Ecolinguistics

Spannungsverhältnisse zwischen Natur und Mensch prägen unseren Alltag, unsere Sprache und öffentliche Diskurse im Themenspektrum der Nachhaltigkeit. Letztere entfaltet normatives Potential, steht bildungs- und wirtschaftspolitisch im Zentrum und bildet sich in der Literatur ab. Natur, Umwelt und Nachhaltigkeit sind Themen, die viele Wissensdomänen berühren – von naturwissenschaftlichen Fragen über rechtliche Aspekte bis zu Überlegungen der Sprachkritik. Sie bedürfen einer Betrachtung aus verschiedensten Fachdisziplinen, wie es etwa auch im Rahmen der Environmental Humanities gefordert wird. Um in diesem Zuge die Relevanz sprachbezogener Zugänge und Wissenschaften zu stärken, führt dieser Band Perspektiven der Literaturwissenschaft, Didaktik, BNE, Human Animal Studies, Geschichte, Philosophie usw. mit Beiträgen aus verschiedenen neueren und auch traditionellen linguistischen Teilbereichen zusammen, wie beispielsweise der Ökolinguistik, der Diskurslinguistik oder der Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation. Der Band eröffnet somit für Wissenschaftler*innen aus Linguistik und anderen Fachdisziplinen sowie für interessierte Lehrkräfte Einblicke in interdisziplinäre Zugänge zu sprachlichen Perspektiven auf Nachhaltigkeit.

One of the dangers that we should be aware of when we study issues of language policy and planning is the fragmentary perspective by which they can be approached. Reality, by contrast, is interrelated and overlapping. This is why a complexity perspective stresses the importance of studying the contexts of phenomena, that is to say, their external relations. The direction to be followed here leads towards a better understanding of reality as a set of open systems that are in continuous exchange with the surrounding ecosystem, bearing in mind always that any apparent stability is the result of a dynamic equilibrium. Making headway towards an interdisciplinary approach is therefore necessary and imperative.
Headings such as status/normative/institution vis-à-vis others such as solidarity/normal/individual seem to imply a basic distinction in the definition of sociocultural reality. To discover and understand the dynamics of the interaction between these two major categories is, in fact, one of the most important subjects waiting to be addressed by language planning and policy strategies and more broadly by sociolinguistics. An interrelated set of guiding questions for the field could thus be stated as follows: What group or organisation, in pursuit of what overall objective or intention, wants to achieve what, where, how and when; and what do they actually achieve, and why? With this approach, even if how a group or organisation obtains its desired goal – that is, its actual intervention – is included as one of the main elements in a piece of research, the research will not focus exclusively on this topic, but will frame the intervention and identify how it is interrelated with all the other elements involved globally in this phenomenon, trying to establish a clear theoretical understanding of the entire interwoven set of events and processes.

This article seeks to construct a comparative investigation of the role and application of militaristic metaphors in three contested areas of science-society discourse (invasive species, foot-and-mouth disease, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). It examines differences in the uses of metaphors and the role played by the emergence or neglect of critical linguistic engagement in these areas of public concern. It contributes to debates about the relationship between language use, policy, and the public understanding of science and technology. It demonstrates that militaristic metaphors are still part of a pervasive, but by no means inevitable, mode of science and policy communication.

This chapter explores an added value of the master piece – Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The super story is cast in typical pre-colonial African villages where there was much dependence on the nature. The setting of the book varies from one rural community to another. Contemporary theories such as ecocriticism, environmental determinism and neo-environmentalism are used to explain the feat achieved by the book in fostering balance between environment and development. From the contextual analysis of the Things Fall Apart, nature is revered, adored, and in some instances abused by people. The communities in Things Fall Apart have their environmental concepts, natural resources, environment friendly livelihoods, and range of natural and human induced environmental problems. From the aforementioned, the principle of environmental sustainability is well entrenched in Things Fall Apart. The contemporary societies of the Igboland and other parts of Africa are ravaged by wide range of ecological disturbances which destabilize several population groups. The paper suggests that by observing some of the inherent lessons in Things Fall Apart a complementary role of reawakening the public interest toward the environmental stability could be achieved in Africa.

This thesis presents the link between the environment and Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) based on ecolinguistics, which defines the inextricability of the environment and language. The specific aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the importance of an ecolinguistic approach to FLT with an ecocritical discourse analysis of textbooks use to teach French as a foreign language. Using the ecolinguistic tool The Stories We Live by, the analysis aims to assess the extent to which the textbooks stimulate environmental awareness and ecological communicative competence. The research concerns two textbooks, Totem and Saison, and investigates the representation of the stories and their polarity from the perspective of deep ecology. The results show the textbooks to exhibit a general tendency towards ambivalent content. Moreover, the presence of explicit ecological reference in the content was evaluated and revealed, by the analysis, to be under-represented in the textbooks’ content. The analyses are presented as model analyses for an ecolinguistic evaluation of textbooks, which could be used by teachers seeking an ecologically conscious textbook. The thesis also seeks to encourage further research into the ecological aspect of FLT, notably in textbooks.

This paper aims to discuss how environment, language and rhetoric interplay in the postcolonial context, in particular by focusing on Making India Awesome (2015), a recent collection of essays in which journalist and novelist Chetan Bhagat offers suggestions to handle many of the challenges of India, ideally positioning the country ‘on the road to awesomeness’. Although ecology is not specifically treated, it obviously constitutes the backdrop of the themes of the book as it intertwines with broad social and cultural domains. I will look at the postcolonial environmental intertext, and its ideological implications, which the author builds up via specific frames, metaphors and devices from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by postcolonial critique, environmental humanities and ecolinguistics. The purpose of the analysis thus is to provide a critical reflection on how language shapes, creates and hides values at the interface between the postcolonial and the environmental.

This review summarises and comments on a book which presents research-based and anecdotal information on the worlds of fishes. The book attempts to enhance humans' understanding of and empathy for the inhabitants of those worlds. What a Fish Knows provides a useful foundation for ecolinguists and others who wish to apply their knowledge and skills on behalf of fishes and all the other animals impacted by what happens in aquatic ecosystems of the planet.

DRAFT; COMMENTS WELCOME

'Ibanic lects', speech varieties including Iban, Seberuang, Kantuk and Mualang, share a clear historical relationship. Yet the nature of that relationship is not always clear. How diverse is the Ibanic dialect network? What are the main 'mountains' and 'plains' in the linguistic topography: which named varieties are most distinct and which are most similar? Who understands whom? Which groups are able to communicate using their own lects, and which are forced to switch to a lingua franca to communicate? This paper examines the Ibanic dialect network from three perspectives: that of 'particle', 'wave' and 'field', and finds insightful but distinct descriptions of the network from all three perspectives.

La notion de norme et de référence à la norme est absolument fondamentale pour qui s’intéresse aux langues humaines. Langues, dialectes, parlers et accents suivent tous des règles rigoureuses, que l’observation permet de déterminer. Il n’y a pas de langue sans grammaire : la langue est une norme.
Cependant, les langues du monde ne jouissent pas toutes de statuts égaux. Dans certains États, le ou les idiomes parlés par la majorité de la population sont normés (pourvus d’une norme de référence) et normalisés, c’est à dire soutenus par un appareil administratif et éducatif conséquent.
À l’inverse, de nombreuses communautés linguistiques, minoritaires ou trop pauvres, sont obligées d’utiliser d’autres langues que leur langue maternelle pour avoir accès à l’enseignement ou aux services publics. La normalisation des langues vernaculaires de ces groupes laissés pour compte est souhaitable pour deux raisons : 1. la préservation de la diversité culturelle de la planète ; 2. l’établissement de systèmes éducatifs et d’information plus performants, parce qu’utilisant la langue maternelle des communautés considérées.
Fixer la norme d’une langue peu décrite est loin d’être une sinécure, comme le montre l’exemple capverdien. Et en fin de compte, cette nouvelle norme n’aura d’utilité que si les pouvoirs publics favorisent sa normalisation, à savoir sa diffusion systématique auprès des populations concernées. L’aventure de la normalisation des langues vaut cependant la peine d’être vécue, en particulier dans nombre de pays du Tiers-Monde. En normant et en normalisant, le linguiste a un rôle essentiel à jouer dans les processus de développement économique.

My latest project is a free online course in ecolinguistics. The course describes how ecolinguistics reveals the stories that structure our current unsustainable civilisation, questions those stories from an ecological perspective, and contributes to the search for new stories to live by. It seems to have struck a chord because hundreds of participants have signed up so far, and a team of 21 PhD students and academics from around the world have volunteered to provide free tuition in 12 languages. To view the course please visit http://storiesweliveby.org.uk

The Chinese provinces are a crazy patchwork quilt of languages and dialects, where the histories of migrations and cultural enclaves, the tides of influence from empire and commerce, the sperm trails that follow rivers and railway lines ... are recorded in a tangle of codes that no one has yet made a serious attempt to untangle. Note that these comments are obviously informal, not a part of systematic research. Chinese scholars themselves are now (2013) taking a much more thorough interest in dialects than was the case even in 2000.

Foremost; The Cyborg Student. The cyborg is student identity in the digital age. They use digital technology as references and material of projects. Combination of information and digital technology shape psychologically student as a cyborg.
Opinion; Environmental Investment in the Metaverse. Immersing into metaverse as a new hype of digital trend has huge carbon emission. Therefore, companies of digital technology and users must take a commitment of environmental investment to reduce the emission by the eco-friendly decision such as electronic devices selection, and environmental conservation by the financial scheme of corporate social responsibility.

The ecology of language has its foundation in the work of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists in the 1950s and early 1960s.  Since the late 20th century, the ecology of language, sometimes known as “ecolinguistics” or “language ecology,” has become an umbrella term for a wide range of perspectives that seek to make connections between language and environment: using concepts related to ecology to understand social environments for multilingualism, analyzing discourses of environment and environmentalism, and describing relationships between biological and cultural diversity. While each of these perspectives is useful in its own way for understanding aspects of language in society, and all of them overlap in meaningful ways, the focus here is on the first perspective since it is arguably the most widely used with respect to the study of language (in) education. In this regard, the ecology of language is a conceptual orientation to critical thinking about multilingualism in and around teaching and learning.  From this point of view, the ecology of language highlights the importance of being aware of the social and political environment in which language learning and teaching takes place. This includes paying attention to how language education relates to large-scale linguistic ecosystems like regions, countries, and cities as well as to small scales like communities, schools, classrooms, and interpersonal interactions.  This text examines foundations, controversies, major contributions, and future directions in ecological perspectives on multilingual education.

This article reports a corpus-aided ecological discourse analysis (EDA) of texts from an international mining company and an environmental advocacy group regarding a proposal to build a massive open-pit copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains of Arizona, USA. The analysis details the grammatical and semantic clusters within the controversial environmental debate and how these clusters reflect the values and beliefs of each group as well as their conceptualization of the mountains and the environment. The integration of the ecolinguistic framework with corpus linguistic methods of keyword analysis as well as part of speech (POS) and semantic tag analysis facilitated the identification of clusters of linguistic features perpetuating a dominant and ultimately destructive cultural discourse that places humans in a role of dominion and authority over the environment in the company texts. In contrast, clusters within the oppositional discourse forwarded by the environmental group promote the aesthetic value of the land and a need for responsible environmental stewardship.

This study explores emotive language in lyrical nature writing from the perspective of ecolinguistics in four nature books. In fact, embodied mind style is explored by considering emotive language as a linguistic phenomenon that can inject into the readers' minds the sensorial, emotional and psychological experiences of the lyricist. The interrogation of emotive language is based on Attitude subsystem of Appraisal Analysis, which consists of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation (Martin & White, 2005). The analyses of the linguistic portrayal of Affect -- based on the modified Affect system sub-categories, including Un/Happiness, Dis/Satisfaction, In/Security, Dis/Inclination, and Surprise -- reveal the prevalence of Insecurity in the books by contemporary nature writers and Happiness in the books by their predecessors. Moreover, the Judgement and Appreciation analyses suggest that moral sentiment and aesthetic emotion are indispensable parts of lyrical nature writing that can awaken humility and sympathy in the minds and hearts of the readers.

Charles C. Fries views linguistics as a science. This paper probes into summarizing Charles C. Fries’ view of  linguistics as a science from the perspective of American structuralism , pointing out its historical limitations due to American structuralism on one hand and its innovativeness on his selection of data, differentiation between linguistic theories and linguistic techniques, and his scientific view of meaning on the other hand, and further exploring its great contributions to the development of modern linguistics such as corpus linguistics, comparative linguistics, systemic functional linguistics and foreign language teaching.

When hearing the word ‘policy’ many people think first of lawmakers who draft and pass legislation and politicians who espouse platforms on various social issues, not teachers. Even with respect to educational policy, one might immediately call to mind national secretaries or ministers of education rather than educators. Teachers, however, are at the front line of language policy since the classroom is a key site where policies become action. Moreover, teachers make decisions every day that amount to developing language policies for their classrooms; for example, teachers decide which language(s) to use during instruction, which language(s) to encourage when students speak to each other, what words are taboo, etc. Policy, then, is not just an area that lawmakers and politicians should care about. In fact, a range of individuals are involved in making, interpreting, and implementing educational language policy other than legislators and education ministers: teachers, administrators, parents, textbook publishers, curriculum developers, and the list goes on. This chapter offers a glimpse into language policy with a particular focus on its relevance for educators. First, major considerations for language planning related to the domain of education are introduced. Then, I explore the different scales of society, ranging from governments to schools and classrooms, where educational policy and planning is shaped. Finally, the impact and relevance of language policy on educational settings is discussed with special attention to what teachers need to know.

В статье показывается эпистемологическая неадекватность биоморфной и инструментальной метафор, лежащих в основании метаязыка лингвистики, уточняется содержание понятия «экология» применительно к языку и приводятся аргументы в пользу системного понимания человека и человеческого сообщества как социально организованных когнитивных (= живых) систем. Порождаемая человеческим сообществом реляционная область языковых взаимодействий становится той динамичной средой, в которой развиваются и вочеловечиваются живые организмы, относящиеся к виду Homo sapiens. Человек становится человеком в языке, и именно это заставляет говорить о языке с использованием экологических понятий. Нет и не может быть «экологии языка», но можно и нужно говорить об экологии человека, потому что его становление и развитие невозможны без и вне языковой среды.

Images, abstracts and sonic expressions form an intricate yet clear pattern in the " weighty " relationship shared by the human " crowd " well connected to one another in Human Chain, the last collection of poems of Seamus Heaney. Another important partner in forming the chain is Nature. With all its " tousled verge " and " Midge veils "-the typical Irish flora and fauna – nature and her elements are represented as the ones " pinched and cinched " in order to attribute living qualities to them, so as to establish a live, interdependent relationship between human beings and nature. Further, the human consciousness and the self are manifested in the poems with the poet frequently drawing metaphorical allusions from the natural world of antiquities. An interplay between the verbal images and the abstract qualities or states of being of the addressees is created to unfold the mysteries of the minds of " I " and " We "-the entities of the poems. Resultantly, what takes shape is a conversational link between them. In the proposed presentation, I wish to examine the linguistic structures and expressions used as concrete source domains – the nature metaphors-to understand the abstract target domains – life, death, self-exploration and realization, love for parents, solidarity among the fellow beings, social and political unrest, and others in Heaney's poetic world. Essentially, Heaney's world of County Derry circumscribes around the people, places, and plants, trees and other elements of the natural world belonging to his immediate external environment. The investigation will be carried out on the basis of identifying and understanding the patterns of " systematic correspondences " – " the mappings "-existing between the source and the target domains. I shall concentrate mainly on understanding the cognitive function of conceptual metaphors-the structural, ontological and orientational-and thereafter, review how it has gone into the groupings of the poems under specific heads or titles. An advertent exercise of investigating the recurring linguistic expressions manifesting conceptual metaphors will also be taken up. My study will thrive upon the study of metaphor in the area of cognitive linguistics.

Scientists turn to metaphors to formulate and explain scientific concepts, but an ill-considered metaphor can lead to social misunderstandings and counterproductive policies, Brendon Larson observes in this stimulating book. He explores how metaphors can entangle scientific facts with social values and warns that, particularly in the environmental realm, incautious metaphors can reinforce prevailing values that are inconsistent with desirable sustainability outcomes.

Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability draws on four case studies--two from nineteenth-century evolutionary science, and two from contemporary biodiversity science--to reveal how metaphors may shape the possibility of sustainability. Arguing that scientists must assume greater responsibility for their metaphors, and that the rest of us must become more critically aware of them, the author urges more critical reflection on the social dimensions and implications of metaphors while offering practical suggestions for choosing among alternative scientific metaphors.

Lines written in early spring is a ballad written by William Wordsworth. This poem represents the ecological philosophy of “the Lake Poets”, that is, to appreciate the beauty of nature and form a harmonious relation with nature. The study aims to explore how to interpret the meaning of the poem through functional linguistic analysis in terms of generic structure and three metafunctions and also how the ecological motif is constructed in this poem. For the first step, the poem is analyzed at the genre plane, unveiling its generic structure. Next, working within the framework of Halliday’s three metafunctions, the paper conducts the linguistic and ecological analysis of the poem. The ideational metafunction is analyzed through transitivity system, the interpersonal metafunction through mood system, and the textual metafunction through Theme-Rheme structure. The analysis shows that the poem is in keeping with Labov’s narrative generic structure and the choices on the lexico-grammatical level are in accordance with the generic structure from the perspective of three metafunctions. In addition, the ecological motif is mainly constructed through transitivity system.

El presente libro es una propuesta interpretativa, inspirada en la ecología de lenguas, perspectiva metafórica que hace énfasis en la lengua y su ambiente social, pero principalmente toma en cuenta que los hablantes o actores locales son usuarios y transmisores de la lengua y que la función, mantenimiento y revitalización de la misma depende de la manera en que se aprende, se usa y se transmite a otros para repensar y discurrir, desde el ámbito académico y la colaboración comunitaria, en torno a cómo todo tipo de práctica revitalizadora parte de premisas conceptuales, ideológicas y políticas que, si bien pueden iniciarse con miras al éxito, muchas veces no inciden en la reversión del desplazamiento lingüístico, porque dichas premisas no coinciden con las expectativas o condiciones de las comunidades de habla. Por tal motivo, también es una invitación a reconocer las implicaciones y contra- dicciones de los proyectos de que se ponen en marcha.

This research aims to present a diachronic model of linguistic diversity in the tropical region of South America, as well as to map the interaction spheres that arose therein during prehistory. For this purpose the Archaeo-Ecolinguistics approach was chosen, which is characterized by compiling and integrating linguistic, archaeological, anthropological, (ethno)-historical and genetic data representative of the study area, so that the evidences used to support this explanatory model are multidimensional and hence less susceptible to interpretative ambiguity. In addition, this study attempts to deepen the theoretical foundations of the field of research known as Ecolinguistics and by focusing on its diachronic dimension, proposes the incorporation of an archaeological interface this investigative platform. This new discipline was, then, called Archaeo-Ecolinguistics. The dissertation contains three parts and five chapters. Part I, consisting of two chapters, is a breakdown of the theoretical and epistemological foundations. In §1 non-linguistic concepts underlying Ecolinguistics studies are presented and in §2 a comprehensive description of the linguistic concepts underlying this emergent field of research is presented. Part II, consisting of three chapters, focuses on the presentation of the aforementioned diachronic model. §3 is an archaeo-ecolinguistic characterization of the study area by its physical and human geographies. To portray the human geography in its diachronic dimension, a reconstruction of the ethno-linguistic diversity at the time of European invasion is offered in association with a detailed archaeological panorama. In §4 the data and the linguistic analyses are presented, highlighting the ethnolinguistic groups that have been in contact for some time in prehistory and §5 encloses the formalization of the aforementioned archaeo-ecolinguistic model along with the mapping of the interaction spheres that have emerged during that period. Finally, Part III presents some additional conclusions based on the aforementioned results. These results show a wide range of contact situations and point that two opposite tendencies developed respectively in the Andes and in the tropical Lowlands east of the Andes: while in the Andes there was a trend towards linguistic homogenization, in the Lowlands east of the Andes the observed trend was towards an acceleration of linguistic diversification. By combining the multidisciplinary data it was concluded (i) that the opposite evolutionary behaviors detected in these two areas were directly motivated by distinctive features observed in the three ranges (physical, social and mental) of the reconstructed linguistic ecosystems circumscribed in each of these regions and (ii) that this opposite tendency was strengthened by the synergetic effect caused by the continuous feedback of such peculiarities. These observations, in short, prove the veracity of the multidimensional nature of the EFL and that linguistic evolution is intrinsically dependent and effectively motivated by the conjuncture of all the dimensions of reality.

This book is an attempt to give an overview of how language interacts with its environment, or better, how actual linguistic structure is formed, changed and influenced by different aspects of the human environment. The focus is mainly on effects of the extra-linguistic environment on the actual grammatical structure of languages; we will leave influences on other linguistic subsystems such as phonology, the lexicon, and discourse structure to the efforts of other researchers.
The underlying assumption of this entire volume is that linguistic structure is not only shaped by how speakers interact with each other and with the world they live in, but also by external forces that are outside the control of individual speakers or speech communities. One might call it natural selection in grammar, were it not for the fact that it is not entirely clear whether biological and linguistic change operate along the same real-world principles, or whether any correspondences are much more superficial.

In this article we do two things: in the first half, we trace the emergence and development of ecological linguistics, or ecolinguistics, from the early 1970s. Having contrasted the ecological endeavour with the form-based traditions of 20th century linguistics, we discern four particular ways in which the ecology of language has been conceptualised: as a symbolic ecology (Section 2), a natural ecology (Section 3), a sociocultural ecology (Section 4), and a cognitive ecology (Section 5). These four approaches are described and discussed in detail. In the second half of the state of the art, we outline future horizons for the discipline. The foundation for this outline is our plea for a unified ecological language science (Section 6). This unified program pursues a naturalised agenda in the language sciences by exploring the ecological embeddedness of language and linguistic interaction (Section 7). In particular, this section presents the extended ecology hypothesis as one possible way of understanding ecolinguistics as a naturalised science of language. Having presented this view, we argue that it can place the four different traditions mentioned within a unified ecolinguistic framework (Section 8). This framework includes a naturalised foundation for those concerns that characterise the ecolinguistic enterprise, e.g. the exploitation of natural resources, empowerment of marginalized social groups, and the peaceful coexistence of languages and cultures in multicultural communities. In the conclusion (Section 9), we call for further interaction between ecological schools and traditions.

This article explores the recently emerging area of ecolinguistics as a form of critical discourse
study. While ecolinguistics tends to use the same forms of linguistic analysis as traditional critical
discourse studies, the normative framework it operates in considers relationships of humans not
just with other humans but also with the larger ecological systems that all life depends on. Ecolinguistics
analyses discourses from consumerism to nature poetry, critiquing those which encourage
ecologically destructive behaviour and seeking out those which encourage relationships of respect
and care for the natural world. The expanded context of ecolinguistics complicates power relations
between oppressor and oppressed since it considers impacts on non-human subjects and future
generations not yet born, necessitating both theoretical development of CDS and an application
of an ecologically based normative framework for judging discourses against.

Since the multi-scalarity of life encompasses bodies, language and human experience, Timo Järvilehto’s (1998) ‘one-system’ view can be applied to acts of meaning, knowing and ethics. Here, I use Paul Cobley’s Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (2016) to explore a semiotic construal of such a position. Interpretation, he argues, shows symbolic, indexical and iconic ‘layers’ of living. While lauding Cobley’s breadth of vision, as a linguist, I baulk at linking ‘knowing’ too closely with the ‘symbolic’ qua what can be said, diagrammed or signed. This is because, given first-order experience (which can be deemed indexical/iconic), humans use observations (by others and self) to self-construct as embodied individuals. While symbolic semiosis matters, I trace it to, not languaging, but the rise of literacy, graphics and pictorial art. Unlike Chomsky and Deely, I find no epigenic break between the symbolic and the iconic/indexical. The difference leads one to ontology. I invite the reader to consider, I ask if, as Cobley suggests, meaning depends on modelling systems (with ententional powers) and/or if, as Gibson prefers, we depend on encounters with whatever is out-there. Whereas Cobley identifies the semiotic with the known, for others, living beings actively apprehend what is observable (for them). Wherever the reader stands, I claim that all one-system views fall in line with Cobley’s ‘anti-humanist’ challenge. Ethics, he argues, can only arise from participating in the living. Knowing, and coming to know, use repression and selection that can only be captured by non-disciplinary views of meaning.  As part of how life and language unfold, humans owe a duty of care to all of the living world: hence, action is needed now.