Environmental Crisis and Pandemic Emergencies: News Stories of Erasures and Awareness

The Chapter will analyse and discuss the presence of stories about the key issue of our times, namely the environmental changes that humans continue to cause, at times when news at global level are flooded with stories of the covid-19 pandemic. The questions that this study addresses are: how are environmental issues dealt with in Spring 2020 when the covid-19 is dominating headlines and news channels? More specifically, how are environmental issues re-framed within the dominant theme of the global pandemic? The theoretical frameworks at the basis of this study are ecolinguistics (Steffensen and Fill, 2013; Stibbe, 2014, 2015; Stibbe Fill and Penz, 2017) and partnership studies, in particular the latest development of Riane Eisler’s work (Eisler, Eisler and Fry, 2019). The study will analyse data from mainstream news outlets in English and discuss the way in which relations of opposition or causality are established, emphasised or erased between environmental issues (pollution in particular) and the spread of covid-19.