Discourse and the Environment: Complexity, Conflicts, and Crises

The environment has become a salient issue in many public arenas, articulating a sense of concern or worry for the degradation of our natural environment and living conditions, caused by human activity. Discursively speaking, the environment has emerged as an umbrella term for issues such as ›air and water pollution‹, ›biodiversity‹, ›waste management‹, ›nuclear energy‹, ›organic farming, ›wildlife protection‹, and ›climate change‹. This article presents some suggestions for approaching the environment from a discourse studies perspective, concentrating on three issues: The complexity of the
environment as a discursive phenomenon, conflicts between diverging environmental concerns, and »polycrisis« as a societal condition for environmental crises.