Mobility Justice: An Ecolinguistic Perspective

Abstract

The climate crisis, migration and urbanization may appear as three separate crises, but under Sheller’s paradigm of Mobility Justice, they become part of a coherent whole that should be tackled as a single, complex and interconnected predicament. This paper observes rhetorical strategies employed in texts about the climate crisis, about cycling advocacy and about the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory, which developed in Oxford, UK, in 2023. The metaphors, deictic pronouns and identity categories used are the main discourse features analysed through a qualitative approach, showing how mobility-related issues are often discussed through spatial metaphors, while deictic pronouns play a central role in the creation of identities. The findings are employed to contribute to the beneficial reframing of mobility-related discourses, whether global or local, and to react to climate inaction. The overall aim of this approach is to reveal the links between discourses about the climate crisis on a global scale and those on a local, urban scale concerning urban mobility policies. The prism through which both global and local discourses are observed is that of space and access to mobility. The aim of this investigation is to identify new patterns of language that can help us finding “new stories to live by”.

1. Introduction

On 1 November 2021, Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, gave a speech at the official COP26 opening ceremony, i.e., the 26th Conference of Parties, an annual global meeting organized by the United Nations to discuss how to respond to the climate crisis. Mottley’s speech was particularly successful and popular: at the time of writing the YouTube video of her speech on the official UN Climate Change YouTube channel had 567,534 views and 12,213 likes, compared to David Attenborough’s 55,021 views and 1239 likes, Antonio Guterres’ 35,649 views and 559 likes, Vanessa Nakate’s 20,099 views and 555 likes, and Barack Obama’s 46,411 views and 857 likes. One year later, at COP27, an important result of the conference was the establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund, a result that developed out of the interest around the Bridgetown Initiative (UN.org 2023), a proposal led by Mottley and named after Barbados’ capital city. Masterson (2023) reports that the project has been compared to the 1948 Marshall Plan. It can be argued that the strength and effectiveness of Mottley’s rhetoric in 2021 were then reflected in the actual results obtained throughout the following year and up to COP28, when the Parties agreed to operationalize the Loss and Damage Fund, which is a funding mechanism to compensate developing nations who suffer most from climate-induced extreme weather-events.

This paper reveals the links between discourses about the climate crisis on a global scale and those on a local, urban scale concerning urban mobility policies. After observing what made Mottley’s (2021) speech so special from a discursive perspective, focusing in particular on her use of pronouns and metaphors, Mottley’s global viewpoint is then put in relation with environmental discourses concerning the advocacy of active mobility, i.e., walking and cycling. The prism through which both global and local discourses are observed here is that of space and access to mobility. The theme of space is at the centre of Mottley’s speech, both in her use of many spatial metaphors and in the actual arguments of her speech. The same is true about the discourses advocating for active mobility, as we shall see, or those opposing the promotion of such policies. This paper takes into account both texts that advocate for active travel and texts that refute the idea that mobility habits need to be changed. Two speeches given by Frans Timmermans are analysed as examples of cycling advocacy. The oppositional discourses arguing against changes in our everyday mobility habits are exemplified here by the reactions to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and the proposal of traffic filters in Oxford (UK) (i.e., strategies to reduce the number of cars allowed to enter the inner city). We analyse how in both cases the values of space and mobility are pivotal in the construction of arguments. The aim of this investigation, in line with Stibbe’s (2021) approach, is to identify new patterns of language that can help us find “new stories to live by”. The discourse features deemed relevant for beneficial reframing are thus selected and observed, while other discourse strategies in the texts under scrutiny are not taken into account. As pointed out by te Brömmelstroet (2024, p. 1), “the language we use to discuss road safety is not an objective mirror of reality. Instead, it profoundly shaped and shapes our contemporary mobility system, our streets and the ways we have to behave on them”.

The fact that most of our urban environments are highly dangerous for young and elderly citizens, and often difficult to navigate for those with physical impairments, imposes the need for these people to be transported by car by other members of the family, most often women, as they tend to be the main care-givers. The issue thus generates intersectional discrimination that entails gender-related issues. Women, non-white, and LGBTQ+ citizens may also feel threatened by the risk of being harassed, especially when travelling alone at night, one more reason that pushes people to choose cars over other means of transport, if they can afford them of course. We see how access to mobility generates several levels of direct and indirect discrimination, which may be intersectional, while the access to and excessive use of private car mobility generates social injustice (Sheller 2018) in terms of air pollution and the risks of being involved in car collisions while walking or cycling (see also Caimotto 2023a).

2. Literature Review

While, of course, the literature about discourse strategies in political discourse is vast (Chilton 2004; Angermuller et al. 2014; Fairclough 1992, to name but a few), to our knowledge at the time of writing, the discourse strategies of Barbadian PM Mottley have not been investigated from a linguistic perspective. Sultana’s (2022, p. 3) work observes climate coloniality, which reproduces forms of colonialism and imperialism in the tropics and subtropics (post-colonies), where climate-induced disasters are prevalent, and they are mainly generated by former European colonial empires through the processes of capitalism and international development. Sultana focuses on discourses from COP26 and highlights the connection between the words of Mottley—which open Sultana’s paper—and the roots of systemic climate injustice:

Imperialism continues through neoliberalism, racial capitalism, development interventions, education, training, and the media. Climate coloniality is expressed in various forms, such as through fossil fuel capitalism, neoliberal growth and development models, and hyperconsumptive and wasteful lifestyles, but also through structures, systems, and epistemologies built and held in place by powerful alliances globally. […] Climate coloniality seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through a toxic mix of global racisms, rapacious extractivism, colonial-capital dispossessions, climate debts, patriarchy, and imperialism.

(Sultana 2022, p. 10)

As for the study of the discourse strategies employed for active travel advocacy (i.e., walking and cycling), little has been published by linguists (Caimotto 2020, 2023b; Filardo Llamas and Pérez-Hernandéz 2023; Reisigl 2021a, 2021b), but a number of scholars who belong to other disciplines have investigated the role of discourse in mobility. A non-exhaustive list would include Aldred (2013), Cox and Van De Walle (2007), Fevyer and Aldred (2022), Furness (2010), Hickman and Hannigan (2023), Norton (2007), Ralph et al. (2019), te Brömmelstroet (2024), Verkade and te Brömmelstroet (2022), Walks (2015), and Wild et al. (2018). Their works highlight how narratives concerning road users, whether in the news or in institutional documents, tend to fuel conflict narratives that attribute power to drivers and weakness to other “vulnerable” road users. For example, Norton, a historian, recounts the history of the word “jaywalker”, showing how it originated from the automobile industry in order to instil the idea that people should stop occupying the road as they used to because cars need that space to be free in order to travel faster. Virtually all studies concerning the promotion of cycling also focus on the narratives that promote car travel, as the promotion of active mobility requires re-thinking and re-designing roads in order to make them less focused on cars.

To analyse the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory that stemmed from the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) and traffic-filtering proposal in Oxford (see Section 5.2.1), the work of Demata et al. (2022) has proved useful. As for the discourses from the conferences of parties and the language of the Paris Agreement, Morgan (2016) observes the language of the Agreement and states:

[I]f one considers the text as a product of negotiation regarding language, then the Paris Agreement begins to appear, rather than merely neutral, purposefully anodyne, if not to say deliberately soporific, despite the claim to urgency. There is a refusal to use a language of actual responsibilities.

Consider then how ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances’ is being used. ‘Responsibilities’, ‘capabilities’, and ‘circumstances’ have no intrinsic meaning. They are given substance in terms of what Parties are prepared to sacrifice, change, or commit to in order to avoid collective adverse consequences. By evading definitive context for the terms, the Agreement evades stating what the real baseline commitments or interests that modify the terms really are.

(Morgan 2016, p. 947)

As we shall see while analysing Mottley’s speech, the themes of responsibility and commitment of the Parties are pivotal. In their analysis of discourses of “othering”, in its Foucauldian sense, Andreucci and Zografos (2022, p. 102512) highlight how the discourse of vulnerability reinforces the orientalist images it draws upon, as the other is depicted as in danger and, at the same time, potentially dangerous. Reactivating a logic of the colonial “white man’s burden”, such discourses reveal a Eurocentric positive self-presentation that sees the West as scientific, rational and altruistic. On the local scale, a similar discursive pattern can be observed, as the notion of “vulnerable road users” follows a similar logic. In fact, from a critical discourse analysis perspective, the observation of mobility-related discourses also reveals discourse strategies that follow the same discourse patterns of racist discourse (van Dijk 1992; Caimotto 2020). At the same time, the actual predicaments that people of colour face in Western urban areas overlap racist discrimination, as bike lanes are sometimes refused by policy makers because they are perceived as used only by illegal immigrants (Wild et al. 2018, p. 510), while people of colour are more likely to suffer from illnesses induced by air pollution and less likely to contribute to the pollution itself, as they are less likely to own a car due to financial difficulties (Friends of the Earth 2022).

From a linguistic perspective, the approach that proves most helpful is that of Ecolinguistics (Stibbe 2021; Penz and Fill 2022), and more specifically, those of Ecological Discourse Analysis (Cheng 2022) and Positive Discourse Analysis (Martin 2004). Mautner’s (2010) work on marketisation is also relevant to understand the underlying dynamics that link it to “neoliberal automentality” (Walks 2015). One of the founding texts of Ecolinguistics is M.A.K. Halliday’s ([1990] 2001) important article ‘New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics’, which was based on his keynote address given at the 1990 AILA conference in Thessaloniki, Greece. In that article, Halliday reveals two important points that are relevant for discourses on both sides of the spectrum analysed here. Both are about forms of injustice, first as classism, then as speciesism:

We have a Scientific Commission on Language and Sex to deal with the situation (and note in this connection that it is assumed that by working on the language you can change social reality, which makes sense only if you accept that reality is construed in language). But why have we no Scientific Commission on Language and Class? […] It is not difficult to see why, although the explanation may sound very obvious. It is acceptable to show up sexism—as it is to show up racism—because to eliminate sexual and racial bias would pose no threat to the existing social order: capitalist society could thrive perfectly well without sex discrimination and without race discrimination. But it is not acceptable to show up classism, especially by objective linguistic analysis […]; because capitalist society could not exist without discrimination between classes. Such work could, ultimately, threaten the existing order of society.

(Halliday [1990] 2001, p. 185)

Classism, of course, is tightly related with urban mobility; owning an expensive car, often mainly because it is a status symbol, is part of the problem. Still, when we discuss cycling as a form of transport, class-related analysis reveals a complex number of facets. The second aspect underlined by Halliday is about the balance of power, linking classism and other forms of discrimination between humans to speciesism:

‘the hegemony arrogated by the human species is inseparable from the hegemony usurped by one human group over another, and that neither will come to an end as long as the other still prevails.’

(Halliday [1990] 2001, pp. 198–99)

Both points made by Halliday are related both to the injustice suffered by developing countries due to climate change and to the imbalance of power concerning citizens that move around in urban areas. Historically, bicycles started out as hobbies for upper classes (one of the English names for the first bicycles without pedals invented by von Drais in 1817 was “hobby horse”). Towards the end of the 19th century, they were one of the first mass-produced products that benefited from the first marketing strategies fuelling consumeristic behaviours (Smethurst 2015). At the same time, as bicycles were cheaper than any previous means of transport different from walking, they allowed groups that used to be much less mobile, to travel much further. This is why the bicycle played an important role in the promotion of feminism and socialism (Horton 2009).

3. Theoretical Framework

The paradigm employed to investigate the discourse strategies under scrutiny—metaphor and deixis—is Sheller’s ‘Mobility Justice’ (Sheller 2018). Sheller (2018, p. 20) explains that

Freedom of mobility may be considered a universal human right, yet in practice it exists in relation to class, race, sexuality, gender, and ability exclusions from public space, from national citizenship, from access to resources, and from the means of mobility at all scales.

Sheller also underlines the importance, when trying to understand mobility justice issues, of including the history of colonialism and its effects, envisaging a multi-scale approach that starts “with bodies, then transportation systems, city-scale systems and urban infrastructures, border regimes and transnational mobilities of migration and tourism and finally planetary mobilities and geoecologies” (Sheller 2018, p. 44). This explains why the present research is carried out by bringing together two extremes of a continuum: discourses of active mobility, i.e., local bodies moving around every day in relatively small urban environments, and discourses of climate justice, i.e., bodies menaced by local risks generated by actions taking place in distant places across the globe and bodies forced to migrate elsewhere, when possible, or to suffer the effects of a crisis for which they are least responsible.

Stibbe (2021, p. 11) points out that all critical discourse analysts always analyse language using their ethical framework; however such frameworks are not always made explicit. The ecosophy outlined in Caimotto (2020, p. 4) is based on Stibbe’s and focuses specifically on discourses about cycling promotion. The ethical framework employed for this paper employs Stibbe’s and Caimotto’s ecosophy. Its main points focus on well-being, as an increase in the number of people cycling generates the positive effect of reducing the number of deaths due to vehicle collisions, sedentariness and pollution, while of course also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The action of moving around by bicycle tends to generate higher levels of environmental awareness. Moreover, cycling is much more affordable than driving, both in terms of economic affordability and in terms of the physical ability required. This enhances social justice if properly promoted. Moving on foot is also central as a form of active mobility and, in general, in order to prove effective as a mode of transport, it requires the presence of a safe and reliable public transport service. While the improvement of public transport requires a number of complex changes of various kinds, the promotion of cycling is relatively cheap and simple, but the barriers preventing change are mainly cultural, and the costs are mainly political. This is why cycling advocacy is interesting to investigate from an ecolinguistic, discursive perspective.

Stibbe’s ecosophy (Stibbe 2021, pp. 14–15) is more general and focuses on the value of living. Stibbe explains that “The ‘valuing’ takes place in different ways: consciously, instinctively, and almost (but not quite) mechanically, from a pedestrian watching carefully for cars, to a sparrow taking flight at the sound of a fox, or a snow buttercup following the arc of the sun to soak up life-giving rays”. He underlines that “living” means more than being alive and that high well-being for current and future generations should be pursued. Care, empathy and gratitude should drive our choices, and our levels of consumption should respect the limits of the ecological systems that support life, now and in the future. The final points refer to social justice and deep adaptation: “It is necessary to put in place measures to preserve life and well-being as far as possible as current forms of society collapse or undergo radical change”. (Stibbe 2021, p. 15)

In the present day, cycling as a means of transport is perceived at the same time as inferior, in line with the aspiration, fuelled by the car industry, which made people desire a car instead of travelling by bicycle during the years of the economic boom. Cycling is associated with food delivery, the gig economy and immigrants, with frequent overlaps with racist discourses (Wild et al. 2018, p. 510). In the same cities and by the same people, cycling is portrayed as a choice for elites, for people with “creative” jobs who can take their time, while cycle lanes are often associated with phenomena of gentrification, i.e., the “displacement of poor people from their long-time neighborhoods as wealthier (often white) newcomers move in to re-made urban places” (Sheller 2015, p. 84). As Furness (2010, p. 135) observes, “one of the cheapest forms of transportation on the planet [the bicycle] is construed as elitist, whereas one of the most expensive and resource-intensive technologies [the car] is considered populist”.

As both Mottley’s speech and the active mobility texts under scrutiny employ metaphors as an important part of their rhetorical strategies, the works of Charteris-Black (2014); Hart (2010, 2011); Musolff (2017) and that of Lakoff (2010) are employed to identify metaphors and discuss their rhetorical effects, while Stibbe’s (2021) stories of framing and metaphors are useful to question the “metaphors we live by” in order to promote new metaphors that encourage beneficial behaviour that protects the ecosystem and supports life. Spatial metaphors are particularly relevant, as the role played by space in this context is crucial for various reasons. Spatial metaphors tend to be employed to discuss time, as time is an abstract concept we tend to talk about by employing a large number of sleeping metaphors, i.e., metaphors that show a low degree of activation, whose metaphoricity is transparent and potentially available to speakers/listeners but is not activated by empirical indications (Müller 2008). For example, we talk about ‘near’ and ‘distant’ future, we envisage improvement through time in terms of ‘progress’, we assume that moving forward is good and staying still (stagnating) or moving backwards is bad. These metaphors are sometimes employed to support questionable policies by stating “you can’t stop progress”, a statement which is literally true, as progressing is about moving forward, but also ideological, as the specific policy being discussed is supported through a metaphorical argument rather than an actual one.

In Mottley, Timmermans and in the climate lockdown conspiracy analysed in Section 5.2.1, space is also a prominent topic because the whole debate is about how we humans deal with the commons and public space. Observing spatial metaphors and deictic pronouns in texts that deal specifically with the sharing of space can reveal important discourse features that can be employed to enhance discourses about the climate crisis. As both Mottley and Timmermans, with their speeches, aim to fight climate inaction by addressing actual required changes on different scales, the work of Bercht (2020) is employed to observe how group identity plays an important role in the acceptance or rejection of the new stories we need to live by, to rephrase Stibbe (2021).

4. Research Methodology

The texts under scrutiny are observed with a qualitative approach. The goal of this research is to highlight discursive strategies in texts dealing with topics that have hardly been observed from a linguistic perspective, while pointing out aspects of continuity linking discourses about climate and mobility justice on a global scale to discourses about climate and mobility justice that focus on local policies and urban spaces. For these reasons, a qualitative approach appears more useful than a quantitative one. The speech by Mottley was given on a specific and pivotal occasion. In general, the texts about mobility policies could also benefit from a quantitative analysis to show the cumulative effect they can have in the creation of destructive discourses—when they oppose the promotion of active travel—or the beneficial discourses that can develop from texts that promote change in mobility choices. Nevertheless, the aim of this paper is to show the thread linking topics of global and local mobility justice; hence, the method employed for discourses of active mobility is qualitative.

More specifically, this investigation aims to retrieve beneficial discourse strategies to promote new stories to live by (Stibbe 2021) and, given the centrality of space in the debates concerned, the analysis focuses on spatial metaphors and deictic pronouns. This analysis does not provide a complete investigation of the texts under scrutiny, nor does it aim to retrieve every discourse feature that may be encountered. It rather focuses on specific discourse patterns—metaphors and deixis—that may provide useful information and reflections for policy makers who need to enhance their rhetorical strategies in order to promote the necessary changes in society to address the climate crisis and the related predicament of access to mobility.

5. Analysis

5.1. Mia Mottley’s Speech at COP26

In her speech, Mottley employs a significant number of complex metaphors, and many of these are spatial. Space and deixis also played an important role in her use of personal pronouns, as we can observe the shifting referents for “we” and “they”. Her rhetoric is beneficial from the perspective of the ecosophy (Stibbe 2021), as she creates a new narrative that smoothens conflict while keeping responsibility central. A dominant spatial metaphor is that of “frontline”. Mottley uses it repeatedly in her speech:

Climate finance to frontline small island developing states declined by 25% in 2019.

So I ask to you: what must we say to our people living on the frontline in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Latin America, in the Pacific, when both ambition and, regrettably, some of the needed faces at Glasgow are not present?

In the words of that Caribbean icon Eddy Grant: “Will they mourn us on the frontline?”

“Frontline” is a metaphor that refers to a position in a battle and hence is, of course, a conflict metaphor as well as a spatial one. The position at the frontline is a position of exposure to danger, and the quotation from Grant’s song carries the message that being on the frontline means being more likely to die, not even knowing whether “they” will mourn “us” for our sacrifice. Just like in a war battle, the choice of which soldiers will be on the frontline is made not by the soldiers themselves but by those in a position of power, which, in this case, correspond to the institutions in charge in the most powerful countries who are the ones most responsible for the climate crisis but not the ones first affected by its devastating effects.

“Frontline” is not the only spatial and war metaphor she employs; we also find the metaphor of “siege”, a situation in which an army is in a position of power and cuts off a town or castle from all communication and resources until they surrender. The army, in this case, would be the rich countries in the world keeping the other two-thirds in danger without letting them escape.

Can there be peace and prosperity if one third of the world, literally, prospers and the other two thirds of the world live under siege and face calamitous threats to our wellbeing?

If we observe and deconstruct these two metaphors, we can see how they evoke an image of immobility; the countries threatened by the climate crisis cannot break free of their situation because those in power hold them in a dangerous place. Analysing this through the lens of mobility justice (Sheller 2018) and taking into account classism in language (Halliday [1990] 2001), we easily see how the problems of migration, access to travel, visas and the required financial means that restrain the possibility of migrating for individuals correspond to the images evoked by Mottley’s metaphors. While she is talking about the climate crisis and its effects, she is also evoking images that reflect the position of weakness related to the possibilities of migrating to wealthier countries.

The following passage employs various metaphors, and some of them are complex:

Our world, my friends, stands at a fork in the road—one no less significant than when the United Nations was formed in 1945. But then, the majority of our countries here did not exist. We exist now. The difference is we want to exist 100 years from now. And if our existence is to mean anything, then we must act in the interest of all of our people who are dependent on us. And if we don’t, we will allow the path of greed and selfishness to sow the seeds of our common destruction. The leaders of today—not 2030; not 2050—must make this choice. It is in our hands. And our people and our planet need it more than ever. We could work with who is ready to go because the train is ready to leave. And those who are not yet ready, we need to continue to encircle and to remind them that their people—not our people—but their citizens need them to get on board as soon as possible.

We have here the metaphor of the fork in the road, usually employed to imply that one road is the right one and the other one is wrong. In an unusual turn, the path is then personified: one of the two paths, the negative one, is that of “greed and selfishness”, and it becomes an agent able to “sow the seeds of our common destruction”. We observe here a number of layers of complexity. First, we have a spatial metaphor of a road with a fork, implying movement along the road and the need to choose which path to follow; agency is attributed to an abstract “we” able to choose between good and bad. Agency from this “we” will be taken away if we make the bad choice, as agency is shifted to the path. Of course, paths do not sow seeds; it is actually humans who will generate the destruction of humanity by letting greed and selfishness guide their choices. But the shifting of agency is likely to generate the implicature that, once having taken that path, the destruction will be unstoppable and will feed itself. Moreover, the fact that elements of nature become agents and humans lose their agency is a powerful reframing of the dominant tendency in our languages of attributing agency only to humans (Halliday [1990] 2001). The metaphor of the seeds is unusual. As observed by Charteris-Black (2014, p. 200), plant metaphors are usually positive, as they tend to describe life, growth, flourishing. When they are employed as negative metaphors, as in this case, their aim is usually to strengthen the negativity they want to convey thanks to the contrast created between the usual, expected positivity and the actual negativity.

This is followed by a journey metaphor, which in a sense can be considered spatial as well: there is a train ready to leave. The metaphor of the train that is leaving is often employed to talk about an opportunity that should not be missed, because once the train is gone, it is not possible to catch it again. But Mottley is creative, and the effectiveness of her rhetoric also derives from the way in which she bends her metaphors and modifies the expected outcome, creating a story within the story. This train is ready to leave. Some people on the platform—i.e., nations—are ready to leave, and their (real) citizens need them to get on board—i.e., make the right choices—as soon as possible. But this train—here is the unexpected turn—is able to leave and to wait at the same time, and “we”—i.e., the leaders of the nations that are ready to take the right actions—need to continue to “encircle” (metaphor) and “remind” (real action) them—i.e., the leaders of the nations that are not ready yet—to start taking the right actions as soon as possible, because their citizens need them to.

Mottley uses this strategy throughout the whole speech: mixing metaphors and reality, using more than one metaphor together and shifting the usually expected meaning of some metaphors. There is another example earlier in the speech in which the complex metaphor of the Gordian knot, which requires some knowledge of the legend in order to be understood, is further enriched and complicated by attributing special powers to the sword cutting the knot:

What the world needs now, my friends, is that which is within the ambit of less than 200 persons who are willing and prepared to lead. Leaders must not fail those who elect them to lead. And I say to you there is a sword that can cut down this Gordian knot. And it has been wielded before. The central banks of the wealthiest countries engaged in $25 trillion of quantitative easing in the last 13 years. 25 trillion. Of that, $9 trillion was in the last 18 months—to fight the pandemic. Had we used that $25 trillion to purchase bonds to finance the energy transitions or the transition of how we eat or how we move ourselves in transport, we would now, today, be reaching that 1.5 °C limit that is so vital to us.

I say to you today in Glasgow, that an annual increase in the [Subsidy Dependence Indices] of $500 billion a year for twenty years put in a trust to finance the transition is the real gap, Secretary General, that we need to close. Not the $50 billion being proposed for adaptation. And if $500 billion sounds big to you, guess what? It is just 2% of the $25 trillion. This is the sword we need to wield.

The legend of Alexander the Great, who cut the knot with his sword instead of untying it, is not necessary knowledge in order to follow Mottley’s point; the important element is the complexity of the situation (the Gordian knot) and the simplicity of the solution (cut it with a sword instead of trying to untie it). In Mottley’s speech, the focus moves from the brightness of Alexander the Great to the power of the sword. In the real world, any sword can cut a knot, but in her narrative within the narrative, a special sword needs to be wielded, reminding of other stories and legends in which only magic swords can perform specific actions. This story creates expectations: who wielded this sword before? Where is it? At the end of the story, “we” need to wield the sword, but along the story, we understand that it was the central banks of the wealthiest countries and the target domain of the sword is the trillions in quantitative easing in the last 13 years, i.e., since the 2008 credit crunch crisis.

The implied reference is clear and linked to Lakoff’s argument about our hypocognition, i.e., the fact that we lack the frames we need in order to understand the climate crisis:

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. We have to think in global, systems terms and we don’t do so naturally. Here hypocognition is tragic. We lack the frames we need.

(Lakoff 2010, p. 77)

We tend to envisage the protection of the economy and the protection of the environment as in contrast with one another. And we tend to invert the priority within the hierarchy, as we think that saving the economic system is the main priority, which is why we value the performance of countries by observing their Gross Domestic Product (for a deeper explanation of systems and their hierarchy, see Meadows (2008, 2019)). Mottley does not address our hypocognition directly; if she did, her argument would be rejected, as it would not fit the dominant frame. Instead, she reframes the whole point, leaving untouched the huge power that central banks have, but redirecting that power towards the higher level of the hierarchy—the protection of the ecosystem—which requires more attention than the crises of the banking system itself. While she does that, she also inserts a rhetorical trick that may go unnoticed: her proposal is to invest USD 500 billion a year for 20 years, i.e., 10 trillion. She closes her point by highlighting that USD 500 billion is just 2% of USD 25 trillion. Still, USD 25 trillion was spent in 13 years, and some could argue that it would be fairer to compare USD 10 trillion to USD 25 trillion, rather than comparing USD 500 billion. Her argument would still be solid, but the rhetorical trick of mentioning “just 2%” is particularly effective.

Before we close the analysis of her speech, it is worth observing her use of pronouns and deixis (Chilton 2004, p. 58). “I” and “you” occur four times, respectively, “they” occurs three times, while the occurrences of “we” total 29. Even if our analysis is qualitative and not quantitative, this discrepancy points to a message that says ‘we are all in this together, we must act together’. At the same time, if we observe the occurrences of “we” more closely, we will notice that the referents vary from one pronoun to another. Sometimes “we” refers to people in the Caribbean (“We exist now”, “We do not want that dreaded death sentence”). Most of the time, its meaning oscillates between the leaders in the room (“When will we, as world leaders across the world, address the pressing issues”) and human being in general (“how we move ourselves in transport”). In a few cases, the distinction is clear, but most of the time, her appeal seems to address both leaders and the general public, raising doubts on the ethics and morals of the recipients (“How many more voices and how many more pictures of people must we see on these screens without being able to move? Or are we so blinded and hardened that we can no longer appreciate the cries of humanity?”).

Mottley is careful to avoid any explicit reference to specific countries; when she refers to the responsibilities, she does not attribute specific guilt explicitly. With a double metonymy, she criticizes the countries that did not attend COP26 by stating “both ambition and, regrettably, some of the needed faces at Glasgow are not present”. She thus creates some distance and lets the recipients decide whose faces are not present but would be needed. She then asks rhetorically whether “some leaders in this world believe that they can survive and thrive on their own?” and states “one third of the world prospers”. When she talks about the quantitative easing, she mentions “the wealthiest countries” and towards the end of her speech, after she uses the metaphor of countries not ready to board the train, she addresses G7 countries with the metaphor “code Red” and the G20 countries by repeating the metaphorical call “Earth to COP” employed in a video shown before her speech. The only countries named explicitly are listed when she talks about the victims of the “dreaded death sentence” of an average global temperature of 2° above pre-industrial levels: “the people of Antigua and Barbuda, for the people of the Maldives, for the people of Dominica and Fiji, for the people of Kenya and Mozambique, and yes, for the people of Samoa and Barbados”. The responsibility for the climate crisis is thus not attached to a few specific countries—an argument often employed by some policy makers to avoid changing the status quo ‘because it’s worthless unless country xy does something’—but rather distributed across all humanity, while at the same time underlining that some people, some countries and some leaders are more responsible for the damage and have more power to generate the necessary changes.

5.2. Discourses of Mobility Justice at the Urban Scale

This section analyses two different sources in order to present examples of discourse strategies employed both by people who aim to promote active mobility and those who are adverse to change and argue in order to protect the status quo. First, we observe some strategies, mainly destructive, in the discourses of the clash that developed in Oxford (UK) concerning the introduction of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and the proposal to filter the cars allowed to circulate, with a “15-minute city” project in mind, i.e., a city planned and organized so that all citizens are able to access anything they need with a 15 minute journey walking or cycling (Allam et al. 2022). The “15-minute city” has been a central notion in the campaigns and policies of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. From a linguistic perspective, it is worth pointing out that this discourse feature is the opposite of the above-mentioned tendency of talking of time through metaphors of space, as the 15-minute city conceives physical space in the city in terms of the time required to reach it. The destructive discourse strategies are observed in the placards and the interviews shown on BBC1 during the programme Panorama aired on 17 April 2023, titled “Road Wars: Neighbourhood Traffic Chaos”. Then we observe the—mainly beneficial—discourse strategies employed by Frans Timmermans, Vice-President of the European Commission, in two speeches. The first was given in June 2022 in Copenhagen at The Cycling Summit, and the second in March 2023 in Brussels at the Cycling Industries Europe Summit. This analysis is carried out under the assumption that the systems of mobility in urban areas in which cars are the dominant means that people use to move around must be questioned and modified in order to reduce the number of cars and the number of deaths due to collisions or related to pollution. By employing the ecosophies outlined in Section 3, this analysis aims to identify the beneficial, ambivalent and destructive discourse strategies (Stibbe 2021) in order to promote narratives and rhetoric that contribute to the promotion of active travel and, as a consequence, protect and promote life and well-being.

5.2.1. The Conspiracy of ‘Climate Lockdown’

The promotion of the “15-minute-city” in Oxford did not work as hoped. Stott (2023) explains:

A demonstration on 18 February organized by a group called ‘Not our Future’ attracted about 2000 demonstrators from across the country, although very few from Oxford itself. The participants were a ragbag of conspiracy theorists including antivaxxers, climate deniers, anti-globalists, anti-semites and the far right. LTN’s, bus gates, and especially 15 minute cities, characterized as ‘open prisons’ were particular targets, as was the concept of ‘Agenda 30’ which seems to be part of an alleged World Economic Forum conspiracy to institute a ‘climate lockdown’ of which LTNs and ’15-minute cities’ are the first iteration.

The relevant aspect for our analysis is the way in which the notion of freedom of movement fully coincides with the freedom of going anywhere by car. O’Sullivan and Zuidijk (2023) underline that the dystopian narrative deployed by the conspiracy theory does not make much sense in the medieval town of Oxford, but rather seems to be imported from a vision of mobility typical of the United States and cities built with automobility in mind. In his investigation on the political importance of automobility, Walks (2015, p. 205) observes how the values promoted by automobility are among the core ideals of liberalism; they include freedom, autonomy, individualism, self-reliance, self-responsibility and unfettered mobility. Walks describes this as “pro-car neoliberal automentality” and underlines how any perceived attack on the automobile is framed as an attack on personal and political freedom and the core values of a “free” society (2015, p. 205). This is also related to Stibbe’s identity story (Stibbe 2021, pp. 98–117) and the important role that car commercials play in the shaping of consumers’ identities, in order to create stories in people’s minds that will push them to prefer and purchase a specific car model.

Let us observe how some of the metaphors and statements from the protesters reveal exactly this framing. The metaphors that emerge from the BBC documentary (Rowlatt 2023) are a coffin (an actual coffin carried at a protest against measures in Waltham Forest) to state that the scheme would be “the death of the road”, as local shops would close down. Hence, according to the metaphor, traffic is life, lack of traffic is death—a metaphor that mirrors another common one that describes traffic as the blood bringing oxygen around the body (i.e., the city) and blocking the traffic can cause a coronary attack (see also Caimotto 2023b). A placard in those protests demanded to “get rid of this Berlin wall and iron curtain”, revealing the right-wing, neoliberal nature of these protests as observed by Walks.

The game “snakes and ladders” is another metaphor employed by an interviewee to describe the difficulties faced by workers who need to travel around with vans: the game is based on the impossibility of planning and controlling one’s journey, as only luck with the dice will allow the player to win. Evoking a game reinforces the frame “work vs. play”, working is serious, engine vehicles are employed by serious grown-ups who are working, while people in charge are not serious and use their citizens as pawns, and the people who do not need an engine to move around do not have a proper serious job. It is important to take this narrative into account when designing campaigns to promote active travel, as the foregrounding of playfulness and pleasantness of commuting by bike could play into this destructive narrative and reinforce it.

“Cash cows” is the metaphor employed by the spokesperson for Taxpayers Alliance: “while we are not against schemes to improve the air quality of our cities and to improve the life of pedestrians and cyclists, what we are against is schemes using cash cows […]”. Road users are reified into fixed identities, pedestrians and cyclists are framed as “others”, while “we” are “cash cows”, i.e., victims of power-holders who use their power against us. This narrative inevitably frames pedestrians and cyclists as an élite with access to privileged treatment.

Some of the messages on the placards visible in the BBC documentary include “15-minute city = open prison”; “15-minute city the end of free movement”; ‘“green” tyranny; “no more lockdowns or restrictions do not consent!”; “You are sovereign not parliament not councils not corporations”; “you are the carbon they want to reduce”; “take back democracy #together”; ‘“carbon”; lockdowns next?”; “our city our choice”; “governments are not your boss”; “global fascists want us terrified oppressed enslaved/World war III”; “you can stick your 15 minute city up your arse”; “15 minute cities is this the dystopia we want?”; “time to wake up”.

One of the placards states: “Freedom is not a privilege given by government Freedom is a right given to every human being on this planet”. Two specular passive sentences appear to define “freedom”; they oppose “privilege” to “right” and contest the role of the government without providing an alternative. The “right to freedom” appears to be a natural right, even if the agent of the passive verb in the second sentence is missing. This declaration, which on face value appears to fight classism and promote social justice, is actually inserted in a context that aims to protect the “right” to move around with one of the most source-consuming, polluting and expensive forms of transport on the planet, i.e., the private car. The words of Laurence Fox—former actor turned political activist interviewed by the BBC—sum up the distorted narrative (see Stibbe 2021, p. 201) being promoted:

“I’ve come here because I object to being told where I can or can’t move in society. I think it’s really unhealthy. I think that what’s happened is post-pandemic the powers that be in the government have got this desire to control our movement, our speech everything […] we should be seeking more freedom, not less. I don’t want to be restricted by politicians and stuff like that”.

(Laurence Fox in Rowlatt 2023)

While all these discourses may appear unworthy of consideration, it is important to investigate them from the perspective of discourse studies, given their effects and role in society (see Demata et al. 2022). We notice in Fox’s words the repeated use of passive forms (being told; to be restricted), the use of the adjective “unhealthy” to talk about a proposal which is mainly driven by the need to improve people’s health in various ways (see also Musolff (2017) for a discussion on the reversal of slogans), and the ‘us vs. them’ populist attack towards institutions, another typical feature of conspiracy discourses.

5.2.2. The Positive Discourse of the ‘Cycling Revolution’

The two speeches given by Timmermans together amount to 5000 words, 2868 in 2023 in Brussels and 2132 in 2022 in Copenhagen. Both speeches clearly and explicitly aim to promote and support cycling mobility, hence it may appear surprising that there is only one occurrence of the word “cyclist” and that Timmermans does not use it to refer to actual people moving around by bicycle but as an abstraction in a quotation of Susan Vreeland’s “Cyclist’s Philosophy of Life”. He employs this quote to introduce a metaphor we shall observe later. The discourse strategy of avoiding the word “cyclist” is beneficial, as its use tends to generate a narrative of conflict between reified road users. As pointed out by Bercht (2020, p. 20), one way to reduce negative intergroup relations is to forge “a superordinate or higher-level social identity”. She explains that

ideally, the formation of a higher-level group identity allows the breaking down of subgroup boundaries and the reduction of ingroup bias (based on social comparison and positive distinctiveness), leading to former outgroup members being granted the same kind of positive evaluations that were previously restricted to the ingroup. This, in turn, can lead to greater acceptance of science and support for action.

In order to mention people who use a bicycle to travel around and those who could in the future, Timmermans employs: “cycling community”, “commuters”, “people who live in this city”, “citizens”, “people”, “mothers and fathers taking their children to school”. In the 2022 speech he refers to his grandparents “for whom cycling was a necessity they didn’t always like” and his first grandchild “who’s now learning to cycle”. He even includes the people who oppose change, describing them gently and not as “enemies” and within a positive message:

I want to end with simply appreciation for the government of Brussels that really does its utmost. Sometimes also, enduring the grumblings of the citizens who ‘yes, they want cleaner air, but they don’t want all this change all the time’, you know-but then again, this is something we all face.

(Timmermans 2022)

The pronoun “they” immediately goes back to “we”, and whether we means “we administrators face grumbling citizens” or “we citizens all face the feeling of not wanting change all the time” is left for the audience to decide.

In both speeches, Timmermans underlines the ways in which an increase in cycling would improve social justice. The reference to his grandparents allows him to achieve three goals. First, he is telling a personal story we can identify with because we all have memories or family stories of our grandparents, a personal story grabs the attention of the public, and one that involves some form of sweet nostalgia is likely to be received positively. Many of our grandparents’ stories are likely to involve bicycles, as they were much more common than nowadays as a means of transport. Timmermans is thus able to raise the point of “bicycles can be a normal way of moving around, it has happened before”, while the reference to his grandparents makes this story nice and engaging. But the most important aspect is how.

Timmermans reframes “evolution and progress”, which in the dominant automobility narrative would be “they were forced to use bikes and then they were liberated by cars”, but in his speech, the bicycle itself is better than it used to be:

For my grandparents the bike was the only way they could get around. They couldn’t afford anything else.

So now, we see it as a luxury something, but for previous generations of Danes and Dutch people this was the mode of transportation you could afford.

You bought a bike for life. The thing weighed about 40 kilos. But it was the instrument that took away social differences, because it did not discriminate. And that’s happening again.

(Timmermans 2022)

Timmermans’ grandparents could not afford anything different from a bike that had to last a lifetime and was cumbersome. We can choose; we can afford more than one, and their quality is higher. We see a bike as a luxury, but it is not a luxury. The implied reference to cars, which are a luxury, create social differences and discriminate, is there, but it is left unsaid. The word “car” is not present in the speech, nor are “danger” or “pollution”. The narrative of Timmermans’ speech is positive (see Martin 2004); it tells a new, bright story. It tells a family story that links his grandparents to his grandson. The latter could also be seen as an intertextual reference to his COP26 speech, in which he made the effective communicative choice of speaking while holding his mobile with a picture of this two year old whose future would be affected by the decisions taken in that very room (Harvey et al. 2021)

Both in COP26 and the two speeches observed here, Timmermans focuses on the values, first and foremost the value of life and well-being. In this passage, we can clearly see the connection with the arguments of Mottley’s speech:

If we want to keep this planet in balance, in balance with nature, if we want to learn to live within the boundaries that the planet has set, and if we want to address the energy crisis, or if we face another crisis—like air quality, you know, more than 300,000 Europeans every year die prematurely because of bad air quality—this is something cycling can address very directly. […] And I repeat, let’s keep the people dying prematurely in mind when we think about cycling.

(Timmermans 2023)

Promoting cycling is thus promoting life and well-being, arguments that should be at the centre of any form of cycling promotion but are often weakened in favour of business-related arguments, which are perceived as more palatable in our marketised society (see Mautner 2010). “The boundaries that the planet has set” is a reference to the work of Rockström et al. (2009), a framework to describe limits to the impacts of human activities on the Earth system. Beyond these limits, the environment may not be able to self-regulate anymore. “Boundaries” is also a spatial metaphor, and agency is attributed to the planet, rather than to humans, a discourse strategy we have already observed in Mottley. Timmermans does talk about the industry and the business implications of an increase in cycling, but these are not framed as paramount even if they are presented as important and relevant to the choice of promoting more cycling. This allows him to use the only superordinate identity he employs, i.e., Europeans, as he underlines how boosting the cycling industry will mean boosting a European industry and market.

Another important focus is the accessibility of bikes, both from an economic standpoint and from the perspective of ability: Timmermans describes the coming of electric bikes as “democratizing” because they take away age and hills. It may be worth pointing out that both “accessibility” and “taking away” are sleeping metaphors, while they are also spatial. The same is true for the “revolutions” he says we are witnessing. But the most dominant metaphor he employs is that of a bike journey, a strategy used in both speeches. In 2022, the metaphor was ongoing throughout the text, illustrating the various phases of the process of change as phases of the bike ride. In 2023, an effective cycling metaphor makes politics not focused exclusively on the short-term the only sensible choice:

Let me give a couple of examples about this.

Let’s have a bike ride.

The first thing you need for a bike ride is a bike and we want to attract more citizens together.

(Timmermans 2022)

Now, if you cycle you need to keep your eye in the distance not right in front of you, because that it greatly increases the risk of a crash. In that sense, I believe it’s like politics. If you look just right in front of you, you’ll crash. You need to also have a vision for the longer future, and that is what brings us together today.

(Timmermans 2023)

LIFE IS A JOURNEY is an extremely common spatial metaphor. Timmermans’ variation is obviously induced by the audience and the topic of his speech. Especially in the second passage, the metaphor allows him to introduce the theme of balance, which also works very well metaphorically, as in order to keep travelling, you need to keep your balance and, in order to do that while riding a bicycle, you need to keep moving.

6. Discussion and Concluding Remarks

In conclusion, in discourses about mobility justice, spatial metaphors play an essential role because of their general effectiveness and because their meaning overlaps the actual centrality of space as the theme being discussed. The beneficial strategies that we have observed in Mottley and Timmermans and that can be employed in other beneficial discourses are the use of superordinate identities, the use of stories and the avoidance of the frames one wants to counter. The stories used by Timmermans tend to be personal, while those used by Mottley are evoked mainly through metaphors. Both speakers provide enough details to make their images vivid and easy to visualize, hence effective.

From a linguistic perspective, the most significant discourse features observed are metaphors, deixis and pronouns. These convey effective messages that contribute to the creation of identity groups, influencing and shaping the recipients’ perception of space and our ideas about justice. The analysis presented here has revealed how, in discourses about the climate crisis and in discourses about local mobility, ideas of public space, ideas of speakers’ and hearer’s identities and the actual, physical experience of space are all intertwined. Both Mottley and Timmermans, in the speeches under scrutiny, mix metaphorical and real actions to the point that the distinction between the two may become blurred, thus generating vivid images, which can improve the effectiveness of the message.

Policy makers and active mobility advocates can benefit from being aware of the various levels of meaning embedded in issues of mobility justice, as explained by Halliday. It is important to take into account all the intersectional forms of discrimination generated by the (lack of) access to mobility, and these need to be reflected in the language. It is necessary to deconstruct and reframe the dominant narrative that takes for granted that car ownership and car mobility are a right, implying that a reduction of access to car mobility corresponds to an impediment to personal freedom. At the same time, cycling advocates should bear in mind that most people are constantly told by car commercials that owning a certain car is a way to express their identity and lifestyle and is the means to obtain two of the most cherished values in Western societies, freedom and individuality. Hence, deconstructing and reframing these stories we live by needs to be done gradually, as it may touch upon deep, important identity values and, for this reason, is likely to be met with fierce resistance. It is important to avoid fuelling conflict between road users; this is why labels like “cyclists”, “drivers” and “pedestrians” should be substituted with more inclusive labels like “citizens”, “people” or specific groups such as “parents” or “Parisians”, depending on the specific audience.

As we have seen in the examples from Oxford, arguments that concern the climate crisis and the required changes to our lifestyle choices can be met with fierce opposition and generate climate inaction. In the case analysed here, an urban mobility project aimed at improving people’s well-being is transformed into a narrative of conspiracy. Some of the beneficial discourse strategies observed in Mottley and Timmermans can be employed to attempt the prevention of such destructive narratives opposing change. It is important to bear in mind that the discourses about the climate crisis are bound to generate anxiety and/or resistance. Discourse strategies that abandon the dominant discourse of market growth but rather focus on human well-being and embrace the emotional response of the public can achieve much more than discourses that accuse a specific group of being responsible for the damage. As the climate crisis requires urgent changes to our habits and identities, linguistics and discourse analysis can play an important role in supporting beneficial discourses of change and tackling climate inaction.