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Ecophenomenology and the Environmental Crisis in the Sundarbans: Towards a Community-Based Ethic

By Kalpita Bhar Paul

This book offers a philosophical analysis of the environmental crisis in the Indian Sundarbans, drawing upon phenomenological narratives. It nuances the present understanding of the crisis by introducing plurality in our metaphysical understanding of the environment and epistemological understanding of the human–environment relationship.

Contemporary research on the Sundarbans mainly focuses on the impending threat of climate change, natural disasters, as well as increasing human–animal conflict, conservation, and forest access debates, while scholarly works have mostly used environmental impact assessments to offer technocratic solutions that prioritize a particular type of human–environment relationship characterized by an “anticipation of ruin.” Rather than rushing to find solutions, I embark on a journey to unpack the meaning of crisis through phenomenological narratives of human–environment relationships. A deep dive into the human–environment relationship through an intentional engagement with the work-worlds of islanders, the formation of a more-than-human community is revealed, giving rise to community-based ethic that transcends the poverty of thought and imagination in comprehending the crisis of the Indian Sundarbans. This new ethical framework emphasizes the co-emergence of self-consciousness and eco-consciousness, serving as a moral impetus for individuals to act ethically towards the environment. This approach impels us to rethink what the Sundarbans is, how the crisis gets manifested to the inlanders and outsiders, and what kind of procedural changes are required to protect the Sundarbans as a living ecosystem instead of a natural museum.

The book’s phenomenological depth and engaged philosophical framework will elicit deep interest from within academia and among practitioners who are working in environmental studies, philosophy, human ecology, and island studies. The convergence of conceptual understandings and field narratives will also draw the interest of research students working in correlated fields.

“If another mass attachment takes the place of the religious one, as socialism seems currently to be doing, the same intolerance towards outsiders will ensue as in the War of Religion, and if differences of scientific opinion ever managed to to attain a similar importance for masses, the result would be the same for this motivation as well”. Freud in Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the ‘I’.

Continue reading “The Concept of the Political: ab-original insights”

Marxism has conventionally found itself on the side of ‘materialism’; there has been a hyper-separation (as against the overdetermination) of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ in much of Marxian praxis. How does one make sense of this hyper-separation, of the conventional bar, which is also the ‘bar of convention’, between Marxism and the spiritual? Can one carefully work one’s way towards an ‘and’ between Marxian questions and spiritual quests, even if it is an uneasy ‘and’?

Continue reading “The Spirit of Marx”

What is a ‘virus’? There appears to be global consensus on the virus as an invader of human ‘territory’. But, what if, the virus was a product, an excreta of the cell, of say, a cell in stress, a cell in extreme distress? What if, the virus was not always already present; lurking around the corner; waiting to “infect”, “invade” the cell? Waiting to leap into the human world, from an animal environ; waiting to migrate? What if, what we call the “virus” was not there in an a priori sense? What if, the virus is not the precursor of life? But the ruin of life? The remainder of life? What if, the virus emerges in an a posteriori sense? Out of cellular processes? What if, “it” – a strand of RNA or DNA – a fragment of genetic material – precariously poised at the cusp of life and death – is not the seed of future life; but the tombstone of the cell and cellular processes?

Continue reading “What if, the virus …”