Literary Studies and Global Biodiversity Discourses: Points of Engagement

Between May 14 and 16, 1979, the Government of West Bengal, India, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M), forcefully evicted Bangladeshi refugees from the island of Marichjhapi inside the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, a reserve forest created in 1973 and turned into a national park in 1984. The leftist government reasoned that the settlement inside a reserve forest violated forest laws and was detrimental to environmental conservation (Mallick 107). The police, along with Communist Party workers, perpetrated great violence in which “the refugees were fired at, their houses were burned down, and all signs of prior activity wiped off” (Jalais 338). While an exact estimate of the dead became impossible because the bodies were allegedly thrown into rivers and the press was not allowed to enter the region, it is said that “[a]t least several hundred” were killed (Mallick 111). “In a final twist to the episode,” writes Ross Mallick, the CPI(M) “settled its own supporters in Marichjhapi, occupying and utilizing the facilities left by the evicted refugees. The issues of the environment and the Forest Act were forgotten” (112).

The Marichjhapi incident is an instance of how the environmentalism of an urban, metropolitan, and comparatively affluent class acts against the interests of the poor and the marginalized, creating contradictions between environmental conservation and human rights. The Sundarbans Tiger Reserve was created as a part of Project Tiger (1973), an initiative to protect the Bengal tiger and its habitats in India. Project Tiger became hugely popular and gathered international support, most notably from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). While no conservation group was implicated in the massacre, Mallick notes that

human rights abuses can result from tourism and environmentalism without direct pressure by these interests on governments for eviction. By developing a business interest in preservation, ecotourism creates a lobby for government policies that place new value on these areas, which would otherwise be seen as wastelands suitable for settlement and more conventional forms of development. (118)

This kind of conservation effort is especially dangerous in economically poorer countries where a significant part of the population directly depends on forests.

The decade that followed the Marichjhapi massacre saw the popularization of the term biodiversity, as well as the creation, by then-WWF Vice President for Science Thomas E. Lovejoy, of the debt-for-nature swap, by which a part of a developing country’s international or foreign debt was cancelled in exchange for environmental actions by the debtor country. According to Nicole Hassoun, debt-for-nature swaps are a novel form of international loan, and the implementation of these loans by local governments creates new barriers to the exercise of human rights. Hassoun gives the example of such swaps in Bolivia, where the Indigenous Tsimané people became “unable to secure formal tenure to their lands” in the aftermath of the creation of national parks through this kind of swap (367). Similarly, the creation of Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica “displaced farmers from their lands and expropriated land from those who refused to sell their property” (367). Thus, neoliberal biodiversity conservation efforts have been instrumental in limiting economic and social opportunities for the poor and the marginalized.

In this context, the relationship between literary studies and biodiversity discourses should be a critical one, and we should examine how literary works engage with this seeming contradiction between biodiversity conservation and human rights. Instead of seeing these two concepts, conservation and human rights, as opposed to each other, we need to investigate under what conditions they become contradictory and what role literature plays in facilitating a worldview where human habitation is seen as inimical to environmental wellbeing. The fact remains that many Romantic and transcendentalist works of nineteenth-century Europe and North America cannot be read without the framing context of the global expansion of colonial capital. Literature, however, can also be critical of neoliberal conservation efforts by highlighting how the history of capitalism and colonialism has been instrumental in shaping the “environments” we are trying to protect. Including the history of capital will also, I hope, draw closer attention to class—an analytical category notably absent in posthumanist discourses about human-non-human relations—as a constitutive element of environmentalism. Literary studies can also engage with biodiversity discourses by examining literary connection-making across ecologies and geographies. What are the connections between literatures about the Rockies and the Himalayas, for example? Or, how does a novel set in the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta speak to one set in the Niger delta? In his 2011 book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon accuses ecocritics from the US of “superpower parochialism” because of their indifference to “foreign history, even when it is deeply enmeshed with US interests” (35). More than a decade after the publication of that book, a majority of North American ecocritical production remains fixated exclusively on North American environments, although surplus labour from the rest of the world, in the form of cheap raw materials, commodities, and services, keeps flooding North American markets. In this context, engagements with global biodiversity discourses might also help combat the parochialism in North American ecocriticism by highlighting connections that remain hidden when we focus on a region or an environment in isolation.

Works Cited

Jalais, Annu. “The Sundarbans: Whose World Heritage Site?” Conservation and Society, vol. 5, no. 3, 2007, pp. 335–42.

Hassoun, Nicole. “The Problem of Debt-for-Nature Swaps from a Human Rights Perspective.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 4, 2012, pp. 359–77. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468–5930.2012.00573.x.

Mallick, Ross. “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 1999, pp. 104–25.

Nixon, Rob. Introduction. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011, pp. 1–44.

Tathagata Som is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. His research interests are environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, South Asian literatures, and Bangla literature. His scholarly work has appeared in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, The Goose, and The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities.