Original title: Who are you calling Mother Nature? Exploring metaphor resonance among young women farmers: A comparative study in the US and France
The researchers interviewed 54 young women farmers in the United States and France about the phrase “Mother Nature.” The farmers explained what it meant to them and drew their own versions of her. Many objected to the idea that nature is above humans, but their drawings and emotional responses sometimes still treated nature as a person or as connected life. French and American farmers also tended to picture nature on different scales.
Imagine a family arguing over whether a garden should be treated like a living thing or just a patch of land. Some people may reject the idea that the garden has a personality, yet still draw it with a face or talk about it as connected to everything around it. In this paper, the garden stands for nature, and the different ways people describe and draw it reveal how the phrase “Mother Nature” still affects their thinking.
Metaphors can shape how people talk about humans’ relationship with nature, including people who farm it every day. These interviews show that rejecting a metaphor does not always erase its emotional or visual influence, and that responses differ across cultures.
The abstract describes interviews and illustrations from 54 young women farmers in the US and France. It does not establish how other groups of farmers or people in other countries respond, or whether these views lead to particular farming practices.
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Who are you calling Mother Nature? Exploring metaphor resonance among young women farmers: A comparative study in the US and France — İlkay Unay‐Gailhard — Open Research Europe — doi:10.12688/openreseurope.24786.1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.