SILENCES IN THE STORM: AN ECOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF ERASURE IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS HEADLINES OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH-LANGUAGE NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

When it comes to reporting floods, smog, locust swarms, earthquakes, heatwaves or stray-animal conflicts, Pakistani newspapers keep relentlessly reporting the events but the language of the headline doesn't mention who suffers, who is in charge or who is to be blamed. In this study, this absence was explored. Following Stibbe (2015), and especially the notion of erasure and its three stages, the study has been based on twenty-nine environmental news headlines that have been picked from English-language sources in Pakistan: twenty-six headlines from Dawn, one from The Express Tribune, and two supplementary policy and archival texts. A qualitative, descriptive and interpretive design was used, and each headline was explored in terms of the language/suppression/backgrounding of participants, the ecological ideologies embedded in those language/suppressions and the amount to which that ideology could be accepted within the stated ecosophy of interdependence, justice and ecological limits. The analysis, which confirmed that erasure was not limited to occasional occurrences, revealed that nearly all headlines committed at least one type of erasure and most undertook two or three. Through the processes of nominalisation, agentless and passive constructions, the personification of nature as a destructive entity, the massification of animal and casualty, numerical abstraction and superordinate economic categories, the vulnerable populations, non-human life, and institutional responsibility were all backgrounded. The three conceptual groupings that emerged throughout the data were: economistic anthropocentrism, where nature was important only as a means of production for markets; environmental determinism, where the hazards were autonomous forces acting upon a helpless population; and technocratic managerialism, where the crisis was a matter of administrative control, not of justice. The study concludes that the ecological harm headlines in Pakistan not only record ecological harm but also erode accountability for it, while the study recommends a change in the practice of headlines to restore the people, living things and responsible institutions to the sentence.