POSSIBILITIES OF “ECO-EMPATHY” FOR SUSTAINABLE EARTH AND BETTER FUTURE

Abstract

We are living in an environmentally challenged world when the pristine earth that sustained lives and the eco-system for centuries has been degrading at an alarming rate due to reckless anthropogenic activities leading to a dangerous and unpredictable change of climate, a continuous erosion of the protective layer around earth’s atmosphere, contamination of soil, water and air. The degradation of the earth’s greenery is leading to an inevitable conflict in which wild animals are coming face to face with humans.

Sadly, When we talk about the sustainable earth or future of the earth we tend to think it is only the domain of science—that of a biologist or an environmentalist. But a deep and sympathetic understanding of the correlation between the living and the non-living, an appreciation of the pre-established connection between all elements in the universe, between matter and Spirit is not possible without literature, without those imagination and values that it inculcates in the heart. Who can better listen to the “Songs of the Earth” than a Keats, an R. L Stevenson or a Walt Whitman? Who can observe the sights, sounds and colours of Nature and the place of Humans in all these better than a Kalidasa or a Rabindranath Tagore? 

My paper aims to look into the possibilities of an ecological study of literature that may help inculcate those values that will support the causes of a sustainable earth—a world in which human beings will live in perfect accord and tune with all forms of existence--living and non-living, not as a center of everything but as a part of everything.