Climate Apartheid: Exploring Urban Political Ecology in the Age of Rising Inequalities in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke

Abstract

The study intends to shed light on the intricate relationships that exist between environmental injustice, nature’s retaliation, and the socioeconomic hardships of underprivileged groups as they are portrayed in Mohsin Hamid’s novel Moth Smoke. Drawing on political ecology, the study will investigate how environmental exploitation and the material circumstances of people’s lives, which are influenced by the unequal distribution of resources, perpetuate a cycle that exacerbates the plight of marginalized populations and furthers environmental degradation. This loop encourages retaliatory reactions from the environment and impacted communities while maintaining social and economic inequality. The analysis will investigate how environmental injustice and nature’s retaliation disproportionately affect underprivileged communities, who are already affected by systemic socioeconomic injustices. These communities are particularly vulnerable to environmental catastrophes because they are frequently denied access to necessary resources, political clout, and resilience. Their socioeconomic difficulties are thus made worse by the fact that they are unable to endure and recover from such calamities.