Among other things, the challenge that Halliday put forward was to make linguistics relevant to overarching contemporary issues, particularly the widespread destruction of ecosystems.
Since Halliday's initial comments, ecolinguistics has developed in several directions, employing a range of linguistic tools to investigate language in an ecological context.
The second aim is to show how linguistics can be used to address key ecological issues, from climate change and biodiversity loss to environmental justice.
According to Abram, writing has gradually alienated people in literate cultures from the natural world, to the extent that "our organic attunement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-increasing intercourse with our own signs".
[3] As dominant languages such as English spread across the world, environmental knowledge embedded in local cultures is lost.
[5] Stories which ecolinguists claim are destructive relate to consumerism, unlimited economic growth, advertising, intensive farming, and those which represent nature as a machine or a resource.
[7] It then developed to include analysis of any discourse which has potential consequences for the future of ecosystems, such as neoliberal economics, consumerism, lifestyle magazines, politics, or agribusiness.
[8] The cognitive approach and the term 'stories we live by' were introduced by Arran Stibbe in 2015, with eight kinds of story: ideology, framing, metaphor, evaluation, identity, conviction, salience and erasure.
This leads to a loss of both sustainable local cultures and the important traditional ecological knowledge contained within their languages.