ABSTRACT
Environmental discourse analysis focuses on the linguistic and other symbolic resources which people utilize in order to describe and explain the relations which they have with their natural environments. Rather than presuming that such discourses reflect the realities of the biophysical world, the basic premise of this approach is that people culturally constitute their environments, and the specific resources located within them, in very distinctive ways. These linguistic constructions often conflict with the cultural interpretations put forward by others. The way in which whales have been extensively anthropomorphized by those environmental institutions which seek an end to whaling is taken as an excellent case in point.
