Environmental signs as physically manifested signs that we and other animals perceive and interpret in the natural environment are seldom focused on in contemporary semiotics. The aim of the present paper is to highlight the diversity of environmental signs and to propose a typology for analysing them. Combining ecosemiotics and the pragmatist semiotics of C. Peirce and C. Morris, the proposed typology draws its criteria from the properties of the object and the representamen of the sign, and of their relationships. (...) The analysis distinguishes eight basic types of environmental signs and provides examples of these from the natural environment. The typology also integrates existing concepts of environmental affordances, ecofields, phonetic syntax, sign fields, ecological codes, meta-signs and others. In addition to basic types of environmental signs, compound environmental signs are discussed with three types of these distinguished: environmental meta-signs; ecological codes; and environmental-cultural hybrid signs. Further study of compound environmental signs could lead to reconceptualising relations between linguistic and pre-linguistic semiosis. (shrink)

In this article, in an attempt to analyze the crisis caused by the images of imported plastic waste, we consider the relationship between waste and its meaning in the case of geographical dislocation and de- and re-contextualization processes. Our analysis is guided by two recent concepts: The Wasteocene and semiocide. While the Wasteocene clarifies the signifying mechanisms of this period, semiocide allows us to understand which signs, under what conditions, are rendered invisible or disregardable. In coining the concept of semiocide, (...) Ivar Puura emphasized two key features of the phenomenon. Following this distinction, which is based on (un)intentionality, semiocide refers either to a fully conscious, perhaps even hostile, attempt to destroy a semiotic configuration, or to a completely nonconscious, unaware process in which the unawareness itself is the source of the destruction. Although a more cultural approach dominates in Puura’s assertion of the concept, the concept is applicable to human classification, interpretation and transformation of nature (Maran, 2013; Tønnessen et al., 2015). Focusing on the case of Adana as a recent example of a global waste crisis, our aim is to provide a (bio)semiotic framework for assessing how and under what conditions plastic materials become arbiters of environmental and political crises. With heaps of plastic garbage with foreign names on them, the discourse of recycling, restricted media coverage, public indignation, the struggles of environmentalist organizations, and the encounter of different spatio-temporalities, our study aims to convey an impoverished narrative of a city in the south of Türkiye. (shrink)

Where sporting games may be said to epitomize our species’ unique agential capacity for playful movement, sports played in nature differ from their equivalent played indoors in that they envelop the human agent within the living physical environment from which our agency originates. In this paper, we draw attention to how sporting sites differ according to origin by pursuing a biosemiotic line of reasoning. Here, the story of a meaningful human life begins with the eukaryotic cell, even though the human (...) subject itself arises much later. As such, the story of nature in relation to our agency, here, in sports, changes too. We present key concepts from biosemiotics, including its continuum life-as-semiotic-agency view, Umwelt, metasemiosis, and semiotic scaffolding to advance our argument that naturogenic sporting sites provide continuity to the macro processes that have generated our semiotic ability to play. Meanwhile, secluded anthropogenic environments constitute yet another discontinuity for the modern sportsperson where the moving body steps into an anthroposemiotic loop and its restricted signscapes from centralized agency. We conclude on the primacy of naturogenic sporting sites as they preserve the quality and complexity of animal ludens’ constitutive relations and therefrom semiotic freedom, on which current and future gameplaying depends. (shrink)

The blooming desert or ‘El desierto florido’ in Spanish, is a millenarian climate pattern caused by El Niño that warms the surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean and creates the conditions for rain in the Altiplano and the Atacama Desert, north of Chile. After some millimeters of abundant rain, a rich biotic community emerges, and in a matter of hours or days, the driest surface on Earth becomes an impressive colorful habitat for more than two hundred different species (...) of eye-catching flowers that host the desert biotic life. Unfortunately, this breathtaking display of colors coexists with less appealing but equally astonishing landscapes. The Atacama Desert harbors the largest accumulation of discarded clothing worldwide and the largest pools of lithium mining which require vast amounts of water for their production. Every year, approximately 56,000 tons of used clothing, predominantly consisting of fast fashion polyester products, water-intensive cotton fabrics, and equally polluting material scraps, are deposited, forming toxic mountains of waste. This article presents an interpretation of these distinct landscapes as interconnected realities of the dump that illustrate the impact of biocultural semiocides, whereby the loss of relationships and meanings with Earth materials is shaped by glocal forces. By making this argument, the article contends that the Atacama region replicates the conditions of the Earth as a global dumping and solastalgia, namely ‘the pain caused by the loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to one´s home and territory.’. (shrink)

Since their introduction in Colombia in the '80s for Pablo Escobar’s extravagant zoo, hippos have become an ecological problem around the basin of the Magdalena River. This article proposes an ecosemiotic discourse analysis of different visions of nature enacted by stakeholders and public opinion around the management of hippos in Colombia. Concretely, we focus on three particular discourses and visions of nature: animalista, narco-cultural, and conservacionista. In this article, we present the relevant social and ecological context of Colombia, the visions (...) of nature theory and the impact of such visions on conservation measures regarding so-called invasive species; we describe and analyze the three visions of nature we center on, and present a computational analysis of discourse dynamics and controversies in Twitter between of such visions of nature; and we reflect on possible courses of action and recommendations about addressing the close interrelation of public discourses and ecosystem conservation by proposing an alternative view, based on the biosemiotic framework of semiocide, to the concept of invasive species. (shrink)

This review admires Michael Marder’s inquiry as a parallel for which biosemiotics can find points of conceptual resonance, even as methodological differences remain. By looking at the dump of ungrounded semiosis – the semiotics of dislocating referents from objects, and its effects – we can better do the work of applying biosemiotics not just towards the wonders of living relations, but also to the manifold ways in which industrial civilization is haphazardly yet systematically destroying the possibility for spontaneous yet contextualized (...) semiogenesis. Biosemiotics has much to gain by understanding the ways, gross and subtle, in which Anthropocenic hubris undercuts our own ability to make sense of the world, doubling down on overconfidence at the expense of meaning-making. (shrink)