Let’s bee frank: Complexity, argumentation and creativity in Greenpeace news reports on bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides

Albert Einstein once said: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years to live”. Now that the world’s bee population is being decimated, the prime suspect is a class of pesticides named neonicotinoids. Over the last few years, scientific research has linked these newer chemicals to the decline of bees and proved their detrimental effects on wildlife and human health. The issue has reverberated through the news media, but environmental NGOs have been the most active subjects involved in the popularisation of scientific evidence regarding neonicotinoids. Building on a corpus of online news reports published by Greenpeace between 2012 and 2017, the paper turns to discourse and argumentation studies to analyse the dissemination strategies whereby the NGO has expounded a complex, scientific topic to the benefit of non-experts. The findings indicate a tendency towards simplification of scientific data and de-scientification of specialised terms and concepts, enacted not only by means of recurrent discursive strategies but also through hapax legomena, isolated and unconventional lexical items that exemplify the linguistic creativity sought in activist contexts.