The ‘sustainable’ video-narratives of Greenpeace – an ecolinguistic investigation

Abstract The ‘sustainable’ narratives of Greenpeace, as they unfold in thousands of short videos retrievable from both YouTube and Greenpeace’s official websites, are ultimately meant to engage more volunteers and donors. Accordingly, their affinities with some advertising languages are easily discernible, such as the use of topics that appeal to the public, for example idyllic natural settings. The multimodal composition of these videos deploys appealing film sequences of landscapes, alternately marked and unmarked by human interventions, whose meanings are reinforced through the lexico-grammar of the verbal level, which is notionally salient and rich in intertextual allusions. The purposes of the present study are to analyse their discursive and multimedia features through the lens of ecolinguistics, a relatively recent approach that is positioned within the wide domain of discourse analysis, and to investigate the cultural-linguistic implications of Greenpeace’s proactive communication. A major focus of attention is on the advertised visions of better worlds and the new stories we should live by, where nature is not to be used for profit but treated as the ecosystem that our lives depend on.