Written in Sand

Abstract

Scholars have recently argued that one of the more urgent tasks for environmentalists is to understand how space is discursively produced. This paper is thus a genealogical, as well as a discourse analytic, account of consideration of how a landscape ‘emerges into history’ through the medium of discourse. This paper analyzes the discourse of an environmental dispute over the Oak Ridges Moraine (ORM), a glacial landscape in southern Ontario. I consider a range of different ways the debate was framed, as well as which of those strategies were most likely to be taken up and widely circulated. The paper considers how certain effective strategies for arguing on behalf of environmental issues function both as challenge to, but also ratification of, certain aspects of (post)industrial capitalism.

Keywords:

• environmental discourse
• language and landscape
• language and place
• language and political ecology
• Oak Ridges Moraine
• ecolinguistics

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the joint meeting of CASCA (the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne d'anthropologie) and SANA (Society for the Anthropology of North America) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in May 2003, at the American Anthropology Association's annual meetings in Chicago in November 2003, and at the biennial meeting of the International Pragmatics Association in Riva del Garda Italy, in July 2006. For conversations about and comments on this project and on notions of landscape more broadly, I thank Ted Banning, Michael Chazan, Gary Coupland, David Begun, J. Dickinson, Charles Frake, Glynis George, Roger Keil, Stuart Kirsch, Ute Lehrer, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Barbara Meek, Shaylih Muehlmann, Jack Sidnell, and Jackie Solway. Many of my ideas about the literature on language, space and place were worked out in a sprawling (!) reading course with Abigail Sone – it's hard to figure out whose insights are whose here. Finally, Gary, Megan and Jake willingly accompanied me on a number of trips to events and places on the Oak Ridges Moraine.

Notes

1. According to Pyne (1998, p. 50):

• The torrent of discovered organisms, rocks, ruins, peoples, and places demanded an order that geography alone could not impose. Instead the culture turned to history and the belief that time itself obeyed grand patterns. The idea of progress, a ubiquitous organic metaphor that relied on growth, not merely expansion, the sheer immensity of revealed time, all converged on the belief that causality was temporal, the design of the world historical, and the surest explanation one that arranged itself as a successive unfolding of events, stage by providential stage. Increasingly historicism became the common soil of cultivated discourse.

2. Once discovered, however, the meaning of a landform need not remain fixed. In the late 20th century, geology found its most compelling questions elsewhere; the dominant discipline for understanding the canyon was biology. Environmentalist debates over the construction of dams on the Colorado River led a focus on the river, and most major works described its integrity and its significance in terms of the unity of the river, which not only flowed but was ‘alive,’ ‘living’ (Pyne, 1998, p. 156).

3. Full citations for the texts analyzed in this paper appear at the end of this paper, before the References.

4. The mountain aesthetic is also invoked in the name given to one of the highest points on the moraine (Mount Wolfe, 360 m), and in the way a hike-leader and biologist described a walk to be taken on a day otherwise devoted to ecological restoration. She suggested that we take a walk to the nearby height of land (the top of a local ski hill) first since it would be cooler and drier and the walk was ‘All uphill there, all downhill back.’

5. My thanks to David Begun for pointing out that the ‘discovery’ of endangered species in the course of environmental disputes is a regular phenomenon that deserves further attention.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bonnie McElhinny

Bonnie McElhinny is Associate Professor in Anthropology and in the Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Studies, University of Toronto. She studies language, gender and political economy, and language and political ecology. She has written on the discourse of police officers, economic cooperatives, and political discussions about child-rearing in colonial and postcolonial settings.