Considering the importance of metaphors for marine conservation

Highlights

• Highlights the importance of metaphors for metaphors for marine conservation and policy.

• The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, shows how metaphors can prove unhelpful for conservation when poorly formulated.

• Suggests how metaphors could be utilised to help raise awareness around the numerous issues facing the marine environment.

Abstract

This paper seeks to highlight the importance of metaphors for marine conservation and policy. It argues that the manner in which the oceans are perceived, often as an alien landscape, can limit the way language is utilised in marine conservation efforts. This limitation can produce unhelpful environmental metaphors that, instead of acting as catalysts for action, produce negative and reactionary responses. It illustrates this point through the example of what has become known as the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch.’ It postulates that if there is a disconnect between the many complex environmental issues facing the world's oceans and the way they are perceived, then more focus should be placed on developing pre-determined culturally embedded metaphors, which can conjure relatable imagery, but that are also rooted in scientific evidence. It recommends that, in an extension to existing public perception research (PPR) on how different communities value the ocean environment, there is room for shared metaphors of the oceanic environment to be developed that can help raise awareness within a particular cultural setting.

Introduction

Language has always played a significant role in the environmental movement, acting as a primary medium through which complex environmental issues are delivered to a wider public. Its influence can be profound [1], [2]. There exists a good body of literature on the role of language concerning environmental and ethical issues, such as climate change, genetically modified crops, energy consumption, as well as the use of the natural capital metaphor [3], [4], [5], [6], but little on the role of language in marine conservation.

There is, however, a growing body of literature on the study of public perception of the oceanic environment, which has come from the growth in what is known as Public Perception Research (PPR) [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]. Perception here is understood as an “umbrella term, which includes components such as knowledge, interest, social values, attitudes or behaviours” [11 p. 62]. Seeing as language plays a key role in shaping, attitudes, values and behaviours, it is surprising that more studies have not focused on the use of language within marine conservation.

Metaphors in particular, like that of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, have proven to be powerful devices for capturing the public's imagination. Not only does Silent Spring contain metaphors throughout, it is itself a metaphor. As Burke states a “metaphor…can be a name—Silent Spring—or an explanation of a condition, a ”silent spring” [12 p. 26]. Indeed, Nerlich calls Silent Spring “a counterfactual blend and auditory metaphor that represents the anti-climax following failed expectations and dashed hopes and cancels the tacit assumption that spring should be full of life, hope and joyful sounds” [13 p. 118]. Although Silent Spring had an astonishing reach, the metaphor was most effective in Western cultures, where silence has always maintained a menacing, threatening aura, being associated with death itself [13]. Birdsong, on the other hand, the dawn chorus, signals renewal, the onset of spring and the beginning of a new day.

Besides the broader cultural ‘figurative extensions,’ the power of Carson's Silent Spring metaphor in raising awareness of the effect of DDT also stemmed from its simple and relatable nature; it was a visual and audible metaphor for the otherwise silent process of pollution, and its emotive brilliance was such that it helped start a whole movement [14]. It was the fear of losing a noise and sight so ingrained into everyday human culture that became the catalyst for action. As Patton [15] states, where the ocean is concerned, the maxim of the great naturalist, Aldo Leopold rings especially true: “we can be ethical only in relation to something we see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in” [16 p. 251].

Through the conjuring of contextual imagery, drawn from concerns of what has happened as well what could happen, environmental metaphors, like silent spring, are as much cognitive as purely linguistic: “The function of metaphors…is…not just a descriptive one, they do not merely represent fact or fictions…they have a performative, and therefore political and ethical, force” [17 p. 9]. In this way, the power of the metaphor lies in their ability not only to shape perspectives of the environment, to raise awareness of a particular conservation issue, but also to act as a conduit for broader action. Indeed, recent studies have shown how metaphors can “powerfully influence cognition…increasing the accessibility of metaphor-related thoughts and eliciting metaphor-congruent behaviours” [18 p. 5].

To this end, how metaphors are used in environmental campaigns, conservation efforts, and by both policymakers and academics alike should not be taken lightly. This paper seeks to highlight the importance of metaphors for marine conservation and policy. Firstly, this paper will argue that there can be a problem with perception when it comes to conceptualising issues effecting the marine environment. Through the example of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ it illustrates that this perception problem can produce unhelpful metaphors that fail to distil the actualities and complexities of marine environmental issues to the wider public. It will then set out how metaphors can be used in a more effective manner, arguing that an approach that is embedded in both socio-cultural values and scientific research is needed. This paper is not arguing that the use of metaphors are a panacea. Rather that if they are constructed with care and meet the requirements set out in this paper they could be effective in a number of policy areas, such as increasing engagement with citizen science programmes, communicating the importance of local marine management projects and explaining complex oceanic issues to the wider public and thereby helping to bridge the perception gap.