Humanities & Language
Vol. 3 No. 2 (2026): Humanities & Language: International Journal of Linguistics, Humanities, and Ed

The discursive carbon footprint of textbooks: Environmental (un)sustainability in Bangladeshi EFL materials

Hasan Shaikh (Khulna University, Khulna, Bangladesh.)



Article Info

Publish Date
02 Jul 2026

Abstract

At a time when environmental crises demand urgent and informed action, this study examines the “carbon footprint” of Bangladeshi EFL textbooks by analyzing how environmental (un)sustainability is constructed in English for Today textbooks for Classes 6-10. The analysis reveals that these textbooks construct a profoundly unsustainable environmental discourse. Nature is aesthetically framed as a passive spectacle, while crises are trivialized as individual tragedies. Responsibility is systematically individualized onto consumer choices, paradoxically celebrated alongside the high-carbon technologies driving the climate crisis. Climate change is discursively distanced as a future, abstract threat, and a resounding silence on systemic drivers, corporate power, capitalism, and global inequality renders structural critique impossible. Through these strategies, the textbooks function hegemonically to depoliticize environmental engagement, producing students equipped for individual virtue but disabled from the collective action necessary for ecological transformation. In a climate-vulnerable nation, the textbooks systematically deny students the conceptual vocabulary to name, analyze, or challenge the structural drivers of the ecological crisis they inherit. Therefore, the study concludes by calling for critical textbook reform that centers environmental justice, structural analysis, and the cultivation of ecological citizenship.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

humaniola

Publisher

Subject

Arts Humanities Education Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media Social Sciences Other

Description

Humanities and Language : International Journal of Linguistics, Humanities, and Education (abbreviated as HUMANIOLA) is an academic, open access, peer-reviewed journal that was established and first published in 2023 by Abdul Media Literasi. It primarily focuses on the study of language, humanities, ...