Blaming, controlling, monitoring, and politicizing human-caused environmental disasters: anthropocentric discourses in framing the Ohio train derailment incident

Abstract This study focuses on the human-caused environmental disaster resulting from the February 2023 Ohio train derailment incident. Drawing on ecolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, we analyze how various stakeholders, including affected residents, Norfolk Southern (the responsible company), and politicians, frame this incident in coverage by CNN and The New York Times . We identify four distinct frames: blaming, controlling, monitoring, and politicizing the incident. While residents emphasize human health impacts and accountability, Norfolk Southern portrays the incident as manageable, and politicians politicize it for partisan gains. These frames underscore and reinforce anthropocentric values by relegating the interests of non-human beings and living entities to a secondary position, reifying a passive nature that is controlled and dominated by humans, and mitigating human accountability for environmental harm. The findings reveal how disaster frames construct and produce hierarchies between humans and nature and among different human groups, hierarchies perpetuated by media influence and political exploitation. By unpacking these frames, the study contributes to understanding how frames of human-caused environmental disasters reflect and reproduce anthropocentric ideologies.