CONSTRUCTING ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH MEDIA NARRATIVES: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDY OF SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY REPRESENTATION IN KENYAN NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

Newspaper coverage of forestry has been widely examined for its representations of environmental degradation, deforestation, and policy conflicts. Much less attention, however, has been given to how newspapers construct beneficial ecological narratives that encourage sustainable forestry and ecological restoration. This study investigates how The Standard, The Star, and the Daily Nation construct such narratives and examines the ways linguistic and visual resources work together to communicate ecological values. Drawing on an integrated framework that combines ecolinguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, and the Oneness Hypothesis, the study analysed a corpus of 210 eligible news and feature articles published between 2022 and 2025. A two-stage keyword screening and close-reading process identified 37 articles containing sustained beneficial ecological narratives, from which fifteen information-rich articles representing the full range of beneficial narrative types were purposively selected for detailed linguistics and multimodal analysis. The findings indicate that Kenyan newspapers consistently construct communities as active participants in ecological restoration rather than passive beneficiaries of conservation initiatives. Forests are represented as relational partners instead of merely economic resources, while linguistic and visual choices work together to frame ecological stewardship as a shared social responsibility grounded in reciprocity and interconnectedness. Indigenous community narratives are especially effective in presenting conservation as an expression of communal identity rather than an externally imposed environmental obligation. Corpus-assisted analyses reinforce these qualitative findings and reveal important differences in modal patterns across narrative registers. The study, therefore, shows that Kenyan newspapers do more than report conservation activities; they help shape public understandings of ecological restoration as a collective social practice. In doing so, the study extends current ecolinguistic scholarship by demonstrating how beneficial ecological narratives emerge through the interaction of linguistic and visual resources within African newspaper discourse, while offering new empirical insights into environmental communication and sustainability.