*as of Feb 2001
CONTENTS:
NB: New additions or inclusions are at the
beginning of each section; new sections are
marked +.
Introduction
Earth/Ecosphere
Human Society/Economy
Bad Things Coming
Solutions To Our Sustainability Problems
Dealing with the Culprits
Metaphors for fostering Sustainability via
Grass Roots Democracy+
Some Ways Hidden Metaphors Appear
This handy reference list of metaphors does
not pretend to be comprehensive, although we
periodically add to it. Most important, it is
definitely not intended to stop you from
thinking up new ones. The mainstream examples
(marked with *) are mixed in with the
progressive ones deliberately, in the hope
that this juxtaposition will also help
stimulate your own creativity in coming up
with new and even more effective versions. If
important ones, mainstream or progressive,
have been left out please let us know.
If you come up with new language you are
willing to share with the Project's
progressive audience, please send it to
<metaphorproject@earthlink.net>.
When
considering whether or not to use a newly
coined metaphor, you might also like to look
at the section on Criteria
for Tweaks and
Metaphors (Workshops pages).
The symbol # used to mark some metaphors
below means a brief explanation or discussion
follows.
Nature is a safety net. (Thanks to Carolyn
Brown.)
Nature (or reality) is a holographic web.
(Thanks to Sandra Lewis, who brought this
metaphor from Stephen Mitchell's description
of Indra's net to my attention.)
The circle of life-Julia Butterfly Hill
Spaceship Earth (Bucky Fuller)
Lifeboat Earth (Peter Warshall, WHOLE EARTH,
Fall, 2000)
---------------------------------------------
Nature is a web.
*Earth is a global economy.
*Earth is a market or marketplace.
Earth is alive: GAIA: Gaia as mother, Gaia as
self-regulatingorganism, or as one which does
not particularly care about us.
Earth can die.
Earth is our Mother: we must take care of her
(problem: misogyny)
Earth is our home (picture with word in many
languages around edge or house in need of
systems maintenance {vs. earth is the global
economy}
Earth is our sanctuary (from the dangers of
our high tech future--Bill Joy)
Earth is an interactive, interdependent self-
organizing eco-community (Margaret Wheatley)
Earth is our body (this one is implicit in
our fear of contaminated food, water, soil,
air-what I call the "gut effect" and the
basis for our growing environmental health
movement.)
Earth needs to be healthy, safe, clean (based
on the one above); we need a healthy planet
plan; we need to "safeguard" it.
Earth's ecosystem is a web of life (here the
metaphor works best if grounded on the
Internet "web" image)
Earth's ecosystem is our family, our
relations, our kin.
*The economy can/must grow (implies it is
like a plant; see discussion of pre-
capitalist cornucopia metaphor still alive
below.)
*Economic growth fosters equity.
*Economic activity is a team competition.
*Economic activity is a form of war.
The economy is nature.
A sustainable economy observes nature's
rules.
See also revised and expanded entry on the
cornucopia metaphor at the end of this
section.
---------------------------------------------
The human species is our family, our kin.
(*For different kinds of families, see
Lakoff, MORAL POLITICS)
Humans are citizens, not just consumers
*Human beings are consumers.
*Human society is a market, or marketplace.
*Humans are magicians, supermen,
technological beings, tool
makers
*The economy is a manmade object; is magic;
is technologically
constructed, is supernature
*The global economy is earth, is the human
community.
*#The economy is a cornucopia.
(For a fine example of a critical deployment
of the fundamental cornucopia metaphor, see
Richard Heinberg, MUSELETTER,#103, August
2000.)
#(Reaching back even before the relatively
recent rise of capitalism with its profit-
driven mandate for constant economic growth,
western human beings have long operated by
the implicit syllogism that nature is an
endless cornucopia, the economy is nature,
and therefore, the economy is an endless
cornucopia. Even now much day-to-day human
experience with nature via plants or animals
fosters an implicit sense of nature as an
endlessly bountiful mother.
However, if the economy is like nature, then
like nature it can die, be poisoned, used up,
abused etc. and the cornucopia can dry up.
Best current image: the now apparently dead
planet, Mars, on which it is difficult to
imagine any kind of economy, without Sagan's
idea of "terraforming," ridiculed in the
recent film RED PLANET.
For mainstream metaphors about economic
disaster and progressive ones about the bad
effects of economic growth, see the next section.
(Stimulus to clarify and expand this item
thanks to Carolyn Brown.)
*Economic growth can slow or stop.
Economic growth destroys equity.
Excessive consumption can make you sick (see
the film AFFLUENZA).
The casino economy can turn into a flea
market economy - Richard Heinberg
---------------------------------------------
*The market can crash.
Progressive metaphors for economic growth's
environmental effects
We will terminally exceed Earth's carrying
capacity.(Research shows we are already beyond it
now.)
---------------------------------------------
We will reach overshoot.
We will hit the wall.
We will pass critical thresholds.
*We will experience systems breakdown. (This
one is currently applied to computers and
human bodies, but not yet commonly to our
ecosphere or local ecosystems.)
We will experience the Nemesis Effect.
(chaotic feedback loops creating
unpredictable systems failures locally or
globally)
SOLUTIONS TO OUR SUSTAINABILITY PROBLEMS
We need to follow the ecosphere's (nature's)
rules.
*We need to be better stewards of God's
creation.
We need to pay attention to our growing
"ecological deficit."
We need to accept "limits."
We need to stop economic growth.
------------------------------------------
We need a better compass. (The Natural Step)
We need a sextant. (Marilyn Waring in new
edition of COUNTING FOR NOTHING.)
We need to do better accounting or auditing,
or measuring of our "ecological footprint."
(see Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, OUR
ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT.)
We need to exercise "ecological restraint."
(Edward Goldsmith, THE ECOLOGIST)
We need to use the "precautionary principle."
(Carolyn Raffensberger)
We need to practice "foresight planning."
We need to do no harm. (Hippocrates)
We need to practice the Gold and Green Rule.
(You take a crack at rewriting the Golden
Rule too and send it along!)
We need to foster biomimicry.
We need to be "bioneers."
We need to practice "natural capitalism."
(see Paul Hawken and the Lovinses' book of
that name.)
We need to practice "industrial ecology."
(William McDonough)
We need to foster "eco-efficiency."
Corporations are cancers on the Earth or
other harmful diseases or forms of life.
(Expansion of this item thanks to many
helpful readers)
Corporations are senseless out of control
machines, like as in the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
(Thanks in part to Mary Wildfire.)
---------------------------------------------
*Corporations are people.
*Corporations are organisms.
*Corporations are family, teams, champions,
communities, competitors etc.
Corporations are not people and should be
deprived of people's rights as individuals
under the law, by canceling their charters or
other means. (Program on
Corporations, Law, and Democracy [POCLAD])
Corporations are citizens and should be held
accountable for behaving in a socially
responsible way.
Corporations are citizens who should be held
responsible to the full extent of the law:
they can be liable, found to be lacking in
due diligence, found to be exercising criminal
negligence, or even actual intent to harm
(manslaughter?), they can be found to be
illegally experimenting on human beings and
the basis of human life, the ecosphere.
*Corporations are crooks, and tyrants.
*People are consumers.
*People are selfish, socially irresponsible,
self-involved, short term thinking, lazy
consumers, who will not accept limits.
*People are pawns of the corporations.
*Corporations are our parents-they provide us
with food, clothes, and shelter, plus a lot
of other stuff (this one is implicit).
Corporations are bad parents-they threaten
our health, our jobs, our environmental
safety, our families and our morality.
*Corporations will save us (by changing and
improving, innovating, inventing new safer
stuff, going straight-also implicit)
*Government will save us, by making the
corporations go straight.
Angry consumers will save us, by scaring
corporations into going straight.
Angry citizens/voters will save us, by
creating government which can correct and
control corporations. (This one has little
credibility still, I fear, given corporate power over
politics right now.)
METAPHORS FOR FOSTERING GRASS
ROOTS DEMOCRACY
AND THUS SUSTAINABILITY
We need "wisdom councils." (See section on
this topic, www.co-intelligence.org/P-wisdomcouncil.html
and the new one, www.democracyinnovations.org)
We need citizen's technology councils. (see
www.co-intelligence.org/P-DanishTechPanels.html)
We need to live simply (includes buying
locally, thereby "starving the corporate
cancers." (David Korten)
SOME WAYS HIDDEN METAPHORS APPEAR
Metaphors can appear overtly in sentence
structure, or be implied in the ways that
statements are phrased (for example the verb
"save,") or they can be deeply buried in the
premises of a statement and nowhere
explicitly stated. They can also be signaled
by the use of certain adverbs or prepositions
as in the following examples: in regard to
climate change, if you say "Is it getting hot
in here?" you have suggested that Earth is a
room; in regard to the news, if you say "What's
up the with Earth?," you are suggesting that the
news is good, as Lakoff and Johnson have shown in
METAPHORS WE LIVE BY that "up" is usually associated
in
the U.S. with good stuff. If you say "What's
going on with the Earth?" it could be
something bad, as "going on" is more
ambiguous than "up.
collected by Susan C. Strong, Founder
The Metaphor Project
www.metaphorproject.org
tel. 925-254-7198, fax 925-254-3304
Post Office Box 892, Orinda, CA 94563
e-mail:metaphorproject@earthlink.net
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