Review of "Ecophenomenology and the Environmental Crisis in the Sundarbans"

Book review of Kalpita Paul's Ecophenomenology and the Environmental Crisis in the Sundarbans: Towards a Community-Based Ethics (Routledge, 2025).

Overview and Structure

Kalpita Bhar Paul’s Ecophenomenology and the Environmental Crisis in the Sundarbans is a timely and philosophically rich engagement with the ecological precarity of the Indian Sundarbans. The book departs from conventional technocratic and anthropocentric frameworks by advancing an ecophenomenological method that reorients environmental discourse through field-based philosophical inquiry. Drawing from immersive fieldwork and long-term interaction with island communities, Paul constructs an original framework rooted in care, relationality, and a refusal of reductive “solutionist” thinking.

The book argues that environmental crisis must be understood not merely as a managerial or policy failure, but as a crisis of meaning. Through the concepts of ontological humility and ethical responsiveness, Paul situates the Sundarbans not simply as a vulnerable ecosystem, but as a lived lifeworld – a space of co-constituted meaning between human and nature. Engaging thinkers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, alongside posthumanist and decolonial theorists, Paul advances a distinctive vision of community-based ethics anchored in experiential knowledge and plural ontologies.

Structured across eight chapters, the book unfolds a layered ethical and philosophical argument. Each chapter introduces a conceptual metaphor – such as “land-eaters,” “floating land,” or “accident”- that interrogates mainstream discourses and foregrounds indigenous categories of understanding. Through these metaphorical devices, Paul not only critiques dominant ecological imaginaries but also constructs an epistemological framework attentive to care, place, and lived relationality.

Chapter Discussions

The introductory chapter outlines the central philosophical and methodological orientation of the book. Paul situates her ecophenomenological approach against the backdrop of crisis thinking in the Anthropocene. Instead of advocating policy-based answers, she argues for a shift in how we think about what it means to be human and what is right and wrong. She says that climate change and natural loss should be seen as signs of a greater loss of relationship to place and care. She positions herself not as an external observer, but as a co-witness to the unfolding ecological realities in the Sundarbans.

Chapter Two, titled Phenomenology of Land and Land-Eaters, explores the existential and political significance of land in the Sundarbans. Paul uses the metaphor of "land-eaters" to criticise the means by which that development drags communities out of their homes in the name of progress and protection. In this regard, land is not just a legal or geographical term; it is also an important moral and psychological centre that holds memory, connection, and the passing down of traditions from one generation to the next.

Chapter Three, Phenomenology of Land-Water-Scape, turns to the relational geography of the delta. Paul contests the rigid separation between land and water prevalent in technoscientific frameworks. Using native phrases like "thirsty land" and "floating land," she shows how local knowledge doesn't fit neatly into two categories and instead shows a more fluid, co-emergent view of ecology. This criticism also shows how modern methods of emergency management are unfair because they don't take into account traditional ecological knowledge.

In Chapter Four, Place and “Replace”, Paul focuses on the historical processes of place-making in the Sundarbans, from colonial forestry policies to postcolonial developmentalism. She engages with Heidegger’s notion of “oblivion” to highlight how state-led interventions have alienated local communities from their environments. The replacement of relational space with administered space, she argues, represents a deeper ethical crisis that echoes the philosophical violence of modernity.

Chapter Five, Phenomenology of Accident, is one of the book’s most original interventions. Addressing human–animal encounters, particularly with the Royal Bengal Tiger, Paul introduces the concept of “accident” as an ontological event. She contrasts calculative bureaucratic responses to tiger attacks with meditative thinking rooted in lived acceptance and coexistence. Rather than treating such encounters as deviations, she explores how they expose the fragility and interdependence of human and nonhuman life in the Sundarbans.

In Chapter Six, Paul introduces saṃsāra as a non-Western ontological category that better captures the dynamic, impermanent, and relational nature of environmental life in the Sundarbans. Reframed phenomenologically, saṃsāra becomes the foundation of a community-based ethic that values difference, embeddedness, and mutual care. Importantly, Paul resists the romanticization of the “local” by attending to internal differences and labour hierarchies within the community.

Chapter Seven applies this ethical framework to the question of moral motivation and environmental behaviour. Paul critiques mainstream environmental psychology for focusing on policy instruments and behavioural incentives, arguing instead that ethical consciousness arises from relational attunement. Through comparative urban case studies, she shows how environmental ethics must be grounded in embodied experience rather than abstract principles.

The final chapter, Beyond the Crisis of Imagination, returns to the philosophical stakes of the book. Paul critiques the representation of the Sundarbans as a natural museum frozen in time and instead calls for a plural, open-ended environmental imagination. She uses Heidegger's idea of "letting be" to argue for an ecological ethics that doesn't allow either dominance or withdrawal. This ethics starts with listening and ends with caring.

Critical Engagement

Kalpita Bhar Paul’s Ecophenomenology and the Environmental Crisis in the Sundarbans offers a thoughtful and intellectually ambitious intervention in the field of environmental philosophy. The book moves with confidence between the abstract and the situated, navigating Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontian thought while grounding its conceptual framework in the textures of lived experience in the Sundarbans. This ability to hold the theoretical and the empirical in sustained dialogue gives the work a notable depth.

The author’s decision to position local inhabitants not as research subjects but as co-inquirers adds an important dimension to the study’s ethical and epistemological orientation. In doing so, the book not only avoids the extractive tendencies often associated with environmental field research, but also makes space for different modes of knowing to shape the philosophical project. One finds here a welcome refusal to treat philosophy as an abstract, universalizing endeavor; instead, the book demonstrates that philosophical reflection can be porous to the world, responsive to context, and open to voices often left out of theoretical discourse.

At the same time, readers unfamiliar with phenomenology may find some sections demanding. The conceptual density, particularly in the more abstract discussions of Heideggerian ontology, may require sustained attention. For readers outside philosophy, particularly those from environmental management, policy, or development studies, this could pose a challenge. Still, the book does not aim for accessibility in the conventional sense; it invites readers into a different mode of thinking, one that slows down interpretation and resists the immediacy of solutions. That invitation, while rigorous, is also generative.

It's clear that the book wants to criticise, especially when it talks about dominating conservation stories, developmentalist frames, and the modern urge to dominate nature. Its reframing of saṃsāra as an ecological concept is especially compelling, providing a culturally situated counterpoint to the Eurocentric assumptions that often shape environmental ethics. The ethical perspective that arises focuses more on fostering awareness, accountability, and collective vulnerability than on altering behaviour.

Some readers may wonder how the book’s philosophical insights might be translated into institutional or policy settings. While it refrains from offering prescriptive models, its ethical orientation resonates with the principles of Post-Normal Science (PNS), which foregrounds extended peer communities, participatory deliberation, and ethical reflexivity in contexts marked by uncertainty and conflict. The Sundarbans, as Paul shows, are precisely such a site, where questions of livelihood, resilience, and identity cannot be resolved by technical means alone. From this perspective, her ecophenomenological approach offers not a toolkit, but a reframing of how environmental questions are posed and lived.

Equally, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) offers a valuable conceptual complement. While Paul foregrounds relationality through phenomenological and ethical lenses, ANT could further illuminate the socio-material entanglements she describes – dykes, boats, monitoring devices, solar panels, and the tiger itself are not just background elements but actors within a distributed network of agency and meaning. Though ANT is not explicitly invoked, the book’s posthumanist orientation and resistance to anthropocentric framing would sit well in conversation with its insights. Such a dialogue could open further possibilities for understanding how infrastructures, technologies, and institutions mediate ecological experience and shape ethical imaginaries.

It is not a text of solutions, but of reorientations. This book is a great resource for students and researchers who are interested in environmental phenomenology, decolonial thought, and environmental ethics. It makes us think and listen more carefully, and act with more humility in the face of ecological precarity.

Relevance and Readership

Ecophenomenology and the Environmental Crisis in the Sundarbans is essential reading for scholars in environmental philosophy, phenomenology, development studies, anthropology, and the environmental humanities. It will also resonate with practitioners interested in participatory environmental ethics, postcolonial ecology, and community-led resilience practices. The book offers a rich conceptual toolbox for thinking through the ethical and ontological dimensions of environmental change.

For those looking to further explore the themes Paul raises, it would be fruitful to read this work alongside Bruce Foltz’s Inhabiting the Earth, David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, Ted Toadvine’s Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. These works, which are similar to Paul's, examine the complexities of existence, geographical location, and morality in the context of ecological change.

Paul's work, by renouncing abstraction and being deeply committed to lived experience, is a significant contribution to the reevaluation of environmental degradation in the Anthropocene.  It challenges us not only to reconsider how we conceptualize crisis, but also how we choose to live, dwell, and relate in a world increasingly defined by vulnerability and interdependence.

References

1.     Chakrabarty, D. (2021). The climate of history in a planetary age. University of Chicago Press.

2.     Funtowicz, S. O., & Ravetz, J. R. (1993). Science for the post-normal age. Futures, 25(7), 739–755. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(93)90022-L 

3.     Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Harper & Row.

4.     Jonas, H. (1984). The imperative of responsibility: In search of an ethics for the technological age. University of Chicago Press.

5.     Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.

6.     Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Beacon Press.

7.     Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1945)

8.     Toadvine, T. (2009). Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature. Northwestern University Press.