The Popularization of Environmental Rights in TED Talks

Knowledge about the discursive strategies employed in environmental communication when addressing social practices is fundamental in order to understand how the public’s active engagement and behavioral change can be brought about, encouraged or discouraged through environmental discourse. This paper purports to investigate the representation and popularization of environmental rights in media texts, with particular focus on TED talks. More specifically, the analysis aims to explore which and how communicative meanings are continuously constructed around environmental issues. The popularization strategies present in a collection of TED talks are investigated, and processes of accommodation and simplification are analyzed with the aim to point out any discrepancies between the nature of rights in legal texts, and their textual realization in non-legal examples. The analysis traces the malleability of terminology related to environmental rights and shows how the selective usage of qualifying words like “sustainability” and “solidarity” can contribute to the fungibility of the concept of “environmental right” itself. The paper also emphasizes the broad social importance assumed by the mismatch between the need for clear legal definitions and the leverage of vague terminology to favor specific policies.