation, alongside more prominent narratives of industrial pollution. It was
“Silent Spring”, Rachel Carson’s study of the poisonous effects of DDT on birdlife
in the United States, that gave environmentalism the kickstart it needed in the
early sixties. The intervening years have seen far-reaching changes in the
organisation of rural spaces and food production methods in most nations of the
first world (Hansen et al 2001), with – in the UK, for example – increasing
mechanisation, decreasing workforces, fewer tenant farmers, increases in the size
of farms and experimentation with genetically modified crops (Sheail 1995). As
Sheail indicates, these processes have inflicted severe damage on wildlife and
habitats that had been part of Britain’s landscape and way of life for centuries.
     However, it is also true that these harmful effects have been balanced to
some extent by counter-movements that increasingly illustrate the diffusion of
environmentally positive ideals, whether these are private organisations like
Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, or supra-national quasi-political bodies
such as the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution or the Global Green Growth
Institute2. At a popular level, “environmentalism” has become a buzzword, a
powerful ideology with rizomatic connections to a range of social phenomena
that both support and feed off it: vegetarianism, veganism, Eastern religions and
practices like meditation, yoga or Tai Chi; diet therapy, holistic medicine, natural
healing, tree hugging, biodance, and so on. Furthermore, traditional practices
and sports that involve spending time outdoors have been given a massive boost
from these underlying philosophical currents, as have everyday practices like
cycling or walking to work rather than using cars (Loland 2021). The therapeutic
qualities of gardening are also well-known (Diamant and Waterhouse 2010;
Joyce and Warren 2016).
     The beneficial effects of physical contact with nature are emphasised in the
“care farm” movement (Hine, et al, 2008; Hassink, et al, 2014), where social
services and farmers combine to assist in treating people with a range of
conditions. Organic farms, meanwhile, which were originally “driven by an
emerging environmentalism and health concerns about exposure to pesticides,
antibiotics and hormones” (Seufert, et al, 2017: 11), represent one of the fastest
growing sectors of food production in first world countries.
     The central character in this paper, Chris Skinner, prominent UK naturalist
and BBC broadcaster, must be viewed against this socio-historical and cultural
backdrop. He inherited a farm on the outskirts of Norwich which he has turned
into a haven for wildlife of all kinds, about which he has been talking on local
radio for many years. In one square mile are found red deer, fallow deer, muntjac
deer, Chinese water deer, hares, badgers, foxes, buzzards, goshawks, little owls;
green, greater and lesser spotted woodpeckers, all kinds of birds, butterflies and
moths, trees, flowers and fungi, insects, spiders, and snakes. These plants and
creatures constitute the topic of the various episodes, which provide a vivid
picture of life on an English farm, with Skinner at pains to stress the balance of

2
 Global Alliance on Health and Pollution: online at https://gahp.net/, last visit 23.09.2021.
Global Green Growth Institute: https://www.greengrowthknowledge.org/, last visit 23.09.2021.
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nature, and occasionally reminding listeners of a deep ecosophy, implicit in
homely utterances like “they’ve all got just as much right to be here as I have”.
Skinner appears to lead the life of a typical farmer, up all hours and out in all
weathers, but from listening to the episodes alone it is impossible to answer
certain questions concerning the viability of his lifestyle. For example, farming
is notoriously precarious from an economic perspective, and it would be useful
to know if High Ash Farm turns in a profit, or whether Skinner’s ecological
activities are an expensive indulgence3.
     It is worth reflecting, for example, on Skinner’s annual practice of seeding
enormous fields with “over winter wild birdseed mix”, so that species of bird
which rely on seeds to get them through winter may survive. This may appear
quixotic, but in point of fact Skinner uses government grants for this purpose, a
circumstance that underlines what has already been hinted at about the effective
political reach of ecological principles and practices in everyday agricultural
life4.
     In this paper then, Chris Skinner’s discourse about the environment is taken
as a model from which positive underlying ideologies may be taken, following
the design of proposing pathways whereby ecolinguistics and positive discourse
analysis might converge.


3. Positive Discourse Analysis

Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) emerged in the early 2000s following some
prominent publications (e.g. Martin 1994 and 2004; Martin and Rose 2003) by
Jim Martin, a leading exponent of Systemic Functional Linguistics, (SFL), the
Hallidayan paradigm on which many critical studies have been based. Before
turning to PDA, however, it will be worth briefly discussing CDA, which may be
seen as discourse analytical research that studies how “social power abuse,
dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk
in the political context” (Van Dijk 2001: 352).
     A critique of CDA is beyond the scope of this paper; some of the main points
in a well-known debate are summarised by Bartlett (2012), as cherry-picking
data that confirm the analyst’s pre-formed opinions (see also Widdowson 2004;
Abbamonte this volume), insufficient coverage of texts on the topic analysed,
over-reliance on SFL, etc. There is also the question of impact, which asks how
credible/useful it is for academics to continually decry harmful hegemonic
discourses in studies that have no visible effect on the abuses in question. To put
this another way, the products of linguistic research are arguably not influencing

3
  The point is crucial if we want to suggest that the husbandry carried out at High Ash Farm
could be a model of best practice for UK farming generally. In other words, it has to be
understood whether economic and ecological goals may work in harmony, or if they are
fundamentally opposed (Shmelev 2012). If it is possible to have a rich biosphere and at the same
time an efficiently functioning, economically viable farming sector then this would clearly
represent the best of both worlds.
4
   The British government is prepared to foot the bill for this initiative. See Gov.UK:
https://www.gov.uk/countryside-stewardship-grants/winter-bird-food-ab9,           last       visit
23.09.2021.
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A41                                                                                        PONTON


the producers of the discourse, and hence their effects remain circumscribed
within a restricted, largely ineffectual area at the margins of social life (see
Chomsky’s critique of CDA, discussed in de Beaugrande 1991). Yet CDA
originally aimed at the redress of inequalities on an ambitious scale. Kress (1996:
15), for example, explains that the intention was to “bring a system of excessive
inequalities of power into crisis by uncovering its workings and its effects
through the analysis of potent cultural objects – texts – and thereby to help in
achieving a more equitable social order5.”
     Reflecting on some of these issues, especially the latter, the emergence of
PDA may have allowed analysts to draw breath, to explore other veins of
linguistic research, that might in the long run afford more substantial results
than CDA has managed, in its forty or so years of activity.
     To a degree, the “why” and the “how” of PDA still remain topics for
discussion (see Abbamonte, this volume). As far as the first is concerned, Martin
appears to emphasise the psychological effects for the analyst, who is urged to
study “discourse that inspires, encourages, heartens, discourse we like, that
cheers us along” (Martin 1999: 51–52). Martin does make it clear that PDA is
still a form of socially engaged research, and suggests that the differing focus
might have a strategic motivation:

      The lack of positive discourse analysis [...] cripples our understanding of
      how change happens, for the better, across a range of sites – how feminists
      re-make gender relations in our world, how indigenous people overcome
      their colonial heritage, how migrants renovate their new environs and so on.
      And this hampers design and perhaps even discourages it since analysts
      would rather tell us how the struggle was undone than how freedom was
      won. (Martin 2004:182)

However, it is interesting that the focus on hegemonic discourse typical of CDA,
the emphasis on philosophical forerunners like Marx, Foucault, Althusser or
Habermass appears to be softening, in such a description, to a position that
appears in some way more tolerant of structural inequalities. In Martin’s words,
we need “a complementary focus on community, taking into account how people
get together and make room for themselves in the world – in ways that
redistribute power without necessarily struggling against it" (Martin 2004: 183, my
emphasis)
    The question of what methodology PDA should adopt to analyse texts has no
ready answer, since unlike CDA and its close connections with SFL, there seems
no logical reason why it should be connected to any particular tradition. Unless,
indeed, Martin’s own links with SFL should suggest it as the most appropriate
methodology, but Martin himself avoids this path, preferring to use a more
eclectic approach in his own work in PDA6. Tentatively, then, since PDA is still

5
  Kress himself, however, in the same chapter, is also concerned to promote a shift from
‘deconstructive activity, to productive activity’ for analysts, and outlines a primitive project for
positive discourse analysis (ibid: 15-16).
6
  In Martin 2004, for example, he uses the Hallidayan conceptualisation of the metafunctions
together with some notions from strict CDA (pronoun reference, implicit ideology) and a focus
on narrative structure.
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ECOLINGUISTICS AND PDA: CONVERGENT PATHWAYS                                            A42


a fresh canvas, it would seem that, within reason, any analytical system that
works in discourse analysis might be able to do so in PDA. In this study an
approach derived from the pragmatics of interaction and relevance theory is
used, focusing on implicit ideologies as these may be traced in discourse.


4. Methodology

A common feature in all approaches to discourse that focus on the construction
of meaning is the notion that there generally is – some would argue, there is
always – more in an utterance than is contained in the surface, or referential,
meaning of the words themselves (Leech 2016). These additional components in
meaning may be conveyed by non-verbal methods of communication such as
intonation, voice quality, emphasis, gesture, body-language, and so on
(Mehrabian 2007; Underhill 2008). Or, they may reside in a cognitive space that
is located between the words (in written discourse, between the lines), requiring
interpretative effort on the part of the hearer to arrive at the speaker’s precise
meaning. In discursive interaction, these processes are ongoing as the hearer
becomes the speaker, and the meaning is progressively mutually constructed as
the dialogue goes on (Kecskes 2016; Bondi 2018).
     In our data, which is taken from a radio programme, BBC’s “The Countryside
Hour”, this interactive dimension is less prominent. The discourse occurs mainly
in monological form, in which the speaker (Skinner) addresses his remarks not
to his immediate interlocutor who has asked him a question, but rather to an
invisible audience, whose instruction and entertainment represent the goal of
the programme.
     It is therefore necessary to apply analysis to explicate the ongoing discourse
in pragmatic terms, focusing on the following: relevance (Sperber and Wilson
1995; Wilson and Sperber 2015), on what can be inferred or what the speaker
implies (Sperber and Wilson, 1986), as well as on what is presupposed (Levinson
1983). In doing so, the attention is not only on the speaker’s meanings, but on
what it is possible to appreciate about his likely audience, their attitudes and
probable reactions, based on what the speaker himself assumes about their likely
ideologies, in the sense outlined by Fairclough (2003):

      Ideologies are representations of aspects of the world which can be shown
      to contribute to establishing, maintaining and changing social relations of
      power, domination and exploitation. This ‘critical’ view of ideology, seeing
      it as a modality of power, contrasts with various ‘descriptive’ views of
      ideology as positions, attitudes, beliefs, perspectives, etc. of social groups
      without reference to relations of power and domination between such
      groups.

This citation begins with what is surely the most usual way of thinking about
“ideology”, i.e. as relating principally to the realm of power, politics, the
dominion of one social group over another, and so on. Here it has been decided
to focus on the second aspect, which Fairclough here calls a “descriptive”
understanding of the word, and explains in terms of the attitudes, beliefs, etc.,
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A43                                                                                       PONTON


that people have. In this sense, “ideology” can be glossed as what people think,
based on opinions, beliefs and prejudices derived from their life experiences. It
is, of course, plain that such opinions have the potential to become political and
may become political whenever the subject who holds them is engaged by a
relevant political question7.
     The realm of ideology in discourse is accessible via the tools of pragmatic
enquiry indicated above, and constitutes the focus of this study. Below follows
an example of the method, applied to a fragment of Skinner’s discourse in an
episode of “The Countryside Hour”:

         Table 1. From The Countryside Hour (22/09/2011)
    L                                Text                                      Comment

    1      Some birds will do that they will bring their own
    2      nesting material and sometimes if there is nesting
    3      material in there the bird when it inspects the box will     Detailed focus on the
    4      think “Oh dear, somebody else's already inhabiting           sparrow’s perspective,
    5      that”. But a bit of a trick if you want to attract           as well as presupposing
    6      sparrows to a particular nest once you put a terraced        interest in such details
    7      box up, for example, is they’re the world's messiest         from listeners
    8      nesters, sparrows, tree sparrows in particular they're
    9      all members of the African Weaver bird family, which
    10     make really scruffy nests is to just sort of poke a little
    11     bit of dried grass or straw in the nest hole entrance and
    12     then the sparrows will come and investigate.


Before proceeding to analyse the text, it is necessary to consider the processes
whereby what is implicit in discourse is made manifest to hearers or readers, by
means of cognitive processes which are not fully understood yet (Sperber and
Wilson 1995), but engage the listeners’ knowledge of “words, syntactic structure,
overall meaning (topics), discourse structures and aspects of context” (Van Dijk
2000). On the basis of these, listeners form hypotheses about probable meanings
(Van Dijk, op.cit), following the application of a deductive logic (Sperber and
Wilson 1995: 68). There is some consensus that these implicit meanings are not
certain, demonstrable meanings but remain at the level of reasonable working
hypotheses (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 70) that guide our contributions to
conversation as well as our behaviour.
    A feature of Skinner’s talk, for example, is that birds have agency (see
introduction); they “do” things, they “bring” things (1), they “inspect” (3),
“think” (4), and “come and investigate” (12). From this, certain things can be
inferred about Skinner’s understanding of birds; that they have their own habits
and thoughts (in fact, he represents them anthropomorphically in 4-5, and as if
the birds possessed human grammar), that their actions are deliberate not
random, and so on. The bird, moreover, is not “just” a common sparrow, but has
genealogical specification and family membership (9) that affects its behaviour

7
 For example, a patriotic conception of Britain at the level of personal cognition will most likely
become political when there is a vote on Britain's membership of the EU.
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(9-10). The inference is that sparrows, as members of a family which stretches
down to Africa, are more important than is generally allowed for in human
accounts.
     Inferential analysis also allows us to appreciate something of the cognitive
processes of the sparrow – at least, to the extent that Skinner’s assumptions
regarding them are valid. From the description of the “trick” (5), we can see that
Skinner is dealing with a specific problem – people put up nesting boxes but the
birds will not use them. It can be assumed, from the solution that he offers (10-
12) that this is because the nest box has an alien, unnatural aspect, from the
birds’ perspective. The solution works, presumably because the birds are
attracted by the straw, a natural object, and gradually overcome their resistance
to the human artefact.
     In a cognitive dimension somewhere 'behind', in a supporting or enfolding
role with respect to these surface meanings are implicit ideologies, in the sense
discussed above, at the level of the speaker’s ideas, perspectives, beliefs,
convictions, attitudes and values. It is plain that for Skinner sparrows matter,
that he knows much more about them than most people, that he considers it
important to provide homes for them, that they have specific anxieties
concerning human objects, specific behavioural characteristics like scruffiness
(10), and curiosity (12).
     Much can also be inferred concerning Skinner’s assumptions about listeners,
applying the well-known CDA devices of pronoun reference (“you”, 5, 6), and
presupposition. Skinner presupposes, for example, that they are the sort of
person that puts up bird boxes – evidence that they care about animals – and
worry when they see that the boxes are not being used. For them, the natural
world is important, and to a degree they will share Skinner’s sense that the
company of birds has a value, it enriches their lives. Finally, Skinner’s digression
about the Weaver birds (9) can be interpreted in this sense: he goes out of his
way to provide them with the information since he assumes that they will find
it of interest.


5. High Ash Farm and the Countryside Hour

High Ash farm is located at Caistor St. Edmund’s, a village two miles south of
Norwich, and its owner, naturalist Chris Skinner, broadcasts about it once a week
on BBC Radio Norfolk. The programmes have a loose format; typically, part of
an episode is devoted to answering listeners’ questions, part to a trip around the
farm in the company of an interviewer discussing topical issues. When Skinner
inherited the farm, it was a shooting estate, but he gradually altered the setup,
and now he farms it for grain and niche products for bio markets; he also
provides stabling and facilities for horse-riding. As mentioned above, the farm
adopts a different attitude towards the environment compared with that current
in most modern farms. It appears, in fact, an axiom of farming that “the
biodiversity value of farmland declines with increasing yield” (Green 2005: 552).
As we have said, recent decades have seen increased recognition among
governments of the importance of balancing environmental and productivity
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goals, but research suggests that wherever the former are privileged, the latter
inevitably suffer (Gabriel et al. 2010).
    For Skinner, it is plain that the bottom line of High Ash Farm is to achieve
and maintain a rich natural environment in which predators are as welcome as
prey, and humble species of butterfly are as keenly celebrated as mammals with
a higher profile such as badgers or fallow deer. His ecosophy extends to moles,
who are permitted to disfigure his lawn with their earth movements, while the
standard practice is to cull them8. It is also common in the UK to cull badgers
because of the link between their activities and the incidence of bovine
tuberculosis in cattle (Downs et al. 2019); at High Ash they are highly valued.
On the other side of the debate, many UK farmers claim to have positive attitudes
towards the animals they rear, that their conditions in intensive farms are better
than they would enjoy in the wild (Serpell 1999); however, as has been seen, a
widespread lack of tolerance towards wildlife appears to be an intrinsic feature
of modern agriculture itself (Conover and Decker 1991).
    Episodes of the programme are regularly devoted to creatures that most
humans largely ignore – spiders, ants, wasps, hornets, bats, hover flies. For
Skinner, these creatures’ lives all have a value, and a place, and he is sometimes
heard to bemoan what he terms our “war’ against nature and animals, wishing
instead for a world that recognises the rights of all animals – and not just humans
– to be alive, and to follow their own individual schemes of living.


6. Data – The Countryside Hour

In this section, two extracts from an episode of “The Countryside Hour” are
explored using the approach outlined above. Relevant examples have been
selected in the terms of this study, guided by the intrinsic interest of the
fragments. It should be stressed that they have not been hand-picked because
they appear to fit some theory: similar findings would emerge from almost any
part of Skinner’s discourse, taken more or less at random9.
    In the first extract, as well as Skinner’s environmental philosophies, we learn
much concerning the ideology of a listener to the programme. Presuppositions
and inferences have been identified and collected in a key below the text
(Presupposition: P; Inference: I).




8
   Many farmers view moles as vermin and have them destroyed. BBC Manchester,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2008/11/12/121108_molecatcher_feature
.shtml, last visit 26.09.2021.
9
  This is not surprising, since what is at stake is largely the implicit philosophies - or ‘ideology’ –
of the central character, and there is no reason to suppose it should vary greatly from one
broadcast to another. The most we can expect is that different topics might bring out different
aspects of Skinner’s thinking about the environment.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15506
ECOLINGUISTICS AND PDA: CONVERGENT PATHWAYS                                               A46


      Table 2. Countryside hour (ii) 24/02/202010
 1      Gudgin: John Reed lives on Unthank Road in Norwich and he says for years
 2      we've fed the foxes and watched them with low level lights in the garden they
 3      came every night and we recognized individuals and named themI1. Sometimes
 4      there would be up to four of the foxes altogether however about 12 months ago
 5      this all stopped and we've not seen one at all since then. Do you think they've
 6      been shot or what, have you heard anything about the Norwich fox
 7      population?P1,2, 3
 8      Skinner: Yes, I have heard about the Norwich fox population and quite a number
 9      of those foxes were actually um culled. Sadly there were some complaints about
 10     them and there was a professional marksman came in uh close to the Unthank
 11     Road area there were complaints about foxes in the garden and foxes making a
 12     lot of noise at nightI2and unfortunately I think six were culled whether they were
 13     the particular ones or not, but there is another set quite close, another earth I
 14     should say, quite close to Sainsbury's in the middle of Norwich on the old Brazen
 15     Gate railway line so there's some more foxes there and there's also some on
 16     Mousehold Heath so they've been spared yeah yes well they they're not known
 17     about necessarily because you know they do distribute themselves, quite right
 18     that, the reason they're near the brazen gate is um at uh where the old railway
 19     line comes in under Hall Road um there's a row of shops there and uh there's a
 20     fish and chip shop and quite a lot of food waste is left there for leftovers from
 21     the chip shop there and they thrive quite well on that it's near their railway arch
 22     but they are pretty well safe there unless again somebody complains and they're
 23     culled it's not illegal to do thatI3you there are professional people that will come
 24     in under license and dispose of them it's always sad because people get very
 25     attached to their foxes and uh yes so it's just one of those things that happenI4it's
 26     a bit sad.

 Key
 Presupposition (P) 1 = the caller presupposes that when a fox disappears there is a
 chance that it will have been shot;
 P 2 = caller presupposes that Skinner, as an authority on Norwich wildlife, will know
 what has happened to the foxes.
 P3 = presupposes that these foxes are part of a wider “population” in the Norwich
 area.

 Inference (I) 1 = the caller has a strong interest in wildlife, and affection for the foxes;
 I2 = foxes making noises at night might be causally connected to their being shot;
 I3 = wards off the notion that what has been done is illegal;
 I4 = aligns the episode with other, “natural” phenomena.


Implicit in the question is the caller’s concern for wildlife in general, which
evidently underlies his interest in the foxes. The family devotes time to observing
the foxes (2), distinguishing between individual animals (3), and going so far as
to name them. Of the practice of giving animals names Borkfelt (2011: 122) says:

       We name individual animals when we regard them as special and it is often
       an expression of fondness, which may end up being subversive to practices

10
  BBC Countryside Hour, ‘Another mystery sound to guess at’, broadcast 24 Feb 2020, online at:
https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-countryside-hour/including-another-mystery-sound-to-
guess-at/, last visit 26/09/2021.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15506
A47                                                                                      PONTON


      that can be seen as harmful to the animal. We regard an animal with a name
      differently and sometimes an individual animal with a name—even a
      fictitious animal—may function as an ambassador and change perceptions
      of an entire species, as one can argue Flipper may have done for dolphins
      or the 1995 film Babe did for pigs.

An attitude of fondness towards the foxes can be inferred from the caller’s
comments; they become part of the family’s quality of life, they represent a way
of interacting with nature, with the wild, the non-human. When the foxes
disappear, a significant gap is left behind, and the caller is sufficiently disturbed
to make enquiries about them via local radio. From Skinner’s reply, it can be
inferred that he is an appropriate source of information, indeed an expert on
local wildlife, since he knows all about the case of the foxes (8-9). He provides
detailed information, not just about the Unthank Road foxes but about the
Norwich fox population in general (8-23). Skinner’s remarks go beyond the local
issue to address societal norms and the axiologies of modern urban life. From I2,
which accounts for the episode in terms of “complaints” about the foxes in
gardens “making noises at night” (11-12), it can be inferred that our society’s
laws uphold the rights of residents to a good night’s sleep above the animals’
right to exist. To a degree, Skinner’s attitude towards this state of things is not
confrontational: rather, he represents the action as not illegal (23), as carried out
by professionals (23) under license (24), and he uses a euphemism “dispose of”
(23), perhaps to avoid raising the emotional temperature. Indeed, in (25) he
represents the episode as “just one of those things that happen”, which
naturalises it. Naturalisation, a heuristic device found in Barthes (2006) and
frequently encountered in CDA (Fairclough 1995, Chouliaraki 2008),
(re)presents phenomena that in reality are dependent on specific human choices
as simply part of “the way things are”, things which should be accepted without
protest. Instead of attributing responsibility to the human agents, the shooting
of the foxes is aligned with other natural phenomena like floods, hurricanes, etc.,
about which nothing can or should be done by humans.
     As well as these presuppositions and inferences, there are other implicit
features, some of which may be briefly mentioned. The discussion of the fish and
chip shop’s practice of leaving leftover food outside (20-21) feeds into an implicit
argument in favour of the foxes’ presence; i.e., modern human life is wasteful
(20), by getting rid of this excess food the foxes are providing a service of some
kind, their right to live is thereby underlined. Finally, it should be noted that
Skinner refers to the railway arch with a possessive pronoun, “their” (21), rather
than the definite article, endowing the foxes with a capacity for possession, the
pragmatics of which are comparable to those associated with agency, which are
discussed above (see introduction)11.
In the next extract, Skinner is replying to a listener’s question regarding a photo
taken of a bird, possibly a starling, nesting in the cavity wall of their house:

11
   There has been some research about whether animals can ‘have’ rights (e.g. Favre 2009), but
the question of whether they can be said to have things, in the sense of quasi-human ownership,
is as yet unexplored as far as I know. This, indeed, is not a case of actual possession; however,
Skinner uses an idiomatic phrase to confer a kind of ownership of the railway bridge on the foxes,
the kind present when somebody is said to go to “their favourite café”.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15506
ECOLINGUISTICS AND PDA: CONVERGENT PATHWAYS                                                A48


      Table 3. Countryside hour (ii) 24/02/202012
 1      It looks like a starling to me. Perfect picture and it's an absolute typical nest site
 2      it's exploring it probably has laid eggs already, many starlings have done. You'll
 3      see the murmurationsP1 that are quite common across the country are diminishing
 4      by considerable numbers each day. We're into milder weather, longer hours of
 5      daylight, the main trigger for birds to start pairing up and nesting and egg
 6      layingI1..it stimulates the protruding gland at the base of the head. Anybody that
 7      keeps poultry, it's been quite dark over the winter months, you can add light at the
 8      beginning of the day and the end of the extend the hours of light that the poultry
 9      is exposed to, and that will precipitate um earlier egg laying as wellI2, so um..very
 10     typical spot for them, very safe in there as well, and probably nesting in the cavity
 11     or just inside on the ledge at the top of the wall. They don't really make a nest with
 12     much material as such, it's often a little scraping, some dust, occasionally they'll
 13     take a few feathers in, maybe a little bit of dry grass and the eggs are beautifully
 14     clear blue, same color blue, sky blue, as a song thrush’s egg but without the little
 15     brown speckling on which the song thrush sat, and a song thrush will make a
 16     beautiful cup shaped nest lined with mud.P2 Starling's nest is much cruder because
 17     it's usually in a hole, old woodpecker's holes are a great favorite, and you'll often
 18     hear the male starling just singing or um courting his favourite femaleI3 with his
 19     head just after the woodpecker, just attracting any passing females, and the more
 20     variety and complexity of his song, which is often mimicry, the more likely is to
 21     attract a mate.P3 Just listen to this, this is one starling [recording of starling song].
 22     It's not a chicken, this is a starling, this is the starling, so there's really a list of
 23     where they've been feeding during the day, and so it's a list of good sites to visit.P4
 24     You hear this sound, you're likely to get some food, obviously a chicken run or a
 25     bantam more precisely in this case is a good place to find some food. So you know
 26     whether she the lady of his lifeI3 or he will certainly know where those sites are,
 27     and uh so they're really um very energetic at this time of the year, and very
 28     importantly they bathe together as well. This is a freshly hatched brood with mum
 29     and dad in my bird bath [recording]. Cleanliness is next to godliness absolutely
 30     and feather care, even at this time of the year is crucial when you have to get
 31     through dark nights... so it's nothing like bathing with a friend, they say.I4

 Key
 P1 = Listeners will know what a ‘murmuration’ is;
 P2 = Presupposes listener interest in this lengthy digression from the original topic of
 the listener’s query;
 P3 = Complexity of song is attractive to female starlings;
 P4 = Presupposes the pragmatic purposes of the starling’s song.

 I1 = a connection between the phenomenon described here – birds pairing up and
 nesting – and the diminution of the murmurations referred to in the previous sentence;
 I2 = the inference is that some listeners might keep chickens and be interested in how
 to stimulate egg laying;
 I3 (& I4) = these anthropomorphic references are a reminder that, like people, birds’
 relationships matter to them, and their behaviour patterns are comparable to what occurs
 in the human world.




12
   BBC Countryside Hour, ‘Another Amystery sound to guess at’, broadcast 24 Feb 2020, online
at: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-countryside-hour/including-another-mystery-sound-to-
guess-at/, last visit 26/09/2021.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15506
A49                                                                                     PONTON


A murmuration is an event that occurs when a flock of birds, typically starlings,
gather together and form dynamic patterns, swaying up and down, moving
across countryside or townscape as if they had one mind. Skinner takes for
granted that listeners know this (P1), i.e. he uses the term with no explanation;
it is safe to assume that listeners to “The Countryside Hour” have sufficient
ecological knowledge. Skinner displays the knowledge of a specialist
ornithologist, as he goes on to explain why there are fewer murmurations at the
moment than formerly, since the birds, moved by seasonal increasing light, have
by now paired up and begun nesting. Listeners are expected to provide the logical
connectors between the clauses in 4-6 (I1). From these details, we can infer what
in other programmes Skinner has explained explicitly, that the purpose of the
murmuration is to facilitate the birds’ getting to know one another, as a
preliminary to courtship and pairing up. The detail relating to egg laying and the
increase of light (7-9) is an aside, probably directed at listeners who keep
chickens. Again, this allows us to infer something about the characteristics of the
intended audience (Kjeldsen 2018).
     In point of fact, much of the extract is something of a digression. The
questioner simply wanted Skinner to identify a bird; Skinner deals with this
immediately (1), and only directly refers to the listener’s question in 1-2, coming
back to it briefly in 11. This is quite typical of his style in the Countryside Hour,
riffing on listeners’ questions to cover topics that he knows will interest them –
here he discusses the habits of starlings (1-4, 16-31), techniques in poultry
farming (7-10), the colour of thrush eggs, their nesting habits (16-18),
complexity of the starling’s song (22-25).
     This last topic allows us to observe Skinner using presupposition and
inference himself, to account for the “meaning” of birdsong. The recording
consists of a 30 second burst of starling’s song, which he assumes is directed at
the bird’s mate, wherein the voices of other birds – curlew, swallow, bantam hen,
etc. – are clearly audible, with Skinner announcing each in turn. The starling is
mimicking these other birds, and in 22-25, Skinner suggests an interpretation of
the sounds as providing the female starling with a “list” (22-23) of good feeding
sites (P4). From this, it can be inferred that, according to Skinner, birdsong is
not simply the production of random sounds, reducible to functional
explanations connected to the protection of territory and other basic goals, as
has been suggested13. (Rather, it is hypothesised that birdsong has a fuller
meaning than is usually acknowledged: the bird is effectively using a form of
oral communication, whose message can be glossed as “go there, you remember
where the chickens are – I went there today and I got something to eat”.
     Finally, the somewhat anthropomorphic references to family life (I3; 27-31),
the coy reference to “the lady of his life” (26), and the description of “mum and
dad” with the family bathing (28-29), suggest the inference that starlings enjoy
something akin to human family life, and share similar communal rituals.



13
     For a discussion of these points see Hauser et al 2002; Marler and Slabbekoorn 2004; Gentner
et al 2006; Hedeager 2012.

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15506
ECOLINGUISTICS AND PDA: CONVERGENT PATHWAYS                                                A50


7. Conclusion

As Martin says, proposing a ten year moratorium on CDA: “we do need to move
beyond a preoccupation with demonology, beyond a singular focus on semiosis
in the service of abusive power” (Martin 2004: 184). However, even in a study
like the present, a critical perspective is never far away. The ideologies
celebrated as positive in this study – deep knowledge of the habits of animals
and birds, respect for the environment, a care for living creatures, and so on –
contrast markedly with current hegemonic attitudes and social practices within
the UK. It is sufficient for a few residents to have their sleep disturbed, and to
complain about animal noises, for a marksman to be sent for. That this is
completely legal highlights a principle that is naturalised in our societies: if there
is a conflict between human and animal needs, the former will win out, at the
cost of even the animals’ most basic need. Skinner is apparently reluctant to
appear as an aggressive crusader for wildlife interests; his is a nuanced
environmentalism, which may go so far as to recognise the rights of townsfolk
to a good night’s sleep.
     In connection with the crude realities of animal treatment, as Trampe (2018)
underlines, linguistic strategies such as euphemism may airbrush them out of
view, but the realities remain. At the level of societal axiology, it would be
necessary to de-naturalise these positions, and re-negotiate the whole issue of
animal rights (Rachels 1990; Palmer 2008)14.
     The aim in this study has been to follow the lead of Stibbe (2018), in
outlining a pathway of convergence between ecolinguistics and PDA. In the
exploration of the underlying ideology of Chris Skinner, and also in those of
listeners to the programme, attitudes that are genuinely ecosophical have been
uncovered. It is not so much the fact that Skinner has an in-depth knowledge of
wildlife – this is apparent from the denotational meanings of his words. On a
deeper level analysis, a complex, multi-dimensional approach to ecology
emerges, that is sensitive to animals as thinking beings, whose lives are granted
an inherent meaning. The superficial anthropomorphism that he occasionally
displays in representing their mental processes may at times disguise Skinner’s
real point, which is that animals and humans have much in common. Birds pair
up, and raise families – just like humans – and enjoy moments like communal
bathing, just as we do. As has been seen, he believes the meaning of birdsong
goes beyond the widely accepted, “functional” interpretation, i.e. that birds emit
largely meaningless sounds in order to attract mates, sound an alarm, or protect
their territory. Instead, Skinner supports a more complex view of animal
communication, such as that found in Ross’s (2019) study of elephants, for
example. For Skinner, birds communicate concepts to each other through song –
somehow, put simply, they talk to each other.


14
   There are some studies in ecolinguistics that promote the use of “positive” alternatives to
hegemonic discourse. For instance, Dunayer (2001, in Stibbe 2018: 167), suggests we use the
term “free-living nonhumans” in place of “wildlife”, and aims to uncover linguistic patterns of
exploitation through the adoption of terms like “food industry captive” and “cow enslaver”,
instead of “farm animal” and “dairy farmer”, respectively.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1974-4382/15506
A51                                                                          PONTON


     Some of Skinner's implicit ideologies, we have seen, are shared by one of the
listeners, and it also emerges from the analysis that Skinner is takes his audiences'
deep interest in wildlife for granted. In terms of “being positive”, then, there is
much to take encouragement from in this programme. Apart from other factors,
the environmental ideals it stands for clearly resonate sufficiently with its
community of listeners for the BBC to assist in their dissemination.


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