Retelling the Story of the Birds and the Bees in the Age of Biodiversity Extinction

Abstract

John Lovejoy coined the term biological diversity in 1980, made the first projection of global extinction rates, and 43 years later we are still discussing biodiversity and extinction in an inconsequential fashion. Extinction signs include the loss of millions of birds in the UK since 1970 and the decline in insects. Goulson summarizes in detail the scientific and biological evidence for the many species extinctions. Although most people do not notice the declines in insects, the loss of bees has been noted when bees’ use as pollinators began to be harnessed as a corporate and commercial activity. This is linked to intensive agricultural practices. The lobbying power of agrochemical companies shapes agricultural practices that directly impact the well-being of all species. Critical ecological discourse analysis of insect decline and the issues related to it is employed, going back to the famous speech given by Michael Halliday. Then corpus linguistic methods scrutinize material from the website of Syngenta, an agrochemical company. We ask whether the website of such a firm can uncover the necessary circumstances for such biodiversity. A corpus-assisted critical analysis of Syngenta’s business report, looks at computer-generated concordances of some of the relevant content words, like ‘crop’, ‘sustainable’, ‘soil’, ‘control’, ‘biodiversity’ and ‘water’. Hopefully, this study will encourage researchers to provide more indications of the disappearance of so many species, and not just birds and insects. But, to really achieve effective protection of biodiversity much more is needed.

1. Introduction: The Aims of the Research Study

This study reviews what is known about the extinction of many species in the context of biodiversity research. Employing discourse analytical procedures the signs of biodiversity loss are addressed, with focus on insect decline and especially decline in wild bees by reviewing biological research and as documented in corporate responsibility studies. A discourse analysis of the role of agrochemicals in biodiversity loss underlines the current part played by pesticides and insecticides in exacerbating the loss, especially in the way intensive farming practices are being channelled by the agrochemical industry.

A central section of the study then concentrates on applying corpus linguistic methods to scrutinize the website of a major agrochemical company. The corpus-assisted analysis of the sustainable business report of the major agrochemical firm Syntagma uncovers the manner in which such a business entity conceptualizes its presentation of sustainably maintaining biodiversity. This reveals how selective and partial its approach is. Certain developments in the natural world are erased in an ecolinguistic fashion by such corporate players. The concordancing study of Syntagma’s website report can thus serve to show how the notion of sustainability is commercially orientated by such corporate bodies.

When the American tropical and conservation biologist John Lovejoy coined the term biological diversity in 1980 and made the first projection of global extinction rates in the Global 2000 Report to the President, little did we think the world would still be tracking around the notions of biodiversity and extinction in a so inconsequential fashion 43 years later on. But such is the way cognitive dissonance works individually and societally.

And so here we are still stuck in a failure to ‘do’ anything. Why is this the case?

2. Signs of Loss of Biodiversity

The disappearance of birds is an obvious sign of biodiversity loss. According to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) (2023) almost 30 million house sparrows, 20 million starlings, 4 million skylarks, 2 million blackbirds and 1 million chaffinches have vanished from the UK since 1970. Then there is the decline in insects. A survey, Hallmann et al. (2017), estimated a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study.

In a book whose title alludes to Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, the English biologist, Dave Goulson (2021), noted how she warned that humans were doing terrible things to our planet. “She would weep to see how much worse it has become”, he comments. Goulson provides an extremely detailed overview of what scientific and biological evidence there is for the many species extinctions that are taking place before our very eyes. As Vadrot and Hughes (2023) maintained: “In 2019, the extent of biodiversity loss was highlighted when it was reported that “of an estimated 8 million animal and plant species (75 percent of which are insects), around 1 million are threatened with extinction” (IPBES 2019, p. 13)”.

What Goulson was engaging in is, essentially, Ecological Discourse Analysis, as Alexander and Stibbe (2014) call it. That is to say, EDA or ecological discourse analysis, was historically developed out of the analysis of ecological discourse, whose origin can be traced back to the famous speech given by Michael Halliday (1990). The present article wishes to contribute to research within that strand of ecolinguistics that has been named “critical ecolinguistics”. Ecolinguistics can also unearth examples of discourse that represent positive views. A good example can be adduced from Alexander’s (2009) analysis of Vandana Shiva’s lecture for the BBC Reith Lectures series. This underlines Shiva’s “re-evaluation” of globalisation, which she frames as a war against nature, and shows how she develops a unique notion of sustainability that exceeds the idea of development to include such values as compassion, justice, and dignity.

In Goulson’s work, in Alexander and Stibbe’s (2014) words, we can see that “the scope of ecolinguistics is clearly far wider than the analysis of texts which happen to be explicitly about environmental or ecological concerns. Instead, the scope is on all discourses which have the potential to encourage people to behave in ways which damage or preserve ecological systems.” And Goulson is unambiguously on the side of preserving ecological systems. In several chapters, Goulson showed how the future of the world is very uncertain. It is hard to predict what the future climate will be like and what humans should do. The strength and frequency of rainfall and of extreme weather events such as hurricanes cannot be forecast. This is likely to pose massive problems for humans. As a biologist Goulson remains focused on insect declines, for example bumblebees, a group he is very well informed on from his research. As he wrote: “Whereas most insect groups are at their most diverse in the tropics, bumblebees as a whole tend to be found in relatively cool climates” (Goulson 2021, p. 163). And as he stated, the climate has always changed and shifts in the distribution of species are a natural response that has been recurring for millions of years. The trouble is, that at the moment climate change is happening very fast and natural habitats are badly degraded and not distributed everywhere. “As a result, most butterflies and bumblebees don’t seem to be moving north. While they are disappearing from the southern edges of their range in Europe and North America, the expected advance at the northern edge does not seem to have happened, with the exception of a very small number of species.” Recall the extreme weather events we just mentioned, for example, heat and drought. “Insects have, of course, coped with all of these events in the past, but the increased frequency and strength of extreme events at a time when many insects have already declined may be the final straw for some,” Goulson (2021, p. 167) commented.

3. How Aware Are People of the Insect Decline?

The declines in insects are facts that most people have not noticed. So many species are no longer as ample, such as mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Goulson (2021, p. 68) said that the slowness of the change makes it difficult to perceive. In connection with this, scientists speak of the ‘shifting-baseline syndrome’; this is the phenomenon whereby we accept the world we grow up in as normal, although it might be quite different from the world our parents grew up in.

Goulson (2021, p. 69) has commented on an interesting exception: “The only aspect of insect declines that has impinged on the consciousness of significant numbers of people has become known as the ‘windshield phenomenon’. Anecdotally almost everybody over the age of about fifty can remember a time when any long-distance daytime drive in summer resulted in a car windscreen so splattered with dead insects that it was necessary to stop occasionally to scrub them off. Similarly, driving country lanes at night in high summer would reveal a blizzard of moths in the headlights that has been likened to a snowstorm. Today, drivers in Western Europe and North America are freed from the chore of washing their windscreen”.

The work of Jill Atkins and Barry Atkins underlined the possible consequences of the decline in bees in the world, stating (Atkins and Atkins 2017, p. xi) “If bees disappear this could, ultimately have catastrophic effects on nature and certainly on humankind.” In particular, they draw attention to the shift in how bees are viewed over the recent years. This holds even for bee-keepers themselves, as Atkins and Atkins (2017, p. 21) adumbrated: “Early bee-keepers expounded on the love they had for their bees and the need to ensure that bee keepers were caring and respectful towards their bees. We suggest from our reading and research, that things changed only when bees’ use as pollinators began to be harnessed as a corporate and commercial activity. […] When the natural business of bees became a commercial anthropocentric business, bee decline began”.

Atkins and Atkins clarified when pollination became a commercial operation on a gigantic scale (Atkins and Atkins 2017, p. 21): “In the late 1990s, there were about 3.5 million honey bee colonies in the US and Canada and hundreds of thousands of hives were transported around the US to provide pollinator services for agriculture—bees for rent, basically.” The intensification of farming has contributed to bee decline too, Atkins and Atkins (2017, p. 21) wrote: “In areas of agriculture and especially where there is “mono-agriculture” (just one crop) there are almost no wild bees at all: commercialized and intensive farming has eradicated natural pollinators (lack of biodiversity and insecticides to name but a few problems) and therefore ‘rent-a-bee’ for pollination has had to fill the space created by wild bee decline”.

Goulson (2021, p. 151) enlarged on this phenomenon, drawing attention to a “problem associated with the global redistribution of bees by humans: the transported bees often had stowaways. […] The global spread of the varroa destructor mite is perhaps the best-known example.” Varroa mite was first recorded on European honeybees in Singapore and Hong Kong. Then, as Goulson (2021, p. 152) stated: “Careless movement of infested bees and hives around the world then led to the mite spreading westwards to Eastern Europe by the late 1960s, France in 1982, the UK in 1992 and Ireland in 1998.” It later spread to the United States, on to New Zealand and Hawaii. Up to now Australia is the only sizeable country in the world that does not have Varroa.

When it comes to the decline in wild bees, the research work of Goulson’s own group discovered that in England and Scotland, the exposure of bumblebee nests to neonicotinoid insecticides had led to an 85 per cent drop in numbers of queens produced by bumblebee nests (Goulson 2021, p. 104). In view of these research findings in 2016, the European Commission asked the European Food Standards Agency (EFSA) to review the new evidence and report back. They concluded that “it was quite blunt in its conclusions: almost all uses of neonicotinoids pose a risk to bees. In late 2018 all outdoor uses of the three main neonicotinoids were therefore banned throughout Europe”, Goulson (2021, p. 104) reported.

We cannot neglect the effects on biodiversity loss from intensive farming. As Goulson (2021, p. 258) stated: “If one looks at the bigger picture, modern farming is part of a staggeringly inefficient, cruel and environmentally damaging food-supply system.” And further on he makes this point: “If we combine the area of pastures used for grazing with that used for growing arable crops that are fed to animals, then three-quarters of all the world’s farmland is used to produce meat and dairy products”.

We do well to mention how sustainable agriculture is likely to be. And we will discuss whether the role of agrochemical corporations are playing is either preparing the way for more environmentally friendly food production or simply contributing to the ongoing degradation of nature by encouraging destructive agricultural practices.

We will then relate this to the mention of ‘sustainable’ in the concordance study Section 5.4.

4. The Role of Agrochemicals in Biodiversity Loss

Let us turn now to the use of insecticides/pesticides and the acceleration of insect (including bee) decline more recently. Goulson (2021, p. 87) discussed agrochemicals: “Today, about 900 different ‘active ingredients’—types of chemicals that are toxic to some sort of pest—are licensed for use in the USA, and about 500 in the EU”.

In the 1990s one class of insecticides was developed that has been shown to have destroyed bee populations. Goulson noted that these chemicals, neonicotinoids, travel to all parts of a plant and he says (Goulson 2021, p. 152): “Neonicotinoids are a synthetic form of nicotine that are systemic and there seems to be evidence that the declining bee population is due to the impact of these pesticides on crops such as corn”.

It is not news that the long-rooted history in corporate lobbying of giant agrochemical companies together with their financial means shape the way in which farmers work and ultimately how this impacts on many species.

Atkins and Atkins (2017, p. 152) recorded that: “[T]he pesticide companies Bayer and Syntagma have been fighting Europe’s temporary ban on neonicotinoids, which came into effect in 2014”.

One of the most dangerous pesticides according to numerous scientific research studies is glyphosate. As the author was drafting these lines, the European Commission published the following statement on 13 October 2023:

“Today, the Member States voted, in a Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed (SCOPAFF), on the Commission’s proposal to renew, for 10 years, the use of glyphosate. The required majority to adopt (or reject) the proposal was not reached. As a result, the proposal, which is based on an opinion delivered by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) will be submitted to the Appeal Committee. […] A decision on the renewal of glyphosate needs to be taken by 14 December 2023, as the current approval expires on 15 December 2023.”

Behind such decisions we can see the lobbying power of agrochemical corporations at work and also their quasi-political power which ultimately shapes agricultural practices that directly impact the well-being of all species. Then, “On Thursday, November 16, the European Commission decided to extend the use of glyphosate, the controversial active ingredient in Bayer’s (Monsanto) Roundup weedkiller, for 10 more years until December 15, 2033. In 2017, the Europeans had only granted the herbicide a five-year extension”.

There have been many public and legal criticisms of the actions of agro-chemical companies. As Goulson (2021, p. 131) noted: “Monsanto is now said to face more than 13,400 lawsuits brought by people suffering from cancer who blame glyphosate for their disease. […] Nonetheless, Monsanto still continues loudly to protest its innocence”.

There is the long-standing Roundup class action lawsuit which came to court in December 2023 (including updates from the last four trials) which came to a $2.25 billion verdict in Philadelphia on January 26, 2024.

In view of such decisions, as that of the EU Commission of 14 December 2023, Greenpeace commented that the Commission “prefers to side with the agrochemical lobbies rather than follow scientific advice, apply the precautionary principle and accept the ban on this pesticide”.

Agrochemical corporations are influential in the development of policy on pesticide use and regulation. And clearly, they provide the major support in their advertising for the actions that industrial farming groups undertake. Their argument against bans on neonicotinoid pesticides is that there is scientific uncertainty about the harm caused by this class of pesticides, and no direct causative relationship. They claim that the science is too complex and incomplete and therefore should not be acted upon.

We can underline this situation by mentioning the influential lobby group CropLife International. According to Crispin Dowler (2020): “CropLife International is an influential trade association and lobby group for the world’s major agrochemical and agricultural biotech companies. Its members Syngenta, Bayer Crop Science, BASF, Corteva Agriscience, and FMC are the five biggest pesticide companies in the world by agrochemical turnover”.

Goulson (2021, p. 103n) makes a feasible point about why Syngenta and other companies call pesticides by the names they use: “Pesticides almost invariably have unpronounceable and hard-to-remember names. Matt Sharlow, CEO of the insect conservation charity Buglife, has a theory that this is a deliberate ploy to discourage public debate about them.” One task ecolinguistic analysis can undertake is to underline what certain actors do not discourse about.

In this context we can refer to the term ‘erasure’. This can be used to “cover suppression, backgrounding, exclusion, abstraction, and in general any means by which texts draw attention away from certain participants or areas of life” (Stibbe 2016, p. 146).

Hence, the notion of ‘erasure’ can show in the intersection between species extinction and the global capitalist system what things are not talked about. Certain participants, like pesticides producers, preferring to underplay their role in contributing to biodiversity decline.

Between them these companies control close to two thirds of the global agrochemicals market. A joint investigation by Unearthed and Public Eye, Dowler (2020), has analyzed a huge database of 2018’s top-selling “crop protection products”; this has revealed the world’s leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as “highly hazardous” to people, animals or ecosystems. It also found more than a billion dollars of their sales came from chemicals—some now banned in European markets—that are highly toxic to bees. Regulatory authorities have found such chemicals pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure to farm workers. Over two thirds of these sales were made in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil and India.

The Pesticide Action Network (PAN) International list of highly hazardous pesticides—HHPS (2017) found that close to half (41%) of the leading products of the agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta contained at least one HHP.

Meriel Watts, a senior science and policy advisor to PAN, told Unearthed: “This investigation shows that there is a huge disconnect between what those companies are saying in the international policy arena and what they are actually doing”.

CropLife itself says that its members reviewed their entire portfolios between 2015 and 2016 and concluded that only 15% of their products were HHPs. Further, they found that 10% were HHPs “that can be used safely and responsibly” and only 2.5% “required risk mitigation measures or were withdrawn from the market”.

5. Methodological Approach

We have been employing critical discourse analysis to deal with insect decline and the issues related to it. Now, we will employ corpus linguistic methods to scrutinize material from the website of an agrochemical company (cf. Alexander 2018; Poole 2022). The analyses undertaken will be facilitated by using computer-generated concordances. The program was compiled by Laurence Anthony and is downloadable from his web site (www.laurenceanthony.net), accessed on 8 November 2023.

The computer-generated concordances set out to see how specific linguistic features are associated with or serve to uphold larger discourse processes, such as evaluation, argumentative strategies and discourse tactics. We thus receive additional evidence to support our qualitative analysis of argumentation structures. They allow us to automatically ascertain a number of facts. One of the most basic techniques of language data-processing is the production of alphabetical frequency lists. They can aid us to automatically access items, displaying how frequently they are used, for instance, and their collocational co-texts, which a cursory reading may well have overlooked. Focuses of semantic interest may well be reflected in lexical repetition, if we ignore the function words and count content words.

5.1. Preliminary Comments

We start with a few questions. What are the foundations of, or the preconditions for, necessary biodiversity? How far can an agrochemical firm claim to be providing these very conditions? Can we uncover the necessary circumstances for such biodiversity by analyzing the website of a firm like Syngenta? What can sorting through some of the concordances of the more frequent terms bring to the surface? How ‘realistic’ does the kind of presentation Syntagma lays before the website reader appear? Or how much is perhaps left out or erased?

We will ask whether such agrochemical corporations feel the need to account for the role they play in endangering species. One task ecolinguistic analysis can undertake is to underline what certain actors do not discourse about. The notion of ‘erasure’ can point up the intersection between species extinction and the global capitalist system.

5.2. Synopsis of Syngenta Sustainable Business Report 2019

This is a précis of the report sections I looked at. The report, as one might expect, is very professionally edited and written. In the written text format it reads like a self-explanatory, matter-of-fact report of how Syngenta has voluntarily taken sustainability on board. The section headings of the report itself are almost self-explanatory. They can serve practically as a summary.

The website version is made up of 42 pages. The first two pages consists of graphics and text giving the highlights of 2019. Then comes the Chief Executive Officer’s statement. The next three or four pages continue and include a page by the Chief Sustainability Officer. There follows a page by Michael Doane, Global Managing Director for Sustainable Food and Water The Nature Conservancy. Several pages present The Good Growth Plan, signed off by Flavio Alzueta, Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer GLOBALG.A.P.

Page 25 presents a case study ‘Measuring’. Page 27 is headed ‘Help biodiversity flourish’ and ‘Making Bornholm a haven for pollinators’. Page 29 is headed ‘Help people stay safe’. Then comes a case ‘Safe farming with study drone technology’. Page 31 is headed ‘Look after every worker’. Throughout the text there are phrases like UN Sustainable Development Goals 2, 8, 17. Page 34 is authored by Fabrice Houdart, Co-author of the UN LGBTI Standards of Conduct for Business. Page 37 is co-authored by Cynthia Cummis, Director of Private Sector Climate Mitigation World Resources Institute.

5.3. Concordancing Study of Syngenta’s Sustainable Business Report for 2019

We here undertake a corpus-assisted critical analysis of Syngenta’s business report. The report has 17,322 tokens—the total number of words (i.e., of running words), and 3157 types—the number of different words (word-forms or ‘lemmata’). This gives a type-token-ratio of 0.182253781318554. Maximum diversity, i.e., every other word being different, equals unity (1). The more repetitive the text, the closer to zero (0) the ratio will be. So, the element of repeating is reflected in this ratio.

Focuses of semantic interest may well be reflected in lexical repetition, if we ignore the function words and count content words. What does the frequency list come up with concentrating on the content words? Beginning with the most frequent items, occurring 30 times and more, we find ‘farmers’—110 instances first, then unsurprisingly in second position ‘Syngenta’—73, ‘sustainable’—56. And then come 24 more items: ‘products’—53, ‘crop’—52, ‘agriculture’—48, ‘year’—47, ‘help’—47, ‘soil’—46, ‘supply’—44, ‘business’—44, ‘use’—45 (both noun & verb), ‘chain’—43, ‘sustainability’—40, ‘growth’—40 (22 instances of Good Growth Plan), ‘seed’—39, ‘food’—38, ‘plan’ 36—(nouns in collocation Good Growth Plan), ‘water’—34, ‘increase’—34 (both noun & verb), ‘management’—33, ‘million’—33, ‘farms’—30, ‘suppliers’—30, ‘technology’—30, and ‘safety’—30.

5.4. Analysis of Some of the Relevant Content Words

A look at the ‘crop’ concordance (52 instances, the fifth most frequent content word), shows it has 23 instances of the right collocation ‘protection’; this highlights the perhaps ‘conventional’ expectation of what pesticide companies’ work is about.

5.4.1. ‘Sustainable’

Let us look at the concordance of ‘sustainable’ with 56 instances: there are 17 instances of ‘agriculture’ as right collocate. Unsurprisingly, there are eleven instances of ‘UN Sustainable Development Goals’. This is a well-known appeal to authority, an action often found in corporate reports.

What can this concordance tell us about how Syngenta understands the meaning of sustainable? It is not defined. It is taken for granted, that website readers ‘know’ what is intended by it. Like many other companies, Syngenta draws on the weak sustainability model of sustainable development; they construct anything connected with ‘sustainability’ as a synergy between the company’s economic and business goals, and environmental protection and community involvement.

These two sentences assert that they are explaining the meaning: “By sustainable agriculture, we mean agriculture that directly benefits farmers, society and nature today and in the future. This makes good sense for both the environment and our business.” This echoes what we have just been saying about their ‘weak sustainability model’.

As we just stated, they assert that they are advancing the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, but do not state how.

Looking at the collocates around ‘sustainable’ can uncover this synergy.

We can list all right collocates: ‘sustainable products’, ‘a more sustainable supply’, ‘sustainable soil management’, ‘sustainable soil and digital solutions’, ‘All sustainable operations performance indicators’, ‘sustainable logistics’, ‘our sustainable sourcing process’, and left collocates: ‘products that are safe and sustainable’ and ‘And to make our business sustainable’.

The semantic prosody surrounding ‘sustainable’, with both left and right collocates, contains several positively loaded or associated items, mostly verbs, standard corporate purr-words, as left collocates, ‘ensuring’, ‘ensure’, ‘accelerating’, ‘implementing’, and ‘optimizing’, ‘scale up’, ‘support’; i.e., ‘implementing new, sustainable rotations’, ‘ensuring the sustainable use of resources’, ‘more efficient and environmentally sustainable wheat’, ‘accelerating sustainable vegetable breeding’, ‘to scale up sustainable agricultural practices’, ‘the certification of safe, sustainable agricultural products’, ‘safe and sustainable farming practices’, ‘optimizing sustainable food production’, ‘ensure sustainable food security’, ‘multi-functional field margins support sustainable intensification’, ‘ensure sustainable improvements’.

The adjective ‘safe’ is a left collocate that occurs several times—‘the certification of safe, sustainable agricultural products worldwide’ and ‘to get first-hand knowledge on safe and sustainable farming practices’. The noun ‘safety’ occurs 30 times and interestingly ‘safely’ 10 times. So, the semantic ‘safe****’ group occurs 50 times in all. This underlines how significant this notion is for a pesticide company.

Recall above the discussion of hazardous pesticides. The word ‘hazardous’ occurs three times towards the end of the report in a section headed ‘Avoiding waste ’. This has a subhead: ‘Hazardous waste intensity’. It transpires that the waste is connected with construction activities and has nothing to do with pesticides.

5.4.2. ‘Soil’

Let us look at the ‘soil’ concordance (46 instances). The collocates on both sides underline the orientation to beneficial sustainability that Syngenta is keen to encourage in its report. Among right collocates we find ‘health’. The positive notion of ‘soil health’ occurs 13 times in the text; also, we find the converse, that should be avoided, of ‘soil degradation’ (twice) and ‘soil compaction’ (twice), and ‘soil erosion’ (once). Left collocates include verbs like ‘protect’, ‘promotes’, ‘promoting’, ‘maintain’, ‘enhance’. Right collocates include ‘conservation’, ‘habitat protection’ (4 times), ‘fertility’ and ‘resource efficiency’ (4 times).

A further word with a positive ring to it is ‘committed’. There are only 11 instances of this. The right collocates are all very positive sounding verbs and verb phrases; there are standard corporate purr-words and purr phrases, as the following list makes clear. They are or have committed: ‘to deliver’, ‘to invest in solutions that reverse soil erosion’, ‘to reduce the carbon intensity of our entire operations’, ‘to delivering at least two technological breakthroughs’, ‘to boost productivity’, ‘to helping improve occupational safety and health’, ‘to ensuring fair labor conditions across our suppliers’, ‘to achieving our Goal Zero vision of zero harm’, ‘to increasing diversity in our workforce’, ‘to reducing the carbon intensity of our entire operations’, ‘to a 20 percent reduction in water intensity’.

As we consider the verb phrases we discovered by looking at the concordance of ‘soil’, we find that invariably they are referring to operations designed to increase the company’s business performance and increase profits. We see in several phrases how environmental sustainability actions are tied in with commercial success, e.g., ‘to develop products that are safe and sustainable, and to steward them carefully’. Here is an extract that underlines this position very aptly: ‘After all: we can only be truly sustainable if our suppliers are as well’.

5.4.3. ‘Control’

A brief look at the concordance for ‘control’ (29 instances in total) shows that many disease names, collocate right with ‘control’. This is clearly an informative part of the website. Here farmers can see what products contend with which diseases. Several specific items, like fungal or viral diseases are mentioned: ‘Fall Armyworm’, ‘diseases such as Pythium and Phytophthora’, ‘Fusarium head blight’, ‘rusts and leaf spot’, ‘blackleg in canola’, ‘bakanae in rice’, ‘Fusarium head blight in cereals’, ‘rust’, ‘yellow spot and Septoria in wheat’, ‘foliar diseases in barley’, ‘pests like aphids and whiteflies’, ‘fall armyworm’, ‘control of malaria’. Then, there are unspecified, generic items, like ‘Weed control’, ‘Insect control’, and ‘above-ground insect control’.

What role does nature play in Syngenta’s report? The few animal names to be mentioned in the report include ‘wild bee’ (one instance), ‘honey bee’ (one instance) and ‘earthworms’ (one instance).

‘Nature’ occurs 16 times and 9 of them in the collocation and name ‘The Nature Conservancy’. The Nature Conservancy, it is claimed, is the world’s largest environmental organization. There have been many doubts published about how seriously the organization took its commitment to protecting the environment, as Naomi Klein (2014, p. 192) related, when The Nature Conservancy began extracting fossil fuels on the Texas City Prairie Preserve on the breeding grounds of one of the most endangered species, the Attwater’s prairie chickens. Then in 2022, a group of 158 conservation, environmental, and social justice non-profit organizations signed an open letter to the Conservancy’s CEO, Jennifer Morris, charging that The Nature Conservancy was overly supportive of logging interests and the use of wood products as a natural climate solution. This bodes ill for people who support the conservation of natural resources.

At this point we can reiterate what Stibbe (2016, p. 145) has to say: “Ecolinguistics has a role to play in investigating the linguistic workings of erasure, examining what has been erased by texts and discourses, considering whether that erasure is problematic, and if it is, then what has been erased can be restored to consciousness”.

5.4.4. ‘Biodiversity’

If we look at the concordance of biodiversity, there are only 18 instances in a total of 3157 lemmata. This is just over 1 percent. As we consider the co-texts of ‘biodiversity’, we see many passages that integrate the notion into the propagated debate about sustainable agriculture. It is feasible to interpret how this linking can be seen as a case of positive ecolinguistic analysis, which leads to a company claiming to be normatively orientated towards preserving relationships which sustain life. This is clearly how several statements could be interpreted. The only caveat I would raise at this point is that Syngenta is just as likely to be constructing ‘sustainability’ as a synergy between the company’s business, economic goals, environmental protection and community involvement.

I can illustrate this by quoting and commenting on a number of the items I have extracted from the website text.

A close left collocate of ‘biodiversity’ is ‘enhancing’ (a corporate purr-word). Purr-words, as non-linguists call them (see Hayakawa 1941), are positively sounding or euphemistic words. We see it in this extract (a): “We have also exceeded a number of our targets, including bringing more than 14 million hectares of farmland back from the brink of degradation and enhancing biodiversity on more than 8 million hectares.” If we summarize the use of words from the ‘enhanc****’ family (15 instances in all), we find that ‘enhance’ occurs twice as a left collocate of ‘biodiversity’, once left of ‘soil health and fertility’. The other six instances have the verb modifying predominantly business and commercial actions. The use of ‘enhanced’ is analogously divided: once as left collocate of ‘genetic diversity’ and once with ‘employee engagement’. Whereas ‘enhancement’ is a right collocate of ‘crop’ (once) and ‘biodiversity’ (twice). Likewise, ‘enhancement’ occurs right of ‘biodiversity’ (once).

A further marked left collocate is ‘reverse’, as in (b): “We have also committed to invest in solutions that reverse soil erosion and biodiversity decline, help farmers become resilient to changing climates, and adapt to changing consumer requirements such as cutting carbon emissions”.

But, actually, in the report as a whole, far more aspects are mentioned which could be seen as foundations of, or the preconditions for, necessary diversity. Interestingly, in at least two extracts ‘pollinators’ and ‘pollination’ are mentioned, as well as ‘habitats’ with ‘diverse wildlife populations’ (c): “As well as substantially increasing biodiversity, it also enabled conversations with the community about encouraging pollinators in their local area.” (d): “The sustainability of agriculture relies on biodiversity—for plant breeding, pollination and food diversity. We are promoting and enabling action to increase and connect habitats that support healthy and diverse wildlife populations”.

A right collocate ‘enhancement practices’ broadens out what is meant: “Other examples of biodiversity enhancement practices include restoration and maintenance of managed forests and agro-forestry.” And closely related are aspects like ‘multi-functional field margins—including riparian forests’ (e): “In EAME, multi-functional field margins—including riparian forests—are now the most frequently adopted biodiversity measures in our portfolio”.

There are several extracts which bring out the importance of looking after the soil (f): “The biodiversity projects we invest in worldwide continue to benefit farmers and their wider communities. For farmers, the positives include better soil nutrient cycling, crop pollination, pest control and water quality regulation”, and (f): “and carrying out biodiversity and soil conservation practices to the highest standards across our seeds supply chain”, and (g): “We strive to minimize soil erosion and enhance biodiversity at the farms in our seeds supply chain”.

Then there is this extract which brings all these aspects of biodiversity enhancement together (h): “To help achieve this target, we will deploy measures such as field margins, forests and beehives to enhance biodiversity, while addressing soil erosion by, for example, promoting farming practices that minimize soil disturbance and provide continuous soil coverage”.

This final extract summarizes how Syntagma has now focused on ‘loss of biodiversity’ (i): “The key message that emerged from our listening sessions is that the sustainable agriculture debate has moved from food security and yield alone to factors such as loss of biodiversity”.

5.4.5. ‘Water’

There are 34 instances of ‘water’. It has six instances of ‘use’ as a right collocate. Then ‘quality’ appears twice as a right collocate. The phrase ‘water-use efficiency’ occurs three times. As left collocates we find ‘improved’, ‘improving’ and ‘support’. A further left collocate is ‘20 per cent reduction in’. All these phrases and many others demonstrate how Syngenta prioritizes dealing with water efficiently and not wasting it, whether used for irrigation or cleaning purposes.

At this point we can bring in discussion of the way pesticides often contaminate groundwater and even drinking water. We find pesticides even damaging nature reserves by seeping in through the ground water. Scientific studies from across the world make it clear that lakes and rivers worldwide, from Portugal to California to Vietnam, are often chronically contaminated with neonicotinoid chemicals. As Goulson (2021, p. 143) stated: “Unsurprisingly, perhaps, our drinking water also frequently now contains fertilizers, particularly in rural areas and developing countries.” The English journalist, George Monbiot (2023), asks the leading question: “What happens when you release thousands of novel chemicals, most of which have not been tested for their impacts on human health or ecosystems, into a living planet? […] What are they doing to other species and to Earth systems”. He referred especially to the sewage sludge which farmers spread on their agricultural land as a fertilizer. This can include a manure/slurry ash mix from poultry and pigs spread on their farms to benefit the soil. He mentioned a report from the British Environment Agency which stated that the risks associated with these contaminants are not yet understood. Monbiot called for the full publication of this report and together with a group called ‘Fighting Dirty’ they are calling for a government judicial review.

5.5. Names of Syngenta Pesticides

Taking a look at the names—VAYANTIS^® fungicide—MIRAVISTM Triple Pack—ADEPIDYNTM fungicide—FORTENZA^® Duo seed treatment—AGRISURE DURACADETM—TAVIUM^® Plus VaporGrip^®—ENOGEN^® feed corn, one is reminded of what Goulson (quoted above in Section 3) says about unpronounceable and hard-to-remember names, when it comes to pesticides.

5.6. The First Person Pronoun ‘We’

Firstly, it is worth asking what kind of relationship the authors of the Syntagma text set out to create with their readers? Is it a ‘distanced’, objective, formal or ‘authority’-based one? Or is it a close, informal, personal or equal-terms one? It is mainly a ‘straight’ presentation of the facts, as seen by the corporation, pinpointing the themes and topics it considers important, dealing with the ideational function of language or the experiential dimension (Halliday 1985). But naturally enough an important perspective on a topic and an element of every position taken up by a speaker can be adduced from the way the interactional or interpersonal function is structured. And there are signallers of the interpersonal function even in the genre of the corporate report. Personal pronouns and modal verbs provide a fairly swift entry-point if we are using a concordancing programme. A look at the ‘we’-concordance (total = 358) demonstrates the preoccupation with self-presentation which the mission statement-like genre clearly dictates.

The pronoun is often followed by verbs in the past tense ‘announced’ or ‘The commitment we made’ and ‘we trained 8.6 million people’, reporting on the actions they have undertaken, or the modals ‘will’ and ‘must’. The modal ‘will’ is sometimes ≈ used to express their future intentions, e.g., ‘We will continue our transparent approach to reporting as seen in our Good Growth Plan’ and ‘we will continue to listen and respond to key stakeholders’. The modal ‘must’ indicates an obligation on the part of the company, e.g., ‘As farmers around the world continue to face the increasing challenges of climate change, we must do all we can to help them deal with the impacts of extreme climates today, as well as find solutions to help reduce agriculture’s and the food value chain’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions’. And ‘In the face of these challenges, I see Syngenta’s role as two-fold. Firstly, we must do all we can to help farmers deal with the impacts of extreme climates today. Secondly, we must find solutions to help reduce agriculture’s and the food value chain’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions’.

Purr-wording accompanies this interpersonal element of the report. It is no exaggeration to claim that the discourse of market economics is colonizing and serving to narrowly frame critical and oppositional discourse on the environment and ecology. How biodiversity conservation proceeds and is represented is no exception. The strands of neo-liberal economic discourse influence both social and ecological realms. This is how Büscher et al. (2012, p. 9) formulated the situation (quoted in Alexander 2015, p. 341):

“The economic language in recent policy solutions to the ecological crisis […] frames interventions in particular directions—namely towards market and technological innovation—in ways that arguably, and often intentionally, deflect understanding away from systemic causes of ecological (and associated socio-economic) crisis.”

And this reverberates throughout Syngenta’s report.

6. Results

The discourse of the Syngenta company’s report is not essentially working to ensure the survival of all living beings. The way the natural world is represented and constructed by this agrochemical corporation is partial. Thus, we can see that what people around us (and that includes agrochemical companies) ‘attend to’ is linguistically shaped. Recurrent wordings or expressions have a habitualising effect on society, as too do particular discourse patterns. These serve to mould and anchor the everyday culture of the speech community which uses them.

We have demonstrated that the discourse employed when a pesticide company deals with the ecological issue of biodiversity constructs either explicitly, or more likely implicitly, its individual standpoint on the problem.

Syngenta’s take on ‘biodiversity’ may not be comparable or identical with that of this researcher—which goes to underline the multiplicity of meanings of ‘biodiversity’.

7. Conclusions

Hopefully, this study will encourage researchers to provide more indications of the disappearance of so many species, and not just birds and insects, and of the enormous effects on biodiversity loss in the world and who or what is contributing to this mass extinction and what can be done about it.

We need to ask whether there are steps that can be taken to slow down biodiversity loss on a world scale. Certainly, at the level of the COP 15 The Convention on Biological Diversity agreement from 2022 in Montreal, Canada, we can read that “Nations have agreed to protect a third of the planet for nature by 2030 in a landmark deal aimed at safeguarding biodiversity.” The rhetoric may sound like it was a breakthrough. But when one looks at what individual states are really doing and we consider the contaminated state of Britain’s rivers, as one example, we may well have our doubts.

To really achieve effective protection of biodiversity much more is needed; for example, requiring transnational companies and financial institutions to monitor, assess, and transparently disclose risks and impacts on biodiversity through their operations, portfolios, supply and value chains. This may sound like an appeal to act voluntarily. But a realist would say that it is going to take a long time, to initiate legal requirements enforced by international law and administered by national governments.