Language shapes our perception and, in a way, influences our actions. Pakistan is blessed with extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, yet we have to fully harness this “linguistic capital” to cultivate ecological awareness.

Under the leadership of Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made notable progress. However, progress on the ground may not substitute the “language” through which ecological actions are shared.

A close analysis of EPA advertisements reveals a linguistic pattern that is both familiar and limiting. Many of the visual materials rely on militarised metaphors that depict the environment as something to be policed or subdued. The image of uniformed officers standing in formation under the slogan “Enforcing Clean, Ensuring Green” is not only a promotional photograph; it is an ideology. It frames environmental protection as a command-and-control operation, a task that depends on surveillance, enforcement, and punitive authority. Such imagery may inspire discipline, but it also risks alienating the very public whose cooperation is essential for sustainable change. When ecological care is presented as obedience rather than participation, we create distance instead of solidarity.

Other advertisements promote what may be called “technological salvation.” Fog cannons are presented as frontline soldiers “fighting smog,” as if pollution were an invading force rather than a predictable consequence of human industrial emissions, crop-burning, unregulated traffic, and weak urban planning. The metaphor of “fighting” pollution with machines distracts from the reality that smog cannot be sprayed away; it must be prevented. It risks turning environmental action into spectacle.

Equally pervasive is the metaphor of environment-as-economy. Posters........

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