What do a polemical report on dams, a (pseudo-)philosophical treatise on animal welfare and a novel about elephants have in common? They are all legitimate objects of the practice of ecocriticism, both a critical method and an ethical discourse that ‘takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature’ (Glotfelty xix). With ‘one foot in literature and the other on land’, ecocriticism is primarily a ‘study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’; but its mandate also extends to the fields of environmental philosophy and bioethics, where ‘as a theoretical discourse, [it] negotiates between the human and the nonhuman [worlds]’ (Glotfelty xviii–xix). And what if the works in question are by an Indian, a South African and a Canadian writer, respectively? What if each, in its own way, articulates resistance to authoritarian habits of thought and value-systems, connecting these clearly to the dominating practices of imperialist and/or neocolonialist regimes? Clearly, there are grounds here for a productive overlap between the tasks of ecocriticism and those of postcolonial criticism, opportunities for a fruitful alliance between the two critical/ theoretical schools that opens up new aesthetic horizons, as well as offering food for political thought.

By comparing three fairly recent postcolonial works – Arundhati Roy's The Greater Common Good (1999), J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (1999), and Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone (1998) – that offer insight into ecological issues and relationships, this chapter asks what contemporary postcolonial and ecologically oriented literary/cultural criticism might have to offer one another at a time of global environmental crisis. Deep ecologists might argue that postcolonial criticism has been, and remains, resolutely human-centred (anthropocentric); committed first and foremost to the struggle for social justice, postcolonial critics have been insufficiently attuned to life-centred (ecoor biocentric) issues and concerns. A growing body of work exists, however, to suggest a convergence between the interests of postcolonial and ecologically minded critics (see, for example, Adams and Mulligan; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin; Nixon; O'Brien; Platz [‘Greening’ and ‘Literature’]; Sluyter).