Nepal, Aug. 3 -- Is literature a fugitive subject within ecology, English language and literature? The papers presented at a recent interdisciplinary seminar titled 'Literature, ecology and conservation' stressed that the reality was different. Literature works as a catalyst, not a fugitive subject.

I was delighted when the literary scholars from the English departments presented brilliantly critical and thought-provoking papers on ecology and literature. It included a keynote speech on this theme, a study of ecology in the representative works of poets like Balakrishna Sama, Laxmi Prasad Devkota and others, poetry and ecology as a subject in its own right, and a study of nature in the traditions of Indic philosophy, mainly the Upanishad...