A Review of Ecolinguistics and Environment in Education: Language, Culture and Textual Analysis for English Language Teachers

Melanie van den Hoven, PhD, ICIS co-chair elect, Chamonix, France / Abu Dhabi, UAE

By Emile Bellewes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic (Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics
Publication Year: 2024

Other details: 264 pages; ISBN 978-1-3502-2934-1 (hardback): $117.00; Paperback (US price): ~$35.95; ISBN 978-1-3502-2936-5; E-book (US price): ~$93.60

In June 2025, the Intercultural Communication Interest section hosted a webinar about Greening Language Classrooms, highlighting a growing interest in eco-critical awareness in English language teaching. The presenter, Dr. Jepri Ali Saiful (Muhammadiyah University of Surabaya, Indonesia) demonstrated how classroom activities that help students feel closer to nature can foster not only empathy for all living things and also intercultural awareness of diverse environmental perspectives. This emphasis on the interrelationship between environmental responsibility and intercultural awareness framed my search for further resources in ecolinguistics and English language education.

Ecolinguistics and Environment in Education: Language, Culture and Textual Analysis, published in 2024 is one such resource. The author, Emile Bellewes (lecturer in the Culture and Society Department at Sweden’s Linköping University) offers a 264-page text divided into two sections and a total of nine chapters. Each part differently addresses teaching about the perils of current orientations to the natural world. The Anthropocene, while usually framed as a geological concept pertaining to the current dominant role of humankind on planet-wide impacts, is presented here as a discursive construct shaped through language and ideology. Part 1 situates ecolinguistics as a pedagogical response to anthropogenic worldviews, using critical discourse analysis (CDA) to show how language reproduces harmful assumptions, including deeply rooted beliefs that the humans hold dominance over the non-human world. This first part also promotes that other ways of thinking about the living world, such as valuing the quality of all life, can bring about better responses to the ecological problems which face us all. Part 2, in contrast, draws on critical pedagogy to drive insights on how to teach students to be “ecological agents” (p. 118). This part provides new concepts and presents 14 activities which can drive ethically responsible practices for the good of all.

The book’s focus is mainly on word choices and sentence level constructions with less explicit attention to text types. It features poetry and information reports as examples but without explicit attention to genre analysis. From an academic perspective, the book’s theoretical contributions become evident around page 165. Key takeaways are exposure to several positive initiatives and newly coined terms, such as rewilding, positive discourse analysis, environmental commons, ethics of care and Earth democracies. These concepts are not merely named but positioned within broader ethical debates about human agency and environmental education. Some theoretical precedents explore include not only Paolo Freire (critical pedagogy) and Michael Halliday (CDA) but also Donna Haraway and other ecofeminist thinkers, Foucault (power and discourse), Duranti Allessandro (linguistic anthropology) and Rod Ellis (English language teaching). It also introduces new ecolinguistics scholars (e.g., Barad, Stibbe, and Martin) to the discussion.

The book first appeared on my radar as a contender for the British Association of Applied Linguistics 2025 Book Prize but fell short of gaining acclaim. Its contribution lies in the field of Applied Linguistics for drawing attention to problems to the nature-culture dichotomy and for devising teaching approaches that contend with “ways of understanding, seeing and also representing the natural world in discourse [which] exist as culturally shared aspects of knowledge across communities” (p. 19). While the book acknowledges theoretical variability in environmental discourses, the book stops short of engaging explicitly with intercultural communication frameworks. As a result, questions arise as to how learners from diverse linguistic and geographical context may interpret ecological narratives differently. The intercultural aspects are underexplored. The primary aim is sensitizing teachers to the potential of using CDA for lessons about language use informing a biased worldview. Thus, this book best serves teacher educators specializing in language education, and namely English language education (but does not admit the focus on English only). This said, it is a welcome source of new ideas for the fields of English Applied Linguistics due in large part to the astute theoretical lenses brought to an ecolinguistics pedagogy.

Teachers of TESOL can gain insights into how critical language awareness can and should prompt students to reconceptualize cultural narratives clouding how we downplay human impact on the planetary crisis. Bellewes’ argument is convincing and theoretically relevant when planning course or lesson objectives. However, the first half of the book prioritizes laying out all the component parts, and its structural density may limit the book’s immediate appeal for classroom practitioners unfamiliar with discourse-analytic traditions. If, for instance, the text was peppered with flow charts to visualize the theoretical lineage of this view of ecolinguistics, and complemented by a final chapter which spelled out how ecolinguistics syllabi can be adapted for diverse English classrooms, then the text would be more accessible for teachers of TESOL.

In sum, the book is well-edited and offers practical suggestions which a well-intentioned teacher can re-imagine for students in schools and universities. I think it merits praise for reconceptualizing how climate change is enmeshed in other discourses. Unfortunately, it does not engage with the aims of intercultural communication in the way that our June webinar on Greening Language Classrooms did. Nevertheless, for those who enjoy the new directions posed when merging English applied linguistics, critical pedagogy with environmental studies, this is a worthy book to read.

Melanie van den Hoven, PhD, is an independent researcher based in Chamonix, France, and Abu Dhabi, UAE, and ICIS co-chair elect. She holds a PhD in Intercultural Education from Durham University and has taught and led cross-cultural communication initiatives across higher education and high-risk industry contexts in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Her research interests include intercultural communication, translanguaging, linguistic ethnography, and English-medium instruction (EMI).