Humanity, Nature, and Ecological Interdependence: An Ecocritical Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Richard Powers’s The Overstory

Abstract

Ecocriticism examines the relationship between literature, human beings, and the natural environment, questioning anthropocentric assumptions that position nature primarily as a resource for human use. Contemporary literature increasingly represents environmental crises through narratives that connect ecological destruction with questions of identity, displacement, capitalism, colonialism, and social justice. Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and Richard Powers’s the Overstory (2018) offer significant fictional representations of the complex relationship between human communities and the more-than-human world. Set primarily in the Sundarbans of Bengal, The Hungry Tide explores the fragile coexistence of humans, rivers, forests, animals, and tides, while The Overstory presents trees as interconnected living entities whose existence challenges conventional human-centred understandings of nature. Through an ecocritical reading of the two novels, this article examines human–nature relationships, anthropocentrism, ecological interdependence, environmental exploitation, displacement, conservation, and the agency of the non-human world. The study also considers how both authors challenge the assumption that nature exists merely for human benefit. While Ghosh focuses on the ecological and social complexities of the Sundarbans, Powers expands the ecological perspective through a global meditation on forests and trees. The comparison demonstrates that both novels advocate a more relational understanding of the environment in which human survival is inseparable from the health of the non-human world.

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