Desert futures and the ethics of care: Environmental imagination social responsibility and the sustainable development goals in Saudi literature in English
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Abstract
Environmental sustainability is often discussed through targets, indicators, and institutional reports. Literature approaches the same questions differently. It makes development perceptible as an alteration of water, land, memory, labour, and everyday belonging. This article examines Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace as Saudi-centred literary works available in English that expose the social life of environmental change. Through comparative close reading informed by postcolonial ecocriticism, energy humanities, urban political ecology, and the ethics of care, the study asks how the novels distribute environmental responsibility, represent institutions, and imagine alternatives to extractive or exclusionary development. Cities of Salt narrates the destruction of an oasis and the conversion of a lived landscape into petroleum infrastructure. The Dove’s Necklace turns Mecca’s Abu al-Roos alley into a speaking witness to speculative construction, waste, damaged heritage, and unequal mobility. Read together, the novels shift attention from individual blame to systems of decision-making while refusing to erase personal complicity. Their environmental imagination intersects especially with Sustainable Development Goals 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, and 16, as well as the educational ambitions of SDG 4.7. The article does not treat fiction as evidence of national SDG performance. Instead, it argues that literary form supplies an ethical and interpretive supplement to sustainability governance: it reveals whose losses are hidden by aggregate measures, how benefits and burdens are unevenly assigned, and why ecological repair requires memory, participation, and institutional accountability. Saudi literature in English thereby becomes a valuable space for teaching sustainability as a question of relationships rather than a checklist of technical achievements.
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