Green Silence in the Age of Climate Crisis: An Ecolinguistic Study

Abstract

In the framework of the rising percentage of climate change and expanding pollution of the environment, the vocabulary of referring to a weather event becomes a central aspect of ecological awareness among the population. The article examines the discourse of green silence, or the absence of ecological allusions, in weather reports at the social media. Based on the different profiles of ecolinguistics and ecosophy and the framework developed by Arran Stibbe (2015) the six stories we live by, the study examined 200 posts on five of the most popular social media sites releasing weather data: AccuWeather, Windy.com, The Weather Channel, Clime (NOAA), and PakWeather. The mixed-method corpus-assisted research demonstrates that ecological oblivion, anthropocentric prominence and hostile identity work is predominate across these short, frequently shared weather messages. Often the consequences of weather events on non-human life and the environment in general, and the ecosystem are downplayed or put into the background, whereas the impact of weather events is centralized on the human level through the metaphorical use, framing and selective salient issues. The results indicate that such platforms promote a linguistic ideology of anthropocentrism that erodes ecological knowledge within systems and diverges the power of climate change discourse, especially the SDG goal 13 (Climate Action). The on-demand instances of erasure and negligence on culturally diverse platforms show the ideological roles of common digital textual interactions and make the ecolinguistics theoretical analysis applicable to real-time-based, app-based, and algorithmic communication scenarios. Its contribution is made to growing scholarship in the field of eco-digital discourse, and it provides practical recommendations that can guide climate communicators, app developers, and environmental editors when they would like to ensure that eco-responsibility and ecological presence are integrated into common weather discourse. It purports a re-imagination of weather bulletins as possible locations of ecological narratives, sympathy, and Earth awareness.