War and Peace in the Global Greenhouse: Metaphors We Die By

This article examines the role metaphorical thought plays in the scientific as well as popular discussion of key environmental issues such as global warming and loss of biodiversity. This discourse, which I call "Greenspeak," rests on a few basic conceptual metaphors, which project inferences from a limited set of source domains onto the target domain of the environment. War, in particular, acts as the prime source domain. In concert with the image schema of "containment," which provides one of the most important scientific models of the environment, the concept of "earth as a greenhouse" serves as the locus of the "battlefield" of the metaphorical "war on the environment." Finally, the article compares conflicting systems of moral accounting underpinning Greenspeak and suggests serious problems with utilitarian models. Our future depends critically on which metaphorical conceptions predominate.