Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
'disaster' and 'catastrophe'. There is also the use of tropes that imply
nature would be better of unmanaged. Burning is equated to a violation
(p. 17), suggesting a virgin state would be preferable. And wilderness, pre-
sented as unmanaged land, is compared favourably with managed land-
scapes (p. 20), in particular as wilderness is seen as the source of sublime
romantic encounters: 'a place where we can stand with our senses steeped
in nature' (p. 20).
The rhetoric used drives the independent scientists' argument towards
the conclusion that humans will inherently destroy rather than conserve
nature and that management conl icts with the natural state of the land.
The government scientists, by contrast, managed the ethos to imply a more
positive message. In policy debates this may well carry greater weight than
a purely negative and oppositional discourse. While negative rhetoric
such as this is highly inl uential within environmentalism and can assist
in building coalitions among environmentalist groups, it is less ef ective
within governmental policy settings.
Concluding on discourse analysis of a dominant policy perspective
What we hope to have shown in this application of two discourse analysis
approaches to a specii c environmental policy case study is the kind of
insights that can be achieved through an attention to language and dis-
course. For example, throughout the analysis, Hajer's story-line concept
provided a powerful heuristic device enabling the conl icting claims of the
pro- and anti- burning discourses to be clearly illustrated. Two separate
discourse coalitions are discernible throughout, subscribing either to a
story-line of 'i re is desirable' or 'i re is undesirable'. Precisely as Hajer
posits, the members of these coalitions subscribe to the same story-line
but tend to apply dif erent meanings to it. For example, the Aboriginal
representatives subscribe to the 'i re is desirable' story-line on the grounds
of cultural tradition, whereas the government scientists subscribe on the
grounds of ecological desirability.
Discursive ai nities are easily discernible within representations of
members of the same discourse coalition, such as the promotion of the
fuel reduction story-line by both government scientists and pastoralists.
Obvious attempts to discredit the storylines of opposite discourses are also
observed throughout the representations. From the perspective of Dryzek's
work, his typology of societal discourses on the environment proves a
rough-and-ready tool for analysing the construction of the discourses.
By describing basic entities, assumptions and motivations within dif er-
ent representatives' story-lines, Dryzek's approach is useful in enabling
dif erentiation between those subscribing to the same overall story-line. It
also provides an access point for the emotive use of language, which plays
