ИСТИНА

This article is written at the intersection of two sciences – linguistics and ecology. So the key terms in this study are ecological consciousness, environmental factor, ecological discourse and conceptual metaphor. Fire is seen as a conceptual metaphor reflecting national consciousness on the one hand and collective consciousness on the other. Presented hierarchy of conceptual metaphors of fire reflects the overall dynamics of the processes of man cognition and interaction with the world and nature, and in the context of current global climate and economic transformations allows to recognize the conceptual metaphor of fire as the unit of ecological consciousness. The problem of the article also involves the study of fire as a mental construct. As a result of the analysis of dictionary entries and the data of the British National Corpus, some basic properties of fire, reflecting the ambivalent properties of the element underlying the metaphorical projection, are distinguished. The special emphasis is laid upon the ecological discourse by which the authors understand any text whose topic is connected with nature and environmental problems. Besides, such texts can both reflect andstructure evolution of ecological consciousness. The analysis of the English-language articles from the BBC news devoted to forest fires allows us to identify a universal metaphorical model in which fire is compared to enemy. At the same time, the article presents some positive observations indicating that this model is being rethought and new environmental conceptual metaphors come into being. It is concluded that the basic conceptual models of fire are universal concepts of ordinary consciousness, but their interpretation depends on extralinguistic (environmental) factors, what leads to a change in the ecological paradigm of consciousness.