Anthropocentric & Eco Ethical Perspective In Jean Giono’s “The Man Who Planted Trees”

Abstract

In recent decades, the environment has posed enormous threats to human society and Mother Earth. Nature is indeed a very powerful force but it also takes care and a soft hand and a kind heart to support the growth of go green life style and well-being of environment especially trees. Trees are the most vital part for life but report says that we are experiencing a huge rapid deforestation in our country. The Widespread misuse of natural resources has kept us at the edge of the ditch. Deforestation of tropical rain forests, rapid depletion of fossil fuels, disordered seasons, frequent global ecological disasters and our environment is on the verge of collapse. In this context, a new theory of reading nature writing called ecocriticism emerged in the last decade of the last century. It is a world- born movement that exists as a reaction to man's anthropocentric attitude towards nature. The purpose of this paper is to explore the ecocritical perspective in Jean Giono's short story “The Man Who Planted Trees”. The story depicts a Shepherd, who stand apart from all of us. His environmental virtues and act of planting revives the environment and revives life in the desert. This environmental oriented literary study promotes the ecological literacy of the reader. This paper therefore not interested in the characteristic of the story, but rather in its representation of the environment influences and as an effective tool to cope up with his hazardous situations and motivate the reader as well as people to plant more trees like Elzeard Bouffier. This paper can also be read as an interpretive tool for analysing nature writing and how it linked to Environmental criticism, Animal studies Green cultural studies Eco philosophy, deep ecology, Eco spiritualism, and more. Key words: Ecocriticism, Anthropocentric, Environmental virtues, Deforestation, Eco-Ethics