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

This book offers a philosophical analysis of the environmental crisis in the Sundarbans, drawing upon phenomenological narratives and dominant place-making narratives to consider the root cause of the crisis.

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, symptom-driven solutions to address the crisis. Instead, this book argues for developing a nuanced understanding of the cause of the crisis by studying islanders’ narratives, rather than offering simplistic, symptom-driven measures that do not resolve the underlying issues. By employing a phenomenological research methodology and engaged philosophy framework the book captures the place-based narrative of the environmental changes in the region. This approach impels us to rethink what the Sundarbans is, how the crisis gets manifested in the everyday lives of the islanders, what differences there are in the narratives of the crisis between insiders 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 theoretical clarity will elicit deep interest from within academia and among practitioners 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.