Global Warming to Climate Change: A Preoccupation of Scholars of Humanities and Literature

A lot has been written on global warming and climate change but still many academic disciplines do not consider it a big problem and leave it untreated in the scope of their expertise. Literary studies per se remained unresponsive to these issues for quite a long time. Climate change is and will be severely affecting ecosystems and disturbing ecological balance. But institutional literature remained for a long time indifferent to the environmental crisis as if oil spills, toxic waste contamination, extinction of species at an unprecedented rate, protests over nuclear waste were not the preoccupations of the literary profession. Literature writers and philosophers like Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) talked about the nonsensical height that human acts led to, but they worked in silos. In the 90's 'ecocriticism' as a literary theory emerged with its revolutionary agenda and gave a collective platform to the eco-critics for the first time. Nevertheless, this remained largely dominated by the White writers. In India, this field attracted many thinkers as well but still the awareness among the youth is very limited. The present paper wishes to problematize this lacuna and put forward solutions by sensitizing the Indian readership regarding the need to contribute to the growing environmental crisis that is looming large in the horizon and if allowed to continue it may lead to the doom of the humankind. The fields of literature and humanities studies have a big role to play in this direction as has been put forth in the book The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ideology edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm through various essays. This study aims to explore select discourses from this book and other resources in a bid to understand how humanities scholars and in particular, literary scholars can respond to climate change.