ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the authority of climate scientists is challenged by powerful vested interests and the media. It explains how human-centred attitudes to the environment, reflected in the vocabulary and grammar of environmental discourse, represent nature as powerless or exploitable. The chapter presents the idea of an ecological critical discourse analysis. It suggests that how the conventional vocabulary and grammar of English might be changed to resist the technological ideology of the exploitation of nature. The chapter investigates how poetry, by contrast, can use language to represent nature as more powerful and more independent from humans. It analyses the typical ways in which nature is represented in the environmental discourse of the State of the World 2012, showing how nature is reduced to serving human needs and represented as powerless. The chapter explores the use of grammar and vocabulary to represent the power of nature in the poetry of William Wordsworth and Edward Thomas.
