„Pashto Poetry & Environmental Crisis in Swat: Understanding & Preserving the Ecosystem through Poetry“

Abstract

For last 2 decades Swat has witnessed changes in almost every aspect of culture, space, and ecology. Among these changes, the environmental crisis remains a major issue addressed by different media outlets and academic and nonacademic organizations. Along with popular narratives and discourses the poets also have their take on the environmental crisis of Swat though mostly ignored in research of cultural and environmental studies. This paper aims to investigate themes of Pashto poetry in context with the environmental crisis. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how Pashto poetry is situating the environmental crisis of Swat and how poetry works for the preservation of the environment. Findings are based on published sources of poetry, interviews, and informal discussions by using the vignette method for collection of data. The framework of social poetics is used to theorize the environmental crisis and how poets take on the crises. The findings suggest that the poetic expressions point out development and militancy as instruments of environmental crisis in Swat. The paper further argues that different objects and elements in flora and fauna are romanticized and instrumentalized as symbols of beauty and love in Pashto poetry which works in the preservation of the ecological system of Swat. Moreover, poetry also produces themes of peace, condemnation of violence and unplanned development, resilience and hope to heal the wounded ecology of Swat.