RGNUL-Punjab International Conference on Literature, Environment and Climate Change (Apr 7-8, 2022): Submit entries by Jan 17

Vision of the Conference

Urbanization and modernization have greatly influenced the interaction between man and environment in the recent times. Man’s ability to exploit nature and her resources indiscriminately is responsible for the environmental crisis of the planet Earth. The excessive consumption of scarce resources, huge amount of garbage, ozone layer depletion, and various types of pollution and extinction of species are among the major environmental problems. Nature stirs creative minds to write about the hungry tides, floods, fissured lands, unquiet woods, creatures great and small, belated spring, dust bowl, bio-piracy, violence of green revolution, environmental injustice and climate change. This environmental literature also emerges from protests like Chipko movement, Narmada Bachao Andolan. It reinforces the interconnectedness between living beings and their surroundings. Environmental education can sensitize one and all regarding the efforts and skills required to improve the quality of the ecosystem. The modern environmental movement dates back to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Carson’s writing raises an alarm against the harmful effects of the contentious use of insecticides. She talks about the irresponsible acts of human beings that could silence the Earth. The changing relationship of human beings with the natural world gives rise to an array of fictional and nonfictional writings. The writings on endangered Earth engage human minds with ecological issues.

Eco-criticism explores the environmental dimensions of literature. Eco-criticism converges with its sister disciplines in humanities, history, anthropology, philosophy, ethics, law, religious studies, political science, geography, sociology and others, to understand the ethics of human environmental interactions. Lawrence Buell traces environmental imagination and ecological ethics in the literary works of various American writers. He asserts that discourses on landscapes and toxicity can propel transformation in the environmental consciousness. Environmentalists and writers across disciplines reflect on the endangered existence of human beings, locally and globally. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Donald Worster, Walt Whitman, Ramachandra Guha,Vandana Shiva, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Indira Sinha, Lakshmi Thiripurasundari, Syed Abdul Malik, Madhav Gadgil, Anupam Mishra, N K Sukumaran Nair, Barbara Kingsolver, Clara Hume, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Gowdy and many more raise public awareness to the environmental concerns.

Various writings on Nature and Environment make ecological destruction intelligible to human beings. Several genres of Green Writing also suggest “ethics of earth care”. These include Earth Democracy, Stolen Harvest, Ripples in the River, Earth Songs, Longing for Sunshine, The Fissured Land, Environmentalism, Back to Garden, Walden, Dust Bowl, The HungryTide, The Drowned Earth, The Burning World, Mother of Storms, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, Ecofeminism, Ecospeak, Ecoambiguity, the Environmental Imagination, The Practice of the Wild, The Family Tree, When Species Meet, Wilderness into Civilized Shapes, ListeningtoThe Land, Green Cultural Studies and The Great Derangement.