Murali Sivaramakrishnan – författare

Narratives of Environmental Challenges in Brazil and India: Losing Nature, edited by Zelia Bora and Murali Sivaramakrishnan, contextualizes the two subcontinents of India and Brazil and closely examines environmental issues from within and without. This collection focuses largely on the fate of forests and water in these two geographical terrains.This book explores narratives that reflect transformations: hitherto unprecedented demographic expansions, exploitation of natural resources, pollution and depletion of river and fresh water sources, uncontrollable demands on the energy front, waste and garbage disposal, drastic reduction of biodiversity. All of these are factors to research when one considers “losing nature.” In philosophical as well as theoretical terms the question of what is nature, what is gained and lost in human-nature interaction, what is the essential “balance” of nature, are all important queries on a similar scale. Societal reality in present day Brazil and India is reconstructed and deconstructed at will by the powerful influence of the past alongside that of globalization and technocratic market structures. The volume contemplates the representation and interrogation of environmental issues in both subcontinents, Brazil and India.

The idea in Post Green: Literature, Culture, and the Environment is not to create another binary like East/West, but rather a call for a shift in the order of perception. The contributors signal a movement from the conventional understanding of green thinking—acknowledging human-centered limitations of the green approaches and recognising the immense possibilities and holistic perspectives that a symbiotic human-nature perspective offers. This book proposes to move beyond the monoculture of the mind toward a celebration of diversity and plurality. While the movement from red to green was a politics of difference, as essays in this book emphasize, the shift toward post green is based on an all-inclusive and holistic vision that contains within itself both difference and multiplicity, something that is quintessential for the stability of our ecosystem. Such affirmative bio-politics toward an alternative symbiosis challenges intellectual theorising, without minimizing the need for radical questioning. It urges the need to do away with disciplinary boundaries drawing hopes for a new spiritual geography of the mind to surface.