The Question of Land Ethics and the Environmental Crisis in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke

Anthropocentric ways of thinking and acting enforce the current environmental crisis regardless of whether they originate from individuals or communities. Both individual and collective behaviours, believed to be the stem of climate change, are an arena of conflict, risk, and misunderstandings. Yet, policies, as well as socioeconomic structures, determine most of the dominant behaviours in modern communities. For instance, being born into an infrastructure that requires petrol is an oppressive reality for individuals everywhere. Put differently, individuals seem to have no other option but to adopt certain modes of behaviour that align with the consumerist structures. Nevertheless, they have a choice over whether to continue in a mode of climate change denialism or to curb their polluting practices. Therefore, taking into account these realities of climate risk and complexity, the present article has a two-fold objective; to interrogate individual behaviour in a time of environmental crisis, and to reconsider human and nonhuman relations from an ecocritical perspective. This approach unveils the need for ‘land ethics’ in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke as a text that represents the environment of the Global South