Greening Gray Beirut: A Cognitive Eco-linguistic Approach to Digital Discourse تخضير بيروت الرمادية : تحليل لغوي بيئى معرفى للخطاب الإليكترونى

Abstract

Interest in green discourse affects the ideas and attitudes of people who are involved in awareness campaigns of ecological threat. Green discourse has a positive environmental focus as it increases people‖s realization to help climate action. Wit (2021, p. 3) identifies the discourses promoted in case studies on climate adaptation and mitigation shared on the Urban Sustainability Exchange (USE) platform, and how these relate to ideational power. As the potential of cities to solve environmental challenges has increased, there is a need to investigate the discourses which shape how urban responses to climate change are being perceived. This paper is concerned with green digital beneficial discourse in the ecological context, i.e. "Greening Gray Beirut" as one of the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) talks addressed by Dima Boulad in 2015. Dima is the founder of Beirut Green Project, a group with a mission of reconnecting Beirut‖s citizens and visitors to the city‖s green space. This talk was given at TEDx event using the TED conference format, but independently organized by a local community. The method of analysis adopted in this paper is an ecocritical perspective approach, based on Arran Stibbe‖s (2015) eco-linguistics framework. According to Stibbe, eco-linguistics analyzes language with a view to revealing the stories we live by, "the mental models that influence behavior and lie at the heart of ecological challenges" (2015, p. 2). The paper is a descriptive qualitative analysis, investigating the techniques of Stibbe‖s eco-linguistics methodology and their role in revealing the dominant ecological ideologies inherent in Dima‖s talk. The results reveal that the talk mostly tends to be beneficial and positive to enhance Beirut citizens awareness of the green spaces in their city.