HUMAN DIMENSION THROUGH POLITICALECOLOGY IN THE SELECT NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK

Political Ecology is an interdisciplinary field that interconnects between environmental issues with Socio-economic and political systems. It highlights the inequalities connected to gender, race and class discrimination often deals with environmental policies. Political ecology examines people’s relationship with environment to shape their identity and environmental movements. It emphasizes on the role of state policies, colonial legacies and local power dynamics offering uneven environmental justice. Pollution caused by factories affects the low-income community since they lack with political power to oppose. Political ecology analyses conflicts on natural resources, such as air, water, land and forest. As ecosystem collapse due to environmental pollution such as exploitation of natural resources, deforestation, burning of fossil fuels, increasing smoke from vehicles and chemical fertilizers, improper farming practices, impacts on emitting of Co2, causes green house effect on earth’s atmosphere. This article explores environmental change to question the justice, power and resistance through political ecology. “Grapes of Wrath”(1939) and “Of Mice and Men” (1937) exploring environmental justice by focusing towards the importance of the land, labor and identity. Interdependence between human and ecosystem anticipating to environmental justice through the lens for understanding the ethical dimensions of human-nature relationship.