Nature Articulations in Norwegian Advertising Discourse: A Depoliticized Discourse of Climate Change

Abstract

This article deals with how nature is articulated in public discourse, and more specifically how humans' relationship to nature is constructed via such articulations. Based on critical cultural analyses of ads presented in a Norwegian context, the article claims articulations of nature serve to a depoliticization of nature, which silence social differences and reduce environmental politics to individual moral action. Several rhetorical patterns of particular relevance to the articulation of nature are discussed, pointing out how disparate, sometimes conflicting, understandings of nature are rhetorically configured and aligned in ways that benefit a global market economy. There is a discursive distancing of nature and everyday life, even as nature remains valorized and very much central to national identity. This constrains citizens' political engagement and undermines understandings of how to govern nature.

Learning Processes and Agency in the Decarbonization Context: A Systematic Review through a Cultural Psychology Point of View

“…Beverige and Nauman [90] define the dynamics between depoliticization and politicization as "the movements of issues between an arena of fate and necessity (the non-political), where nothing can be done (depoliticization), to one of deliberation and contingency (the political), where action and change are possible (politicization)" (p. 278). A growing corpus of literature operationalizes depoliticization from a psychosocial view [91], in an environmental context [90,[92][93][94], and in the learning process [95,96]. In a similar scope but from a different theoretical framework, Smerecnik and Renegar [97] provide one example of the functional use of agency by a specific rhetorical marketing strategy in an environmental context.…”

“…The way in which low-carbon behavior changes are designed primarily reflects these ends rather than the issues of emancipation or power relations. This depoliticized sustainability narrative of organizational culture determines a capitalistic agency that leads toward a commodified subjectivity and undermines the real effectiveness of the decarbonization aim [93,97]. Bruine De Bruin et al [77] offer another example of depoliticization in the learning process regarding the concealment of ideological underpinnings or the political and social implications of a particular low-carbon innovative technology (in this case, the carbon capture and storage technology) under the rhetoric of the neutrality of technology.…”