LP+Annotation+1


 * Full citation? **

Lakoff, George. “Why It Matters How We Frame the Environment.” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 4, no. 1 (2010): 70–81. doi:10.1080/17524030903529749.


 * Where are the author/s located, what are their backgrounds and what kinds of expertise do they have? **

George Lakoff is a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. Much of his work revolves around analyzing how individuals use metaphors and generate/construct grammar to explain the society’s complexities. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966. Idealism mobilizes. Conservatives are more effective at communicating concisely to the public because they have had/spent more time than liberals in building up effective frames. “The conservative moral system includes a number of ideas that work against environmentalism and against dealing with global warming” (74). Humans often separate themselves from Nature, conceptualizing Nature as other.
 * List of at least three details or examples from the text that point to something important about culture, education and/or the challenge of environmental sustainability in the United States. **


 * What three quotes capture the critical import of the text? **

Words are defined relative to frames, and hearing a word can activate its frame*and the frames in its system*in the brain of a hearer. Words themselves are not frames. But under the right conditions, words can be chosen to activate desired frames. This is what effective communicators do. In order to communicate a complex fact or a complex truth, one must choose one’s words carefully to activate the right frames so that the truth can be understood. (73)

‘‘Hypocognition’’ is the lack of ideas we need. We are suffering from massive hypocognition in the case of the environment. The reason is that the environment is not just about the environment. It is intimately tied up with other issue areas: economics, energy, food, health, trade, and security. In these overlap areas, our citizens as well as our leaders, policymakers, and journalists simply lack frames that capture the reality of the situation. (76)

Here’s a deep truth that is also hard to discuss because there is no established frame for it in public discourse. The economic and ecological meltdowns have the same cause, namely, the unregulated free market with the idea that greed is good and that the natural world is a resource for short-term private enrichment. The result has been deadly: toxic assets and a toxic atmosphere. That is, the joint cause is short-term greed together with the fact that the global economy and ecology are both systems. Global causes are systemic, not local. Global risk is systemic, not local. The localization of causation and risk is what has brought about our twin disasters. (77)


 * What is the main argument of the text? **

The main argument of the text is that mobilizing individuals in favor of environmentalism requires an effective, coherent framing of environmentalism – “the natural world is being destroyed, and it is a moral imperative to preserve and reconstitute as much of it as possible as soon as possible” (80). The article argues that without the appropriate frames – including “semantic roles, relations between roles, and relations to other frames” – individuals are incapable of cognitively conceptualizing the scope of environmental issues (71).


 * Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported. **

Every word that individuals use or recognize is embedded within a cognitive frame. These frames have a direct connection to emotions, rendering certain words meaningful on an emotional level. Furthermore, ideologies can be seen to be embedded within frames, and since “the synapses in neural circuits are made stronger the more they are activated,” the more certain words and ideological vocabularies are repeated, the stronger the frames for those words and ideologies become. (72)

While many people lack the frames needed to understand environmental issues, even more alarming is that many people have in their brain circuitry the wrong frames for understanding these issues. In this sense, showing individuals relevant facts as a method for mobilizing – such as the EPA and environmental NGOs often do – can often be pointless. The slow and tedious process of building up frames and the neural circuitry required to understand environmental issues is essential.

There is a real challenge to building frames based on progressive moral systems – with values of “empathy, responsibility (personal and social), and the ethic of excellence (make the world better, starting with yourself)” – because the frames for a conservative moral system have a much better foundation. The goal then needs to be to determine ways to “activate the progressive frames on the environment (and other issues) and inhibit the conservative frames” (76). This requires a significant alteration of how environmental issues are messaged to the public, overtly calling a need for institutions and policies to facilitate better communicative practices.


 * What parts of the argument did you find most and least persuasive, and why? **

The most compelling part of Lakoff’s argument was his section on “hypocognition,” where individuals lack the frames needed to think about issues outside of the ways that their brains have been trained. Lakoff touches upon the significance yet inability of most individuals to zoom out and see the larger issues of environmentalism, mostly because they have not been exposed the language and ideologies that would suggest the significance of doing so. The lack of frames is both a persuasive argument as to why individuals engage differently with environmental issues, as well as a distinct point of intervention for environmental educators.

However, one of the challenges I have faced whenever I think about framing is how to address what the frame leaves out. A frame opens up certain lines of thought, wrapping it nicely in some encasing, but it also suggests that something exists outside the frame, and I think that it is important to be able to employ multiple frames when thinking about environmental issues – to employ multiple lenses and conceptual encasings, determining which one works best for approaching the issue. Such an endeavor is not only important for allowing the individual to select a proper lens, but also to allow him/her to empathize with where individuals employing different frames are coming from. While I do not believe that Lakoff would deny the significance of approaching issues with multiple frames, he does not specifically address this in his paper.


 * What kinds of corrective action are suggested by the text (either overt or implied)? **

At a broader level, the text suggests that environmentalists develop strategies to build new frames or neural capacities in order to allow individuals to engage with their concerns. More overtly, Lakoff suggests changes to environmental “messaging” that include development of better communication systems such as “framing research institutes,” with training, spokespeople, and media attention and development of cognitive policies in addition to material policies (80).


 * Explain how the argument and evidence in the text relates to our effort to conceptualize, design and deliver EcoEd? **

This article highlights the significance of cultivating in students the lenses that they need to engage with environmental issues in a morally progressive way. In order to overcome the issue of “hypocognition” and establish the ideological frames that address the broader issues, students need to constantly be exposed to languages and forms of messaging that stress the students’ integration with Nature, address social, economic, and political issues, and warn of risks to seemingly beneficial innovation. The design and strategies for delivering EcoEd curriculums need to take note of the high-level neural concerns that this text arose, including how established frames can be reified with the wrong message and how careful selection of words and ideologies, over time, can be used to activate new frames.


 * What additional information has this text compelled you to seek out? (Describe what you learned in a couple of sentences, providing at least two supporting references). **

After reading this paper, I was wondering where framing is currently being used in education. I was first drawn to this article put out by the Intel Corporation on Curriculum Framing Questions ( [] ). As it turns out, Intel puts out many curriculums that, through “larger picture” curriculum-framing questions, get at a lot of EcoEd literacy goals. They suggest a structure that asks students to think through essential questions (the big, enduring idea questions), unit questions (open-ended questions on topic), and content questions (facts derived from the curriculum). This trajectory of question asking is intended to lead students to an understanding of what big picture issues the topics at hand are embedded within – a method for instilling frames. I need to further look into the educational goals of Intel Corporation.