Erasing the environment in news coverage of the Nord Stream bombings: An ecolinguistic analysis

Abstract

This article examines news media coverage of the Nord Stream pipeline bombings in September 2022 in order to ascertain how the Baltic marine environment was represented in the discourse. Data was taken from five international news sources that represent the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. One month of linguistic and visual data was analyzed using the ecolinguistic framework (Stibbe, Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, 2021) and four stories of erasure emerged from the data, including stories of complete erasure, partial erasure, and metaphorical erasure. All four stories were evaluated against a wartime ecological philosophy, and all four were determined to be destructive stories that communicated negative worldviews about the natural world. None of the news discourse addressed the devastating effects of the explosions for the Baltic marine inhabitants, including the acoustic impacts and the dispersion of toxic sediment from an already polluted seabed. Erasing the marine environment communicates the worldview that the environment is not important, and this is particularly damaging at a time when the natural world is already enduring unprecedented antrhopogenic abuse. The results of the study indicate that news coverage of war and conflict could benefit from the use of an ecological philosophy that illuminates the importance of the natural world alongside human social concerns.

Keywords

Baltic Sea ecolinguistics media and conflict Nord Stream Russia–Ukraine war war and ecology

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