A Point of No Return? Chronicling Our Environment
Mir Wafa Rasheeq
MARGINLANDS: INDIAN LANDSCAPES ON THE BRINK by By Arati Kumar-Rao Picador India, New Delhi, 2023, 240 pp., INR 699.00
October 2024, volume 48, No 10

Arati Kumar-Rao’s Marginlands offers a compelling examination of the fragile Indian landscapes vis-à-vis climate change that have been adversely affected by human-induced oversights and due to ill-advised policy choices. The author’s ethnographic investigation focuses on the often-neglected peripheries, gathering perspectives from humans and nature’s entities impacted by an ongoing environmental disaster. The crisis serves as a foundation for a complex network of socio-economic and political disparities, further exposing those already inherently susceptible to institutional vulnerability. The author employs a framework of environmental storytelling to depict ineffective decision-making, disregarded data, and overlooked warnings. It establishes links between the vulnerable peripheries and the actions contributing to a broader discussion on environmental insecurity and institutional indifference.

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