Eve Nabulya

This study investigates the environmental consciousness embodied in two dramas and two novels all committed to environmental issues in East Africa. It explores a kind of community based environmental ethic referred to in my study as 'eco-communitarianism', which emerges from human relations with the non-human in the texts. The study attends to setting, characterisation and figurative language devices employed in the representations of human-non-human relations in the works to explain how the notion eco-communitarianism emerges. I argue that this emerging concept of a community-based environmental ethic questions the binary of ecocentrism (eco-system-centred) and anthropocentrism (human-centred). Yet it is upon these two poles that the dominant strands of ecocriticism and also environmentalism are constructed. I comment on the significance of eco-communitarianism, as a socially inflected environmental ethos, basing on its projected potential in advancing environmental protection in the imaginary worlds of the literary works.