ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN PRINT MEDIA: AN ECOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

Abstract

The study explores the representation of environmental sustainability in Pakistani English newspaper discourse from an ecolinguistic perspective. The research adopts Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the discursive construction of environmental issues in major national newspapers. Data was collected through purposive sampling from fifty newspaper articles published in Dawn, The News, The Express Tribune, The Nation, and Daily Times. The data was analysed through lexical categories, core environmental lexical units, theme–rheme structures, and framing patterns. The findings reveal that environmental sustainability is predominantly portrayed through crisis-oriented discourse, where climate change, floods, droughts, pollution, water scarcity, and environmental degradation are framed as urgent national concerns. The lexical choices frequently emphasise risk, destruction, depletion, and vulnerability, while positive sustainability narratives such as resilience, adaptation, renewable energy, and sustainable development appear less frequently. The study also finds that environmental discourse in Pakistani newspapers mainly focuses on policy failures, infrastructural weaknesses, and immediate environmental threats rather than long-term ecological transformation and innovation. Furthermore, the analysis highlights differences in newspaper framing, where some newspapers adopt policy-oriented and technocratic approaches while others rely on emotional and crisis-based representations of environmental challenges. The study concludes that Pakistani English newspaper discourse reflects growing awareness of environmental sustainability issues; however, it still requires a more balanced and future-oriented representation that promotes ecological responsibility and sustainable solutions. A key recommendation for future research is to extend the analysis to regional languages and multimodal media to explore broader environmental discourses in Pakistan. A major limitation of this study is its exclusive focus on English newspapers, which may not fully represent the diversity of environmental reporting in the country.