Nature, environment & climate through world literature

A FIVE-THOUSAND-YEAR WARNING

Zahid Ahmed Tapadar

(zahidtapadar@gmail.com)

There is a moment near the beginning of the world’s oldest story when a king stands at the edge of a vast forest and hesitates. Gilgamesh of Uruk faces the sacred Cedar Forest and feels something no empire has ever extinguished: awe at the natural world and the terrible desire to master it. He enters. The axes fall. The trees come down. Something ancient is lost — and four thousand years of literature have not stopped mourning it since. Literature had begun to record our debt to the Earth, our losses, and the consequences of forgetting.

The earliest literary traditions share a remarkable ecological consciousness. The ‘Prithvi Sukta’ of the ‘Atharvaveda’ declared the covenant plainly: Mata Bhumih Putroaham Prithivyah — “The Earth is my mother; I am her son.” Kalidasa, perhaps the greatest nature poet in world literature, gave that bond its most luminous expression: in Meghaduta a cloud carries a lover’s grief across mountains and rivers; in Ritusamhara, India’s six seasons become mirrors of human desire and longing. Homer’s seas mirror fate in The Odyssey; Virgil’s farmland embodies civilisation’s debt to seasonal grace in the Georgics; Li Bai and Du Fu transformed mountain mist into meditations on impermanence; and Matsuo Basho compressed eternity into a haiku — “An old silent pond / A frog jumps into the pond — / Splash! Silence again.” In Indigenous storytelling across Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Northeast India, forests and seasons were living relatives. Mamang Dai said it plainly: “The land is memory.”

The Industrial Revolution transformed not only landscapes but also consciousness. William Blake heard in the “charter’d Thames” the sound of “mind-forg’d manacles” — the mental chains that allowed human beings to accept the world’s destruction. The Romantics reacted ecologically. Wordsworth urged: “Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher.” Shelley addressed the West Wind: “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth.” Tolstoy wrote that “one of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.” Thoreau declared, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately” — and that “we can never have enough of nature.” Rabindranath Tagore wrote in ‘Gitanjali’ and ‘Stray Birds’: “The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world.” He founded tree-planting festivals at Santiniketan, turning ecological care into a cultural practice a century before the word “environmentalism” existed.

By the mid-twentieth century, the forgeting had become dangerous. Charles Dickens documented poisoned industrial cities; Thomas Hardy mourned destroyed rural landscapes. Then came Rachel Carson. Her ‘Silent Spring’ (1962) opened with a fable about a town where one spring, no birds sang. Her most profound claim was deceptively simple: “In nature nothing exists alone.” She wrote: “Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Silent Spring changed laws, reversed policies, and helped birth the modern environmental movement. Ecocriticism, emerging as a formal discipline from the 1970s, recognised that literature does not merely reflect environmental reality but creates the conditions under which people can see it, feel it, and act.

As the world began to warm in earnest, literature faced its greatest challenge: to make a planetary crisis personally felt. J.G. Ballard imagined submerged cities in “The Drowned World” (1962). Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ explored water scarcity and desert ecology. Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ (1993), set in a burning California of the 2020s, predicted what scientists now document. Margaret Atwood named it “the everything change” — her ‘Madd Addam trilogy’ (2003–2013) warns that “the people in the chaos cannot learn what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals.” Cormac McCarthy, in ‘The Road’ (2006), showed the aftermath: “nights dark beyond darkness and the days more grey, each one more than what had gone before.” Barbara Kingsolver brought the crisis home through displaced monarch butterflies in ‘Flight Behaviour’ (2012). Richard Powers, in ‘The Overstory’ (2018), made trees the true protagonists, insisting that “the only thing that can change a person’s mind is a compelling story.” Kim Stanley Robinson, in ‘The Ministry for the Future’ (2020), told COP26 as the first novelist to address a UN climate conference: “We are in a science fiction novel that we are all co-writing together.”

No account of climate literature is complete without including the perspectives of those most affected by its consequences. Ruskin Bond has chronicled the Himalayan landscape over several decades, capturing its essence with a tenderness that serves as an ecological witness. In ‘Rain in the Mountains’, ‘Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra’, ‘The Book of Nature’, ‘My Trees in the Himalayas’, ‘The Cherry Tree’, and ‘The Blue Umbrella’, forests, rain, birds, and rivers are rendered with such loving precision that their loss will already have been mourned in language. “And when all the wars are over,” Bond wrote, “a butterfly will still be beautiful.”

Arundhati Roy, in The God of Small Things and her essay The Greater Common Good, insisted that the silencing of rivers and the silencing of people are the same act of power. Amitav Ghosh, in ‘The Hungry Tide’, made the Sundarbans a microcosm for the global emergency and, in ‘The Great Derangement’ (2016), declared: “The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture.”

Mamang Dai, Temsula Ao, and Easterine Kire of Northeast India, alongside Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart, encode the same truth: the health of the land and the health of the people who belong to it are one indivisible condition. From the Cedar Forest of Gilgamesh to the disappearing Sundarbans, from Kalidasa’s monsoon rains to McCarthy’s ash-grey skies, literature has worshipped nature, mourned it, warned against its destruction, and imagined the possibility of transformation. Scientific data can measure the carbon in the atmosphere. Literature makes us feel what it means — in the silence of a birdless spring, in grey ash where forests once grew, in the splash of a frog and the silence that follows. The Earth has been speaking for five thousand years. The only question is whether, this time, we will finally listen.