Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island: The Climate Crisis and Planetary Environmentalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), in addressing the planetary scale of the climate crisis, gestures to the possibility of, and the imperative for, multispecies as well as multi-ethnic and cross-cultural cooperation as a way of facing climate change. The parallel that Ghosh draws between human and animal migrations, resulting from climate change, underlines the novel’s emphasis on multispecies climate justice. By connecting the refugee influx into the Western world to the environmental crisis beyond the West, the novel also concerns itself with social, racial, and historical injustices, drawing attention to the role of European colonization and the present-day global capitalism in escalating the climate crisis. I discuss the characteristics of environmentalism that I identify within Gun Island using the term “planetary environmentalism.” This kind of environmentalism extends beyond any geographical boundary created by humans, as borders lose their meaning when the future of the whole planet is at threat. I argue that the novel, through planetary environmentalism, raises a cry for multispecies justice as a question of multispecies survival to face the challenges of the planetary crisis caused by climate change.