Ecocriticism: Relationship Between Nature And Culture

The beginning of the human life on earth can be traced back to the time three million years ago in Eastern Africa from where they spread in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America (Chamley 1). Man started to occupy and exploit the earth’s environment since their early appearance on earth. The environmental degradation is rapidly intensifying in the successive phases of human civilization. When industrial revolution in the 19th century brought urbanization with it, the encroachment of earth and nature increased in a massive scale. Most dangerously a hierarchy has been established between human and none-human. The anthropocentric view of the world puts humanity at the centre and the none-human, including nature, is merely to be consumed by

Eco critical study or “ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture” (Glotfelty xix). Without a clear distinction between nature and culture, without understanding the relationship between human non‐human we cannot understand and save the ‘natural world’. By ‘natural world’ I mean, the co-existence of the living and the non- living organisms. William Rueckert makes a comment on anthropocentric world perception that “man’s tragic flaw is his anthropocentric (as opposed to biocentric) vision, and his compulsion to conquer, humanizes, domesticate, violate, and exploit every natural thing (113). Anthropocentrism as human flaw has ruined the beautiful globe. It creates hierarchy between ‘human’ and ‘none-human’ and considers the ‘non- human’ made for the

There is more somber side of this issue: the dystopian side of the outdoor advertisements. A clutter of billboards and signs unevenly assembled at every nook and corner “becomes a part and parcel of the urban life which actually degrades the quality of environment in several subtle yet significant ways” (Jana and De 6). My purpose in this article, therefore, is to investigate the role of outdoor advertisements in general and the billboards and signs, in particular, in creating visual pollution and the corrupting the serene and natural environment, therewith affecting human life. The guiding principle of this article is that modern urbanization, in the name of creating commercial utopia has ironically created ecological dystopia. My hypotheses, therefore, can be stated as