The paradox of sustainable development and environmental conservation in contemporary English fiction: Challenges of the coming era
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Abstract
Sustainable development promises continuity: economies may expand, technologies may advance, and human wants may be met without exhausting the living systems on which those ambitions depend. Contemporary English-language fiction repeatedly tests that promise against damaged places and vulnerable lives. This article offers a comparative ecocritical reading of Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), and Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018). Bringing postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental justice, econarratology, material ecocriticism, and climate-fiction scholarship into conversation, it asks how narrative form exposes the contradiction between growth-centred development and ecological conservation. The comparison shows that the paradox is not an inevitable conflict between human welfare and nature. It is produced when development externalises damage across class, geography, species, and time, while conservation is reduced to spectacle, technical management, or a compensatory gesture. Habila’s disrupted river journey renders petrodevelopment as slow, recursive violence; Kingsolver’s focalised realism reveals climate knowledge to be inseparable from poverty and cultural mistrust; Atwood’s dystopian retrospection turns the ecological “solution” into corporate biopower; and Powers’s arboreal architecture contests the human tempo of property, profit, and plot. Across their differences, the novels convert remote processes into sensuous, ethical, and formal pressure. They also resist easy consolation. Their most credible ecological alternatives arise not from frictionless green growth, but from restraint, distributive justice, situated knowledge, multispecies responsibility, and institutions answerable to long temporal horizons. Fiction’s contribution, therefore, lies less in supplying policy than in changing what counts as a consequence, a stakeholder, and a future.
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