The term ‘climate justice’ links environmental problems surrounding global warming and its manifold consequences with ethical and political considerations. It connects the impact of climate change to concepts of justice that incorporate environmental and social justice, involving the investigation of individual and collective human rights, equality, and historical responsibility. Climate justice affirms the rights of communities, dependent on natural resources for their livelihood and cultures, to own and manage these resources in a sustainable manner. It is opposed to the commodification of nature and its resources.¹ One of the central ironies of climate justice is that those who are least responsible for climate change suffer its gravest consequences. Kofi Annan, the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations, remarks:

Annan’s view is endorsed by scholars like Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, who observe that ‘In the last decade … experiences of environmental violence, rupture and displacement are central ecological challenges across the Global South.’³ Indeed, the issue of climate justice and its complexities have come under increased scrutiny and one outcome that stands out is refugeeism, which also includes internal displacements.

In 1994, ‘The Almeria Statement’ estimated that the number of migrants in the world would continue to increase by about 3 million each year.⁴ The environmentalist Norman Myers forewarned the world of this emerging crisis.⁵ In 2005, he projected up to 200 million in estimated refugee numbers. He was talking about both political and environmental refugees.⁶ It is often the case that the lines between the two are blurred. Essam El Hinnawi defines environmental refugees as people ‘forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of marked environmental disruption (natural or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected their quality of life’.⁷ Bram Büscher and Veronica Davidov expand on this idea of ‘environmental disruption’, which they identify as environmentally induced displacements or EIDs, ‘whereby specific populations find their use of land irrevocably altered, whether as a living space, as a livelihood resource, as a cultural site, or on any number of other claims to territory due to some form of environmental change’.⁸ However, the plight of internal refugees is not surfaced even in international discussions on refugee aid. Stranded within their countries and largely ignored by the media, these refugees are the world’s forgotten people. A Christian Aid report claims that almost all the countries in the developing world have large numbers of internal refugees.⁹ The untold hardship of these populations goes unnoticed.

Laura Westra argues for the term ‘ecological refugees’, which encompasses those displaced by both environmental and climate catastrophes, since, whether due to industrial hazards or natural disasters, in all instances, local ecologies have been destroyed and are no longer habitable.¹⁰ Furthermore, environmental disruptions are not always the result of spectacular catastrophes. Indeed, Rob Nixon advocates for a more nuanced view of environmental violence as not just a ‘highly visible act’ that is ‘event focused, time bound, and body bound’, but also as dispersed through time and affecting the poor, who form the most vulnerable group.¹¹ He argues that what he labels ‘slow violence’ can fuel ‘long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded’.¹² Nixon identifies ‘petro-imperialism, the mega-dam industry, out-sourced toxicity, neocolonial tourism, antihuman conservation practices and the militarization of commerce’ as some of the problems that create ‘the environmentalism of the poor’, making them the ‘principal casualties’ of slow violence.¹³

Through an analysis of texts from the Global South that provide a much-needed perspective from the ground on the grey areas of climate justice, this chapter negotiates a complex set of concerns that a simple definition of ‘justice’ will not adequately address with regard to the most vulnerable populations. Timothy Clark, in a chapter on ‘Post-colonial Ecojustice’, points to the complex questions involved, which are ‘fraught with political, ethical and religious overtones’.¹⁴ He discusses how social complexities render climate justice issues difficult to resolve. These views are germane to the texts I examine from the Philippines, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka that yield insights into climate justice problems. The first set of texts – several poems about Typhoon Yolanda and a children’s novella about floods in Pakistan – depicts the problem of refugeeism, here, ‘internal displacements’ of the poor. The ensuing three texts from Sri Lanka and India together reveal another aspect of climate justice, namely, the challenges involved in attempting to balance the innate precarity between social and environmental justice.

I examine texts across a range of genres: poetry, fiction, and a children’s novella. This range is essential for it not only reveals the ubiquitous presence of the theme of climate justice across all genres in the Global South, but it also demonstrates its pertinence to all age groups. Moreover, texts in each of these genres assert an important aspect of the multi-pronged problem and facilitate readers’ understanding of it as ‘glocal’ experience. Thus, while the poems effectively convey the trauma in compacted words, in the children’s novella, the inner resilience of the survivors is emphasised. The novels enable a more layered and expansive exploration of the complex issues at stake. In these ways, the diverse genres are useful, indeed essential, in providing distinct insights into a complex problem.

First, I consider a set of poems that describe Typhoon Yolanda (with the international codename ‘Haiyan’) which barrelled through the Visayan Islands of the Philippines on 8 November 2013. It was one of the strongest tropical cyclones in history. Entire provinces and cities in Samar and Leyte were massively destroyed and flattened. Over 6,300 people in Central Philippines were killed and 4.1 million were displaced. Nearly 1,600 are still reported missing. Even as news of the immense catastrophe was being broadcast to the world, many writers and artists gathered online and began recording their emotional responses to the tragedy. An anthology was launched: Outpouring: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology (2014), edited by Dean Francis Alfar and his team.¹⁵ Others followed, such as Verses Typhoon Yolanda: A Storm of Filipino Poets (2014), edited by Eileen Tabios.¹⁶ The poems I examine on Typhoon Yolanda are available both from within and outside these collections, which describe the trials and tribulations of the people of the Visayas during and in the aftermath of the typhoon, connecting these to climate justice issues.

Next, I examine a children’s novella based on the 2010 floods in Pakistan, caused by unprecedented rains during the monsoons in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab, and Baluchistan regions of Pakistan. Approximately one-fifth of Pakistan’s total land area was affected. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province was the worst affected. According to official sources, there was a death toll of around 2,000, and a further 20 million people suffered loss of land and damage to property, among whom around 8.6 million were children. Rani in Search of a Rainbow (2014) by Shaila Abdullah – an award-winning, Pakistani-American writer based in Austin, Texas – is about a little girl and her family who become victims of extreme weather.¹⁷ Displaced from their homes by torrential rain, they flee to a refugee camp.

The Sri Lankan writer Jean Arasanayagam is a Burgher married to a Tamil. Arasanayagam’s short-story collection, All Is Burning (2014), which describes various aspects of the Sri Lankan civil war, is remarkable for its non-partisan presentation.¹⁸ ‘I Am an Innocent Man’ becomes relevant in the way it presents the injustices that occur when ‘global capitalism pits itself directly against traditional land use’ or commercialises ‘the commons’, creating climate injustices of a different order from those discussed above.¹⁹ Meanwhile, Arundhati Roy has established herself as an environmental activist. In her novel The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997,²⁰ she shows how even well-meaning Western efforts to help with environmental crises in the Global South can, in fact, lead to climate injustices. Finally, I discuss Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) to spotlight a problem that is not unusual in developing nations, where human rights questions clash with ecojustice protocols.²¹ Ghosh, an internationally acclaimed novelist, identifies some intricate socio-environmental issues in his novel.

In examining these texts emerging from the Global South, I also make a bid for the usefulness of imaginative literatures that focus on environmental catastrophes and probe the ways in which they add value. If one way to mitigate the disproportionate impact of these disasters to achieve climate justice is to involve disenfranchised and marginalised groups in the planning and policy-making process, so that these individuals have a say in their own futures, then imaginative literatures emerging from situated locations that give voice to their troubles become equally pertinent. They also depict the overwhelming emotions that accompany such disasters, which statistical studies cannot convey. In their book Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion and Meaning in a World of Data, Paul and Scott Slovic argue that humans are unable to process numerical data in holistic ways. They remark that ‘Perhaps the first thing to realize … is that we are all, to some degree, “innumerate”. Even the most mathematically gifted human beings are psychologically limited when it comes to attaching feelings to numerical information.’²² The authors draw attention to the importance of imagination and the power of narrative to augment the abstract with the specific, as the only means available for galvanising common humanity to action in times of risk. For climate change as a macro-environmental issue meets the criteria of ‘super wicked problems’.²³ These are problems characterised by ‘uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge, and high stakes’.²⁴ Jakob Arnoldi believes that ‘Culture affects how humans understand the world, because we make sense of the world by cultural means.’²⁵ Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann famously present how our reality is the result of social construction, a collective effort to make sense of the world as we see it.²⁶ The way we construct this reality by means of social communication has been subject to a wide range of sociological research. Jennifer Helgeson, Sander van der Linden, and Ilan Chabay stress the role of cognitive structures in the concept of a mental model, which is ‘a person’s internal, personalized, intuitive, and contextual understanding of how something works’.²⁷ Erving Goffman introduces framing as a means to read and understand situations and activities in social life.²⁸ All these scholars stress the importance of cultural narratives, not only to communicate and educate humans about action in relation to environmental catastrophes, but to stress the idea of humanity as a community that needs to bond in order to survive, thus underscoring the need to engage with imaginative literature.

Narratives of Internal Displacement

In ‘Typhoon, Typhoon, an Appeal’, Elizabeth Padillo Olesen points out the relentlessness of natural disasters: ‘Typhoon, typhoon, you clothed yourself / as Yolanda or Haiyan or Koppu / or Lando’.²⁹ Olesen laments:

She petitions: ‘please, can you give us a long break / from your constant visits?’. Olesen’s remonstrance is against what Westra terms the loss of ‘the resource base, the integrity of the lands where a community resides’. As Westra points out, when this is destroyed, ‘it can no longer support human life’.³⁰ Invariably, the speed and suddenness of these extreme weather catastrophes take the communities by surprise, well illustrated in Rani in Search of a Rainbow, which describes the rapid escalation of weather conditions and the lack of preparedness of the communities. It all begins with fun and play: ‘A few weeks ago, the rain had started innocently in their village in Pakistan. Pitter patter, dancing droplets were a signal to the young children that it was time to celebrate by dancing. And dance they did.’³¹ Soon, however, the celebration turns to mourning: ‘But the rain did not stop … Rivers and creeks overflowed, but the rain did not stop … Rain, the adults warned, was not a friend anymore. That is when the dancing stopped.’³² The narrative emphasises the vulnerability of marginal communities and their lack of protection against extreme weather. The families are forced to leave behind their few precious possessions carefully collected over a lifetime of labour. They face the total destruction of their homes and all they have painstakingly hoarded over the years. The texts highlight the poverty and desperation of the refugees. The scenes describe the ‘internal displacements’ that repeatedly occur in the Global South as a consequence of extreme weather.

It is impossible to overestimate the extent of the problems caused by extreme weather. Christian Aid predicts that, ‘given current trends, 1 billion people will be forced from their homes between now and 2050’.³³ The report estimates that around 250 million people will be permanently displaced by climate change-related phenomena, such as floods, droughts, famines, and hurricanes by 2050. These privations, however bravely confronted, take their toll. ‘This year, the thirty days of Ramadan had been a time of great changes in their lives. There had been neither feasts nor treats’, Rani ruminates despondently.³⁴ The bathos of her innocent worry, that even though it was Eid she had nothing special to wear, not only contrasts the scale of the catastrophe with her childish anxieties, but also shines a light on the millions of children in the Global South who routinely fall ill or die in climate catastrophes. Their lives, bereft of even basic necessities, reflect the deep economic chasm that divides the rich and the poor. Olesen reaffirms this ‘environmentalism of the poor’ by pointing to the complete breakdown of life during climate catastrophes:

Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist, explains that transitioning from industrial society to ‘second modernity’ or a ‘risk society’ occurs as the new and unintended side effects of industrial society (such as radioactive emissions) end up creating unprecedented risks.³⁶ Olesen’s descriptions reveal some rather paradoxical aspects of climate upheavals that the British scholar, Anthony Giddens, characterises in ‘post-scarcity’ societies, wherein the problems we face need not be the result of backwardness or ignorance but of technology and industrialisation: a result of the ‘advancement of knowledge’.³⁷ Also, as Giddens reminds us, ‘no one can be completely free’ from ‘the diffusion of circumstances of manufactured risk’; this is all the more the case with ‘natural risk’.³⁸

In a risk society, the differences of class hierarchies appear to be erased since everyone is exposed to the same risks. What is noteworthy, though, is that, despite the ubiquitous nature of risk and indeed of the catastrophes caused by extreme weather, it remains a contradiction that the consequences of these catastrophes are never evenly distributed. Though everyone is affected in various measure, it is the poor and the sub-dominant classes that are the most vulnerable in the aftermath and suffer the gravest consequences. Thus, climate disasters disproportionately affect the poorest people in the world as they have no infrastructure or social networks to protect them or to mitigate the effects. The novella and the poems uncover the suffering of the disenfranchised of the world and describe their extreme privation and material loss: For poor Rani, ‘Good meals were so few these days. Her stomach growled.’³⁹ For Ric Bastasa:

Olesen, too, graphically invokes this image of total loss in ‘After the Super Typhoon’: ‘After the storm, people move and walk / on flooded streets and roads, treading on the / debris of ruined houses, trees and memories … ’. Olesen’s reference to not just ‘ruined houses’ and ‘trees’ but also to ‘memories’ is significant because it touches on the intangible factors that climate justice implicitly invokes: the subjective feelings of the disenfranchised, a perspective that is usually not the focus of ‘evacuation summaries’ and ‘Aid Reports’. Aside from the loss of material belongings, these narratives show that the very core of human identities changes irrevocably, leaving a feeling of unheimlich. The uncanny effect produced by ‘effacing the distinction between imagination and reality’, where one’s worst nightmare becomes reality, resonates with catastrophe survivor accounts.⁴¹ Abdullah’s text captures just such an uncanny moment. As the families in Rani’s and the surrounding villages are evacuated by helicopters, to young Rani, her ‘home looked like a helpless boat as the water surrounded it’.⁴² This moment, when her familiar home becomes unrecognisable, scares the little girl.

The logic of Westra’s preference for the term ‘ecological refugees’ becomes plain since it is not just refugees’ environment that is destroyed but the very ecology of their subsistence that is ravaged and transformed to such an extent that they can no longer successfully re-bond as a community there. They are not only physically and materially affected, but the psychological dysfunction caused by the climate catastrophe remains with them, sometimes for the rest of their lives, as trauma. Westra believes that if ecological integrity is central to human health and survival, as well as to the normal functioning of ecosystems, then its absence represents an attack on all of these.⁴³

Literary writers responding imaginatively to climate disasters are invested in recreating this sense of trauma that overtakes the affected. But, remarkably, even as these texts add value by making visible the ‘affect’ of the catastrophe on the communities, they are as important for the different emphasis that they offer, not on the extensive damages alone but on human resilience. In ‘The Typhoon Last Night’, even as Bastasa describes how Yolanda tears their houses, roads, schools, and possessions apart, his emphasis is determinedly on the close emotional bonds that lend strength to the community:

He is proud to be part of this indomitable humanity that stands together against the elements.

Similarly, in surviving the Pakhtunkhwa floods, though the dire problems faced by the dispossessed community are laid bare, the focus is on demonstrating an alternative set of values. Rani’s sense of adventure and feeling of joy, unmarred by circumstances that might be traumatic to the adults, presents the idea that the potential for joy is not dependent on possessions. The capitalistic insistence on ownership and consumerism as core to comfort and even identity is turned on its head. Rani leaves home with the barest essentials, and yet, despite the many privations in the refugee camp, these people, used to living with the bare minimum, are not unhappy. The narrative foregrounds the view that possessions are not what bring pleasure or sorrow, challenging capitalism’s basic premise. In the refugee camp, the sense of community and reciprocity is given prominence. Rani’s mother, well versed in midwifery, assists in the birth of Beeni’s baby. Daadi (grandmother) helps with cooking for the multitude of refugees, while Rani’s father volunteers with carrying the supplies that are brought by helicopter to the camp. Rani learns important life-lessons from her Daadi. Through her interactions with her grandmother, her family, and others in the community, Rani gradually realises a fundamental truth: that human communities can only survive through mutual help and selfless acts of service. The narrative speaks directly to Al Gore’s views, when he remarks: ‘Human civilization is now so complex and diverse, so sprawling and massive, that it is difficult to see how we can respond in a coordinated, collective way to the global environmental crisis. But circumstances are forcing just such a response.’⁴⁵ Similarly, Mary Robinson, former Irish President and UN Climate Envoy, observes that climate justice links human rights and development to achieve a human-centred approach, safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable and sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its resolution equitably and fairly.⁴⁶ This is made essential due to the vast gulf in resources between nations of the Global North and South, and within those, between the rich and the poor, making this rift one of the starkest injustices of our age.

The incapacity of global systems to provide for an equitable distribution of resources, leading to a lack of resource-fairness, has caused billions of humans to suffer. These literatures from the Global South on climate change expose this chasm between the haves and the have-nots. They reveal the vulnerability of the human race as a whole, accentuating the need for human interdependence and the necessity for humanity to work together. Texts such as these emphasise human values. Rani’s refugee camp then becomes a microcosm of planet Earth. This children’s novella serves to underscore the idea that great efforts by global organisations will come to nought unless each member of every small and big community acts responsibly and selflessly. A noteworthy incident in the book occurs when Rani meets her neighbour, a little boy called Juju, who lives in the tent next to hers. Rani and Juju queue up for blankets. But, when it is their turn, there is only one left and, as they both grab it, it is ripped in half.⁴⁷ The blanket tellingly becomes a metaphor for social cohesion. Each child initially refuses to give up his or her half. However, when Rani learns that Juju is very ill and that his half of the blanket is not sufficient to cover him, she quietly sews both halves together and hands over the whole to Juju. This selfless act, and the joy and relief it brings to the feverish Juju, form an evocative textual moment. ‘Juju’s eyes flew open. “Is it … ? Yes, it is our blanket,” … “I fixed it for you.” “For tonight?” Juju asked. “No silly, forever,” Rani answered. “It’s a gift from me.” Juju’s eyes twinkled like the shiniest star in the night sky.’⁴⁸ The idea of communal sharing rather than personal possession is key here. The importance of communing with nature and being attuned to it is also gently emphasised. This marks humanity’s place in a larger design, what Ursula Heise terms a ‘sense of place, sense of planet’.⁴⁹ Rani ‘stared at the twinkling star in the night sky … its brilliance made her happy’.⁵⁰

The Typhoon Yolanda poems and Rani in Search of a Rainbow are important as crisis narratives. They reveal the importance and usefulness of imaginative literature in opening up a dialogue about alternative values necessary to take humanity forward on this imperilled planet. They provide object-lessons about the necessity of joint human effort needed to save our species through portraying abstract emotion alongside disaster statistics. The eminent anthropologist Arjun Appadurai discusses the significance of imagination as a social practice:

Appadurai’s definition is especially apposite when it is applied to fictional texts that become equivalent to (imaginative) testaments that illustrate the more abstract aspects of climate justice problems.

Environmental versus Social Justice

In most global discussions, environmental and social justice issues are examined in tandem. Paradoxically, an underexamined problem in the Global South is that, often, environmental and social justice issues are at odds with each other. The texts I examine in this section present this composite association and its problems. Arasanayagam’s ‘I Am an Innocent Man’, set in a small village in civil-war-riven Sri Lanka, is a first-person narrative by the village schoolteacher, Das. The complex narrative centres on the idea of guilt. Das, who begins his tale rather self-righteously, elaborately discoursing on the reasons as to why he is innocent of guilt in the goings-on between the two factions, very soon falters in his narrative as it gradually dawns on him that no human is untouched by guilt or untainted by war.

It is particularly telling that this short story begins with the narration of an ecojustice issue, as if to highlight the parallels between environmental (in)justice and civil war: that, in both cases, ideas relating to innocence and guilt, regrettably, can often become a matter of perspective, and no human can be completely exonerated. The text opens with what can be identified as ‘slow violence’: the acquisitive role of global capital and its contribution to inequitable resource management. As Das cycles through the village, he sees newly mushrooming prawn farms. He experiences a moment of cognitive dissonance, ‘this feeling that the ponds were seething, alive, and that the prawns were trapped in their aquatic prisons from which they could not escape until they grew large enough to be trapped, netted, packed and sent away to titillate the appetites of the wealthy gourmets who could afford them’.⁵² However, he is so inured to injustices of all kinds that his comments are tinged with resignation, lacking anger or malice: ‘To me, the prawns appeared to have an even greater price than that placed on human life. They were being reared for profit.’⁵³ The commodification of humans, especially in the Global South by global capital, has had a long history beginning with early colonisation and the slave trade. But what concerns me here are the neocolonial forms of such depredations. Before the prawn farms appeared, these lands had belonged to no one. Now they have become private property, ‘enclosed and fenced in’, a graphic description of how an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ is created and nurtured by global, predatory capitalism.⁵⁴ Hence, the villagers become trespassers in what was once their ‘commons’. The hapless villagers, deprived of their sustenance, resort to stealing. The security team employed by the investors beats up the villagers, even going so far as to ‘hang’ repeated offenders. One villager complains and the army moves in. The ramifications are overwhelming, destroying the village, the fields, and the community. What therefore begins as an environmental problem instigates a whole set of socio-political issues leading to civil war, underlining the impossibility of neatly compartmentalising these issues. The rights of the people to their ‘commons’ are overturned, their civil liberties decimated. They are left without means of survival. Such texts open our eyes to pervasive practices that are in direct contravention to stated climate justice principles. Contrary to the ‘legal’ narrative which ‘proves’ that the villagers have stolen prawns from a private property, the larger truth that emerges is that elite members of the capitalist-patriarchy have stolen from the poor people land that should rightfully be theirs.

In neocolonial regimes, often, corrupt governments are complicit in these nefarious transactions. This is quite against the universally agreed principles enshrined in Robinson’s climate justice document, which insists that the ‘The opportunity to participate in decision-making processes which are fair, accountable, open and corruption-free is essential to the growth of a culture of climate justice.’⁵⁵ Capitalist-patriarchy, we see, plays with the lives of the subalterns in the Global South.

Ironically, though, in some cases, even if the environmental interventions are not capital-driven but initiated by well-intentioned international bodies like the World Bank, the results may be equally disastrous. This is revealed in Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things. Broadly invested in challenging the hierarchies of dualism that legitimise patriarchal oppression of women and hegemonic oppression of the subalterns, the novel describes an environmental catastrophe in Ayemenam, a village in the Indian state of Kerala, where the story unfolds. It focuses on how, contrarily, countries in the Global South suffer environmental catastrophes as the unintended side effect of ‘developmental projects’ that are funded by global initiatives, for example, World Bank-funded agricultural development in India in the 1960s, leading to what came to be known as the ‘Green Revolution’. Agricultural production was greatly boosted with new, hybridised, high-yield varieties of paddy and wheat, supplemented by the application of large amounts of chemical fertilisers that had the unfortunate effect of introducing toxins into these food products and also damaging the environment. The World Bank offered large loans to support such intensive agriculture, but mismanagement by local governments and lack of proper follow-up by the World Bank officials meant that both local governmental bodies and lofty Western institutions were culpable for the toxic side effects. Thus, in Roy’s novel, we are informed that Estha, one of the characters, ‘walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans’. The river itself is described as ‘thick and toxic’.⁵⁶ As Clark remarks, this kind of ‘colonial and neocolonial exploitation offers little space for an ecocriticism that has sometimes looked like the professional hobby of a western leisure class’.⁵⁷ The novel spotlights the fact that, between centralised initiatives and localised applications, many things can go wrong, and the result is a deep distrust of institutions. In these cases, attributing blame and finger-pointing by various interest groups becomes more the issue than tackling climate justice concerns to safeguard communities. When establishments disavow responsibility, they also distance themselves from the disastrous repercussions of the mismanaged projects. This is vividly demonstrated by Roy’s narrative.

The Hungry Tide by Ghosh surfaces another unusual but increasingly acknowledged climate justice problem in the Global South, namely the question of whose rights should take precedence when subaltern human rights and animal rights are in conflict. In the novel, the Bengali-American Piya comes to the Sundarbans, the rich backwaters of Bengal, to study dolphins, and teams up with a local fisherman, Fokir. The two, though unable to communicate through a common language, discover a deep bond due to their mutual love for the dolphins. While highlighting the problems surrounding dolphins, the novel draws our attention to another parallel conservation issue, namely, the Morichjhanpi problem.

In 1978, around 30,000 Bangladeshi refugees broke out of their camp in central India due to harsh treatment by the Indian government and sailed to Morichjhanpi, an island in the Sundarbans. Within weeks, the refugees had cleared the forest and created a settlement. However, Morichjhanpi was located within the National Reserve Forest meant to protect Bengal Tigers; therefore, it was against the law for anybody to settle there. The Indian government was determined to remove the new inhabitants from the island, and, in 1979, set up a blockade around Morichjhanpi. When the blockade began, media were denied access to the island and were banned from reporting. According to the Udbastu Unnayanshil Samiti (the Refugee Development Association), within the first month of the blockade, nearly 700 people died due to police firings, starvation, and a lack of medical supplies. Also, more than a thousand huts were burned down and nearly two hundred boats were confiscated by the authorities. In the end, all of the remaining refugees were forcibly removed from Morichjhanpi by the police.⁵⁸ This becomes a problematic case in that tiger conservationists and human rights activists were at loggerheads debating the superior rights of the respective groups to the land. These circumstances, where human rights and animal rights directly confront each other, become so complex to manage that an amicable resolution appears impossible. It is no wonder that, aside from presenting the problem, The Hungry Tide does not presume to take a position or indeed offer solutions.

*

Thus, these fictions from the Global South reveal the complicated nature of climate justice problems and how it becomes important to understand the diverse issues before we attempt to pass judgement or suggest solutions. In such instances, the simplistic polarisation of the concerned North and the hapless South gets obfuscated. Pablo Mukherjee pinpoints the historical interconnections between environmentalism and postcolonialism as being a ‘comprehensive critique of European modernity, in particular its core components of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy’.⁵⁹ In short, what emerges is that climate justice involves a range of stakeholders, both local and global, Western and Eastern, from the Global North and South. The texts emphasise the idea that unless there is a uniform understanding of the problems involved and a common resolve to address them, climate justice remains a distant dream.