Arcadia Regained? Moving past the strife with nature in corporate discourse about climate change

The discourse of climate change is replete with language belonging to the semantic field of war, signaling a pervasive metaphorical framing of such discourse in terms of conflict. A recent publication issued by the United Nations Environmental Protection Agency, however, carries an invitation to “make peace with nature”, thus hinting at a desire to move past the conventional war frame to adopt one grounded in peace instead. War and peace are inextricably linked to each other, to the extent that they can be said to belong to the same dynamic metaphor, i.e. a construct that accounts for the way in which related linguistic metaphors shift in discourse as this progresses. The study investigates the function and strategic use of the war and peace metaphors 1) in the UNEP document; 2) in a small longitudinal corpus of corporate non-financial reporting; and 3) in selected examples of corporate self-legitimating discourse, with a view to assessing the evolution in the framing of climate change. Findings suggest that the war frame has dynamically evolved over the years, with recent evidence suggesting a progressive overcoming of the ‘active fighting’ stage and the emergence of a post-war peace between nature and mankind depicted in terms of a restoration of the status quo ante which is simultaneously forward and backward-looking.