Nov 20 2007
Rockridge Nation: How Can We Make ‘Green’ an Identity?
Someone who’s been doing environmental work in the non-profit sector recently suggested I look at George Lakoff’s book Thinking Points–A Progressive’s Handbook–Communicating Our American Values and Vision. What a gift that recommendation was.
Lakoff is a professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Berkeley (see his not-too-bad Wikipedia write-up), and back in the late 70s when I was getting an MA in linguistics, he and former spouse Robin Lakoff were heroes to us for bringing meaning and social context into the dominant linguistic paradigm at the time, Chomsky’s transformational grammar. This makes it all the more meaningful, encountering his ideas again in such a different and far-removed context.
The non-profit think tank he founded has a website, Rockridge Nation, where I found this wonderful post: Ask Rockridge: How Can We Make ‘Green’ an Identity?. Lakoff’s ideas, and the discussion about how they could be applied to conservation topics, has forced me to re-think my entire approach to conservation writing — in what I think will be a very positive way. For more details, see my post at the end of the comments section for the above-referenced article. And I plan to post some examples written using his approach as well.
[…] I love the book but think the more we crank up the doom-and-gloom, the easier it is for conservative spinmeisters to peg people concerned about this issue as just a bunch of Chicken Littles. There was a great article about this kind of negative stereotyping on Rockridge Nation a while back, which I discussed in an earlier post. […]