RETHINKING ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AND ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

ABSTRACT Contemporary India’s ecological crisis increasingly reveals the environmental consequences of development-centred modernity and unsustainable patterns of economic expansion. Rapid urbanisation, extractive infrastructure projects, biodiversity decline, hydropower expansion, and climate instability have significantly transformed ecologically fragile landscapes, particularly in the Indian Himalayas. Although existing environmental scholarship has extensively examined sustainability policy and climate governance, comparatively limited attention has been given to how environmental ethics, cultural memory, and indigenous ecological knowledge influence ecological resilience and environmental decisionmaking. This paper addresses that critical gap by examining how ecological degradation is shaped not only by environmental mismanagement but also by the weakening of culturally rooted ecological relationships. The paper specifically aims to analyse how environmental ethics and cultural perspectives reshape contemporary ecological debates in India. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive methodology informed by political ecology, environmental discourse analysis, and interdisciplinary sustainability studies. Drawing upon the works of Vandana Shiva, Ramachandra Guha, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Rob Nixon, the paper critically examines ecological vulnerability in Uttarakhand and the Garhwal Himalayas through environmental case studies, policy reports, and sustainability scholarship. The discussion further highlights how ecological risk and environmental inequality disproportionately affect communities dependent upon local ecological systems and mountain-based livelihoods. This paper explores how India’s growing environmental crisis is deeply linked to the way rapid development often takes priority over care, balance, and responsibility toward nature. Long-term ecological resilience depends upon rebuilding ethically grounded relationships between governance, culture, and ecological systems. By connecting environmental humanities with Himalayan ecological realities, the study contributes to broader transnational debates on ecological justice, climate vulnerability, and sustainable futures in environmentally fragile societies.