Making nature legible to industry: An ecolinguistic analysis of salience, erasure, and environmental value in Aramco's 2024 Arabic sustainability discourse
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Abstract
Environmental reporting makes ecological life visible through categories that an industrial organization can govern. Visibility, however, is selective. Species, habitats, water, air, waste, and spills may appear as living particulars, aggregate indicators, or passive recipients of corporate action. This article offers an ecolinguistic analysis of Saudi Aramco's Arabic Sustainability Report 2024 and the environmental-impact page of its Arabic Annual Report 2024. The corpus contains 16,147 raw tokens and 14,871 cleaned tokens, arranged in 97 prose blocks and 598 clause units. Close reading examines salience, erasure, abstraction, evaluation, anthropocentrism, quantification, and the grammar of care and damage. Lexical scans identify a marked imbalance: corporate and industrial actors are named far more often than individual living beings, while measurement terms are unusually dense. Yet the discourse is not uniformly ecologically thin. Named birds, plants, coral, wetlands, and the Nubian ibex interrupt abstraction and create moments of ecological presence. The dominant pattern is a managed ecology in which nature becomes habitat area, water volume, emission level, recycling rate, or “net positive impact.” Quantification supports accountability by exposing year-on-year performance and adverse events, but it also makes unlike lives and places commensurable. The report's mitigation hierarchy recognizes avoidance before restoration and offsetting; nevertheless, corporate grammar places the company as the enduring actor and ecosystems as objects of avoidance, repair, and compensation. Industrial legibility is ethically ambivalent: it can direct attention toward protection while narrowing value to what can be measured, managed, or connected to operations.
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