Green conflicts in environmental discourse. A topos based integrative analysis of critical voices

ABSTRACT

‘Green’ concerns about nature, the environment or the climate have traditionally been juxtaposed with concerns about economic growth or job creation. Recently, however, a new type of conflict has appeared, in which different green concerns, for instance regarding mitigation of climate change and protection of landscape qualities, seem to collide. These environmental conflicts have so far received little scholarly attention. This article addresses the issue by a study of national and in particular local news media discussion on the construction of wind turbines in Denmark, bringing together research traditions from environmental communication, discourse analysis, and place studies. Analytically, the study employs the notion of topos as the key meaning unit, referring to the premises upon which an argument is based. In addition to the empirical findings, the study points to methodological potential of the concept of topos to integrate qualitative and quantitative approaches within a discourse studies framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Green conflicts
• environmental communication
• topos
• discourse analysis
• place
• protest voices
• wind turbines

Notes on contributor

Anders Horsbøl is an associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. With a background in philosophy, communication studies and discourse analysis, he has explored approaches to and dilemmas of dialogue, participation and democracy within different societal realms. He has published particularly in the fields of (multimodal) critical discourse analysis, political communication, health communication, citizen engagement and environmental communication. Author postal address: Aalborg University, Rendsburggade 14, 9000 Aalborg, Denmark.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Source: www.windpower.org

2 The distinction between formal and material topoi has been suggested by Kopperschmidt (1991). See also Wengeler (2013).

3 For a recent account of the polysemous character of Aristotle’s notion of topos, see Boukala (2016), which also relates the Aristotelian understandings to the use of topos within the Discourse-Historical Approach.

4 The premise could also be reconstructed with a higher deontic modality (‘then the planned initiative must be stopped’), or with a lower modality (‘then one might consider if the initiative is a good idea’). In the current inventory analysis, I have sought to reconstruct the premise in a less pronounced form, in order to maintain a higher level of generality of the topos, which may then be realized linguistically with different degrees of modality.

5 These epistemic controversies are not new within the study of environmental and science communication. For an early account of ‘local’ versus ‘scientific’ knowledge, see Wynne (1992).

6 The co-articulation of landscape and national community has affinities with nationalist discourses (see Forchtner & Kølvraa, 2015), but the affinities are more far-reaching and covers a broad range of discourses from tourism, museums, mass media and everyday conversations, perhaps best captured by the notion of ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig, 1995).