Unpacking environmental metaphors and ecological awareness

Abstract

Environmental metaphors are figures of speech that represent our understanding of the environment and our relationship with it. Metaphors used in everyday life belong to a conceptual system of mental networks and associations that help us organise information through a set of correspondences between concrete objects and abstract notions. By unpacking environmental metaphors, we are able to better understand how we relate to nature. In order to explore some environmental metaphors, I teamed up with a group of six student-teachers in their second year of the Master in Teaching and Learning at the University of Malta. They had participated in the summer school “Eco-Voices: Digital Narratives, Linguistic Diversity and the Environment in a Changing World” at the University of Enna ‘Kore’, 15-19 September 2025, during which the topic of ecological discourse had been treated by several academics and reflected upon in writing by the students. The following conversation was initiated with the aim of deciphering how the ways in which we talk about the environment portrays ecological agency. It deliberated on whether current idiomatic expressions, songs, literature and drama represent humankind as being the agent acting on the natural environment, or whether nature is the cause of certain experiences harming or benefitting humans. The dialogue developed into a recognition of our interdependence with the ecosystem, and finally to the realisation that our everyday discourse might be hindering us from a fuller appreciation of nature.