The Urgency of Ecological Consciousness and the Impact of Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Associate Professor, Department of English, AMET University Chennai, India

Abstract

Environmental Humanities, a surging multi - disciplinary field unravels the entanglement between the human and the non- human, the material and the affective modes of ecological crisis. Geo - politics began with the history of colonial extraction across the world in the form of trade and exchange, adventure and globalization. The ruthless manoeuvring of nature and the environment in the name of anthropocentricism aroused a sense of social responsibility among environmental activists, social scientists, writers and nature conservationist to bring about an awareness among humans to insist on the importance of conservation and protection of nature and to acknowledge the presence of non - human life forms and the need to revert back to old ways of living in coexistence with other species around. Today Environmental Humanities seek to specify the multiple zones of conflicts and the legacies surmounting the planet and ventures to redefine ecosystems for the human and the nonhuman. In the history of environment, the attention to non-human organic presence has perpetually evaded the consciousness of humans particularly the modern digital generation. Crusaders and conservationists of environment has time and again highlighted on the urgency to ecological consciousness and the consequences to be faced by the upcoming generations who fail to realize the blunder inflicted on nature and other species.

Environmental Humanities today discourses on sustainability, ecological justice, bio-diversity, hydro politics, petro fiction’, climate – Fiction and the like, The present paper attempts to explicate the different ways in which environmental studies is represented, understood and communicated in a particular socio-political set up and transports us to the world of Amitav Ghosh, who traverses multiple genres and territories and who savagely documents the geopolitics of climate change in his novel The “Great Derangement”. The paper also strives to apply the eco-critical environmental approach in reading this literary text