Environmental and Ecological Justice in South and Southeast Asian Literature

Abstract

The concept and the practice of environmental justice incorporate an integrated notion of justice that engages with the monitoring and the management of environmental risks in human populations, and also, equally, the distributive rights that need to be shared and regulated between human communities and nonhuman life. This chapter centers both environmental justice, concerned with environmental risks within human communities, and ecological justice, focused on the relationship between those human communities and the rest of the nonhuman world. The increased interest in ecological and environmental justice themes has come to be foregrounded in the literatures of South and South-East Asia due to a growing awareness of its local and global significance because of increasing weather disasters that have created refugeeism, including internal displacements, in these regions. Even as authors such as Nguyễn Mnh Châu, Amitav Ghosh, Merlinda Bobis, and Indra Sinha from South and Southeast Asia record the impact of environmental disasters on disenfranchised communities in the Global South, they also appear compelled to explore the ideological conditions that have led to the disjunction between nonhuman nature and Asian populations from a specifically Asian perspective. This also leads them to explore the disconnects that occur between ecological and environmental justice movements.