Introduction

'Ecology,' the concept which made ecolinguistics possible, has its origin in the 19th century, in which Charles Darwin looked at the 'evolution' of organisms and the development of humans in this evolution. In Western scholarship, ecolinguistics has become increasingly well established within mainstream linguistics. Ecolinguistics deals with the impact of language and discourse in describing, but also aggravating and perhaps alleviating, environmental problems. The use of 'ecolinguistics' is the more modern one subscribed to by the majority of linguists concerned about the environment. Ecolinguistics may also be a pace-maker in the age of transdisciplinarity and may show the use of methods and processes that have hardly been considered so far, such as citizen science, in which people not connected with a university collect materials and help scholars to see the applicability and the down-to-earth side of their scholarship. Finally, this chapter also provides an overview of this book.