The ‘sustainable’ video-narratives of Greenpeace – an ecolinguistic investigation

The ‘sustainable’ narratives of Greenpeace (henceforth Gp), as they unfold in thousands of short videos retrievable from both YouTube and Gp’s official websites, are ultimately meant to engage more volunteers and donors. Accordingly, their affinities with some advertising languages are easily discernible, such as the use of topics that appeal to the public, an example of which are idyllic natural settings.1 The multimodal composition of these videos deploys appealing film sequences of landscapes, alternately marked and unmarked by human interventions, whose meanings are reinforced through the lexico-grammar of the verbal level, which is notionally salient and rich in intertextual allusions. The purposes of the present study are to analyze their discursive and multimedia features through the lens of ecolinguistics, a relatively recent approach that is positioned within the wide domain of discourse analysis, and to investigate the cultural-linguistic implications of Gp’s proactive communication. A major focus of attention is on its advertised visions of better worlds and the new stories we should live by, where nature is not to be used for profit but treated like the ecosystem that our lives depend on.